Next, let's discuss the vSphere 5.5 Virtualization Layer.
vSphere 5.5 virtualizes and aggregates resources including servers, storage, and networks and presents a uniform set of elements in the virtual environment. With vSphere 5.5, you can manage IT resources like a shared utility and dynamically provision resources to different business units and projects.
The vSphere 5.5 Virtual Data Center consists of:
• Computing and memory resources called hosts, clusters, and resource pools.
• Storage resources called datastores and datastore clusters.
• Networking resources called standard virtual switches and distributed virtual switches.
• vSphere Distributed Services such as vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage
vMotion, vSphere DRS, vSphere Storage DRS, Storage I/O Control, VMware HA, and FT that enable efficient and automated resource management and high
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
Physical Topology of a vSphere 5.5 Data Center
A typical vSphere 5.5 datacenter consists of basic physical building blocks such as x86 computing servers, storage networks and arrays, IP networks, a management server, and desktop clients. It includes the following components:
• Compute Servers: The computing servers are industry standard x86 servers that run ESXi 5.5 on the bare metal. The ESXi 5.5 software provides resources for and runs the virtual machines.
• Storage Networks and Arrays: Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) arrays, iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) SAN arrays, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) arrays are widely used storage technologies supported by vSphere 5.5 to meet different datacenter storage needs.
• IP Networks: Each compute server can have multiple physical network adapters to provide high bandwidth and reliable networking to the entire vSphere
datacenter.
• vCenter Server: vCenter Server provides a single point of control to the datacenter. It provides essential datacenter services, such as access control, performance monitoring, and configuration. It unifies the resources from the individual computing servers to be shared among virtual machines in the entire datacenter.
• Management Clients: vSphere 5.5 provides several interfaces such as vSphere
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
Introduction to vSOM
The vSphere Management market is extremely large. More than 50 percent of physical servers have been virtualized and more than 80% of virtualized environments are using vSphere.
That 80 percent adds up to about 25 million unmanaged hosts.
This is a massive opportunity for vSphere with Operations Management.
This system combines the benefits of the world‟s best virtualization platform, vSphere, with the functionality of vCenter Operations Manager Standard Edition. vCenter
Operations Manager delivers more value to customers through operational insight into the virtual environment for monitoring and performance, as well as optimized capacity management.
vCenter Operations Manager is an integral part of vSphere with Operations
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
In today‟s complex environments, operations management personnel need
management tools to enable the journey towards the private cloud, self-service, and IT as a service. While they are being pushed to raise availability and performance,
organizations need to reduce cost and complexity.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
A classic reactive approach - to monitor, isolate, and remediate based on issues - no longer meets today‟s needs.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
Modern operations management solutions need a proactive approach to reduce the number of false alerts, lower incidents, raise visibility and increase control over the environment.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
In today‟s complex environments, operations management personnel need
management tools to enable the journey towards the private cloud, self-service, and IT as a service. While they are being pushed to raise availability and performance,
organizations need to reduce cost and complexity.
A classic reactive approach - to monitor, isolate, and remediate based on issues - no longer meets today‟s needs.
Modern operations management solutions need a proactive approach to reduce the number of false alerts, lower incidents, raise visibility and increase control over the environment.
Let‟s take a look at how this affects a current performance issue. A performance issue can be caused through a problem in a vApp, a datastore or network I/O. Alternatively, a VMware vSphere cluster itself might be causing poor performance. This implies there are dozens, or even hundreds of metrics to analyze.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
In today‟s complex environments, operations management personnel need
management tools to enable the journey towards the private cloud, self-service, and IT as a service. While they are being pushed to raise availability and performance,
organizations need to reduce cost and complexity.
A classic reactive approach - to monitor, isolate, and remediate based on issues - no longer meets today‟s needs.
Modern operations management solutions need a proactive approach to reduce the number of false alerts, lower incidents, raise visibility and increase control over the environment.
Let‟s take a look at how this affects a current performance issue. A performance issue can be caused through a problem in a vApp, a datastore or network I/O. Alternatively, a VMware vSphere cluster itself might be causing poor performance. This implies there are dozens, or even hundreds of metrics to analyze.
