The new vRealize Operations Management Pack for vCloud Director 5.0 has been released on 28 September 2018,

Overview

The Management Pack for vCloud Director monitors the health of supported vCloud Director entities and sends early warning smart alerts for monitored Provider vDC objects. Cloud Providers can use this management pack together with vRealize Operations Manager to check the health status, performance trend and capacity information of the provided tenants’ cloud resources.

overview

One thing to note is that the Management Pack for vCloud Director does not collect performance data directly from vCloud Director. Instead, it enables vRealize Operations Manager to present health data by mapping vCloud Director entities to vCenter Server objects. The vCenter (vSphere) adapter collects performance data from vCenter for vCenter Server objects.

Following is the resource relationship hierarchy graph from the user guide, green color components are objects which are discovered and monitored by using vSphere adapter in vRealize Operations Manager, after you installed the management pack for vCloud Director, the system will automatically connect and associate related objects between vCloud Director and vCenter Server in the form of logical construct.

hierarchy

 

In the vRealize Operations Manager GUI, you will see the inventory objects hierarchical mapping something likes the following graph, T1-OVDC is organization VDC from management pack for vCloud Director, which is related to T1-OVDC of resource pool type from vSphere adapter.

mapping1

Here I’d like to introduce in a very high level ways regarding how to configure the management pack and what are those new features comes with this new release.

Configuration

My lab environment has the following products installed and setup:

  • vCloud Director 9.1
  • vCenter Server 6.5
  • vRealizeOperations Manager 7.0.0.10098133
  • VMware vSphere Adapter 7.0
  • NSX Management Pack 3.5.2
  • Management Pack for vCloudDirector 5.0.10154291
You need to make sure your environment is compatible with the new management pack, you can check against the support list in Compatibility Matrix for VCD MP 5.0 and Tenant App 2.0.
support
After installed the management pack, you then configure the connection of the management pack to your vCloud Director instance, this is kind of straight forward, just make sure you have performed the connection test without any error, and you can see the adapter’s status has changed to “Data Receiving”.
Configure
If you like, you can configure the vCloud Director vApp or VM default collection interval in the “Advanced Settings” section, by default it collects info from those objects every 30 minutes. (you can see I’ve changed it to 5 minutes).
Advnaced

The vcloud.properties file in vRealize Operations Manager contains configuration properties that control how the Management Pack for vCloud Director models vCloud Director services, synchronizes object relationships, and reports object down alerts, you could also edit that file to suit your need.

putty

 

What’s New

Based on the release notes, vRealize Operations Management Pack for vCloud Director 5.0 introduces the following new features:

  1. Additional storage elements: The vCloud Director management pack can discover various catalog elements such as, media files, vApp templates from vCloud Director along with the associated organization vDC and storage capacity (GB).
  2. Services associated with Edge Gateway: Ability to collect the network services such as, distributed firewall, ipsec, dns and so on, associated with specific edge gateway. Also, provides the traffic statistics and status (if the service is enabled or disabled during a specific time)

For item 1, you can see the new inventory items for catalog in the GUI, just click that from the left panel inside “vCloud Adapter” object category, example shown as below:

catalog

 

For item 2, we can see from the user guide saying that it will collect the following metrics:

Edge

From NSX-vSphere Adapter, we can see the detail Egress and Ingress traffic information, screen captured example is shown below;

Screen2

You can also check if any service in vCloud Edge Gateway has been enabled or disabled:

screen3

Also in this release, there are 7 new reports :

  • Organization to Organization VDC Mapping
  • Organization to VM Mapping
  • Organization VDC to vApp and vApp Templates Mapping
  • Organization VDC to VM Mapping
  • vApp to VM Mapping
  • vCloud Director to Organization Mapping
  • VM Hierarchy

 

report
Following is the VM Hierarchy sample report:
report2

Hope this quick update help you understand what’s included in the new version of vROPS Management Pack for vCD, see you next time!

Note:

  1. vRealize Operations Management Pack for vCloud Director 5.0 User Guide
  2. vRealize Operations Management Pack for vCloud Director 5.0 Release Notes