As lately I have been testing several of our Enterprise Management Solutions, & I have been sharing them more often with our customers. After the announcement of vRAM, vCenter CapacityIQ is one of the products that seems to grab attention quickly. After delivering several POCs to customers, most of them have came back to me and asked me on the procedure to Grant a User Access to vCenter CapacityIQ. Most of them want to ensure that they can create a user name & password for their monitoring team that does not have access to anything else in vCenter. As the steps are not too clear in our documentation, I have decided to share it on here with few snapshots:

1- When you configure vCenter CapacityIQ, the virtual appliance generates a vCenter CapacityIQ privilege under Global privileges in the vSphere Client, actually this is done as a part of the vCenter CapacityIQ virtual appliance installation. Therefore if you are done with the CapacityIQ virtual appliance installation you are done with this step.

2- Restart your vSphere Client after completing the installation of vCenter CapacityIQ.

3- From the vSphere Client Home page, click Roles. See the screenshot below.

4- Add the CapacityIQ privilege under Global privileges to a new or existing role.… Read More

Capacity Management importance has been on the rise since Virtualization started becoming a main stream. In earlier days in the physical world, Capacity Planning/Management used to end at the time the hardware was purchased. In most cases, the hardware was over-sized to ensure it can handle the workload as well future growth of the application. Though as that over-sized box is dedicated to a single application, it did not matter how you sized that application as long the server has enough resources to run it. Though when virtualizing the story is fundamentally different, as now you have multiple VMs per server. If VMs are over-sized that means your consolidation ratio & other VMs performance can be affected. If Virtual machines are under-sized, then they will not perform well. Idle & unused VMs can be of a huge waste of expensive storage and need to be avoided.

Capacity Management importance has even grown further, when VMware has announced its new vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing module as if you madly over-provision your VMs that will guarantee your cost will not only jump on hardware, but on vSphere licensing as well. I believe after the announcement of vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing the demand for Capacity Management products like VMware vCenter CapacityIQ & vKernel vOPS Capacity Manager.… Read More

Most organization today has different complains about their current performance monitoring tools. These problems are put under the magnifier when Virtualization or Private Cloud is implemented. Below are few of the main complains getting heard & VMware is trying to respond to by vCenter Operations Manager:

• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many metrics that is hard to make sense of & track.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools report too many false positive events, which getting to be a nightmare for our admins.
• Our users are the first to notice performance problem before our admins can use our current Performance Management/Monitoring tools trying to find out the problem source.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools does not provide problem source analytics, which does not help us avoid the manual work required to find out the source of the problem.
• Our Performance Management/Monitoring tools does not take Virtualization into account.

To respond to the above, VMware has introduced vCenter Operations. VMware vCenter Operations uses patented analytics and powerful visualizations to automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems which is a big advantage when compared with traditional performance management/monitoring tools that still depend on thresholds.… Read More