By using its patented analytics engine, vCenter Operations Manager gives the
operations administrator the ability to combine all these metrics into a single view in the easy-to-use vCenter Operations Manager dashboard. With the help of this accelerated information, administrators can use Smart Alerts to reduce the number of fault alerts.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vSphere with Operations Manager Overview
VMware‟s approach to management helps administrators to become more proactive, instead of reactive to issues. Administrators can identify many potential issues ahead of time with planning, optimization and automation. Based on this modern toolkit,
administrators can fulfill the demand of the organization‟s CIO to improve availability and performance while reducing cost and complexity.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
vCenter Operations Manager: Quick Facts
In virtual and cloud environments, the relationships between performance, capacity, costs and configuration become intricately linked.
Configurations are fluid, while capacity is shared and sourced from many places, such as multiple providers, infrastructure tiers, and so on. All of these moving parts can impact performance.
This means that customers need visibility across the system and analytics to figure out what is important from the torrent of data produced. All customers benefit from a more integrated, automated approach to operations management.
The user gets an integrated solution using vSphere with Operations Manager, through management dashboards and smart alerts, that allows proactive management for day-to-day operating and support.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vCenter Operations Manager: Quick Facts
A process of permanently monitoring and analyzing data collection helps to identify performance problems, support automated root cause analysis, and delivers information for capacity and efficiency optimizations.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
vCenter Operations Manager: Quick Facts
There are other vendor solutions, but vCenter Operations Manager stands apart.
vCenter Operations Manager differs from other vendor solutions through patented performance analytics.
These include self-learning of normal behavior; service health baseline; trending; and smart alerts of impending performance degradation.
vCenter Operations Manager provides automated capacity planning and analysis:
designed for vSphere and built for the cloud.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vCenter Operations Manager 5.7: vApp Architecture
The vCenter Operations Manager vApp consists of two virtual machines. Both of these virtual machines are auto-connected through OpenVPN, which delivers a
highly-secured data channel.
The Analytics virtual machine is responsible for collecting data from vCenter Server, vCenter Configuration Manager, and third party data sources such as metrics, topology and change events. This raw data is stored in its scalable File System Database
(FSDB).
The analytics engines for capacity and performance periodically process this raw data and store the results in their respective Postgres or FSDB databases.
Users can access the results of the analytics, in the form of badges and scores, through the WebApps of the UI virtual machine.
Before deploying the vCenter Operations Manager vApp, you must be aware of the requirements for both virtual machines. You need to take into account the environment size, landscape and complexity.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
Manager 5.7 includes the new Metrics Profile feature that allows a subset to be chosen from metrics collected from vCenter Server.
By default, this feature is set to Full Profile, meaning that all metrics from all registered vCenter Servers are collected. The Balanced Profile setting ensures that only the most vital metrics from vCenter Server are collected.
The Full Profile allows for 5 million metrics to be collected and the Balanced Profile allows for 2.2 million metrics.
For larger deployments, you may need to add additional disks to the vApp.
vCenter Operations Manager is only compatible with certain web browsers and vCenter Server versions.
For vApp compatibility and requirements you should consult the vApp Deployment and Configuration Guide.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
vCenter Operations Manager 5.7: High Level Architecture
The vCenter Operations Manager vApp collects data from many different sources such as VMware vCenter Server, VMware vCenter Configuration Manager, or VMware vCloud Director.
The vCenter Operations Manager Analytics virtual machine processes the collected data, and presents the results through the UI virtual machine.
Possible user interfaces are the vCenter Operations Manager vSphere UI and vCenter Operations Manager Custom UI - which is only available in the Advanced and
Enterprise editions.
vCenter Operations Manager also features an Admin UI to perform administrative tasks.
As discussed previously, the monitored resources and collected metrics require certain computing resources. These should be taken into account when deploying the vApp.
vCenter Operations Manager is designed as an enterprise solution, so planning and preparing your environment is critical to successful deployment.
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
Learn More: vSOM Training
To learn more about vCenter Operations Manager, visit the VMware Partner University Site or the VMware Partner Mobile Knowledge Portal for iPad or Android Devices.
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide
Learn More: vSOM Training
Student Study Guide – VTSP 5.5
Module Summary
This concludes module 1, vSphere Overview.
Now that you have completed this module, you should be able to:
• Provide an overview of vSphere as part of VMware‟s Vision and Cloud Infrastructure Solution
• Describe the physical and virtual topologies of a vSphere 5.5 Data Center
• Provide an overview of vCenter Operations Manager
• Describe the vApp architecture for vCenter Operations Manager
VTSP 5.5 - Student Study Guide