vSphere Optimization Assessment (VOA) through vRealize Operations

A lot of customers out there have realized the power of vROPs and use the tool for effective monitoring and management of their Datacenter.
The tool gives granular insights to the environment and typically for large scaled environment its a logical to use an analytic tool of such nature.

The out of box reports of the tool helps you gauge the status of the resources and is quite helpful for daily operational purposes.

To improve the reporting, VMware has introduced a new reports which gives exhaustive insight to your environment.

Upgrading vRealize Operations to 6.4

vRealize Operations 6.4 brings in some really cool advancements in the UI along with some 13 new and amazing out-of-box dashboards. The new Dashboards provide 
a) Summary of the environment
b) VM troubleshooting capabilities. Deeper details like OS, IP address etc.
c) Infrastructure performance and capacity details at the Datacenter level. It now provides key performance indicators for an objects and has ability to highlight issues and related objects to it.

Besides this also introduce support for vSphere 6.5 and Predictive DRS (pDRS)

Predictive DRS : Predictive DRS (pDRS) can proactively load balance a vCenter Server cluster to accommodate predictable patterns.

Where DRS performs load balancing of hosts within a cluster by considering the last five minutes of virtual machine demand, Predictive DRS acts based on data provided to it by vRealize Operations Manager. 

vRealize Operations Manager monitors virtual machines running in a vCenter Server, analyzes longer-term historical data and provides forecast data about predictable patterns of resource usage to Predictive DRS. Predictive DRS moves to balance resource usage based on these predictable patterns.

So in all, vROPs 6.4 brings in a lot cool features which are worth an upgrade.

However there are a few pointers which needs to be considered before you rush to an upgrade

1) Upgrading older versions of vRealize Operations Manager (6.0.x or 6.1) must use a two-step upgrade...They must first upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager 6.3 and then upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager 6.4

2) For recent versions of Realize Operations Manager (6.3, 6.2, or 6.2.1), we can upgrade directly to vRealize Operations Manager 6.4

3) Upgrading to vROPs 6.4 includes upgrading 2 pak files

a. The OS pak file

b. the Virtual Appliance pak file 

4) Make sure a snapshot of each node in the vROPs cluster is taken before we start the upgrade

5) Take a backup of any customization, configurations, custom dashboard etc. being created before the starting the upgrade procedure.

Follow the instructions on the "Updating your Software" Link and you should be able to upgrade to vROPs 6.4 without any issues.

VMware Identity Manager Integration with Access Point

VMware Identity Manager also known as vIDM is recently introduced SSO engine which is now used across VMware solutions around EUC and Mobility solutions.
Most of the customers love vIDM is because of its ability to provide single unified interface for accessing your application, which could be apps delivered through Horizon (VDI/Published Apps) or Mobile Apps or SaaS based applications.

vIDM allows us to federate with multiple identity sources at the backend and act as a Single authentication source with SSO capability to be the key to a User Workspace.

vIDM Setup

Its pretty simple and straight forward to deploy vIDM (Workspace) in your LAN setup.
It requires you to deploy the follow the below steps...

1) Deploy vIDM appliance, assign network properties (IP address, netmask, gateway, domain name etc.), create respective DNS records and power it up.

2) Configure it through the UI of the appliance to integrate with the Identity source (like an AD) by providing Base DN, Bind DN and credentials

3) Once we have synced with the AD, map respective backend application sources (e.g. Horizon, Mobile Apps through Airwatch, SaaS apps or Web URLs etc.) to show up as a Catalogue item.

4) Provide Entitlement of these services to the synced users


Access Point Setup

During the deployment of Access Point, i found it to be the most simplest to deploy it using the Powershell scripts.
You can refer to Access Point Deployment Utility (VMware Fling) page for the OVF deployment utility.

The other effective way is to deploy the OVF is using the standard import wizard through the vSphere web client.
I found it convenient to deploy it straight forward by just providing Networking details and leaving the rest sections (i.e. Horizon/Reverse Proxy/Airwatch) blank.

The configuration for integration with vIDM/Horizon/Airwatch can be done later from the Rest API page (https://access-point-appliance.example.com:9443/rest/swagger.yaml)


Refer to the Access Point Installation and Configuration Guide (http://pubs.vmware.com/accesspoint-27/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/access-point-27-deploy-config-guide.pdf)