HPE SimpliVity customers have been searching for a way to get a complete overview of their hyperconverged environment, to see how the different HPE SimpliVity objects behave on a day-to-day basis. VMware vRealize Operations (vROps) Manager provides the ability to monitor multiple hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) objects through a single interface. Now, HPE has created a plugin that integrates vROps and HPE SimpliVity, allowing customers to get a real-time view of the overall health of their system, including storage and efficiency metrics.
Users can also monitor specific HPE SimpliVity objects in their environments. These include backups, VMs, hosts, clusters, and federations. During installation, the MP uses the native HPE SimpliVity REST APIs to gather information from the HCI systems. The collected information is then processed and sent to the vROps Manager, which uses this data to populate the GUI. The HPE SimpliVity dashboards are available by default, allowing users to monitor resources that are HPE SimpliVity-specific and not part of the stock vROps suite. Attributes that can be monitored include performance and capacity-related data like IOPS, compression ratios, and deduplication ratios, to name a few.
Features of the new solution
In addition to the information already available in the vCenter GUI, the MP also provides the following functionalities:
Multiple federation monitoring
Apart from monitoring the HPE SimpliVity objects, one of the unique offerings of the MP is the ability to monitor multiple federations. The MP has no upper limit on the number of federations – the only pre-requisite is network accessibility. The federation to be monitored should be reachable over the network where the vROps appliance is installed. This in turn gives a comprehensive view of all the federations where the admin/user is able to see the HPE SimpliVity specific data of all the federations on a single dashboard. How cool is that?
The screenshot below shows two HPE SimpliVity federations being monitored. Once the user selects a particular federation, all the details corresponding to it are displayed in the other widgets.
Custom dashboards
The MP has a robust set of HPE SimpliVity specific metrics supported, which can be used in order to monitor any specific area of interest for the admin. The list of metrics will be listed under the MP in the vROps GUI once the MP has been installed. They are also listed in the user guide for reference. The admin/user can use these metrics to create their own custom dashboards in order to fit their needs. Basic knowledge of vROps is needed in order to create custom dashboards and widget interactions.
The “Getting Started for HPE SimpliVity” dashboard in the Dashboards page gives an overview of all the default dashboards provided by the MP. HPE SimpliVity customers can view a video tour of the dashboards here.
VM replica placement information
Details of the VM replica that exists on a different host can also be seen through the dashboards. An object list widget in the VM dashboard, shown below, shows the VM names and their primary and replica placements.
Predictions
The VMware analytics engine provides for proactive prediction that can determine the point in the future when a resource will reach a predefined critical level. Users can make use of this functionality to get a trend of how the system metrics would fare in the future.
Note: The prediction can be done to a maximum of 366 days, a limit set by vROps.
The screenshot below shows a widget that gives a prediction of the allocated capacity vs. used capacity using the vROps built-in analytics engine.
Reports
Apart from dashboards, users can also create report templates for the HPE SimpliVity objects. These templates contain information that would be needed as part of the final report. The report template then can be run manually or can be set to run automatically based on the user’s need. The MP populates this report whenever it is run. The template can also be configured to trigger e-mails once a report has been generated.
Refer to the Knowledge Base article to get to know how to configure and generate reports in vROps.
The screenshot below shows the first page of a sample backup report generated for a particular HPE SimpliVity host. Similar reports can be generated for overall backups of clusters and even federations.
Installation and licensing
The installation of the MP is pretty straightforward with just a few steps involved. The user guide includes the detailed steps. After the MP is installed, users can add HPE SimpliVity adapters, which are responsible to get the data from the HPE SimpliVity systems.
In case of monitoring multiple federations, each federation requires an adapter to be added in the vROps appliance. While adding an adapter, HPE SimpliVity provides the OVC IP of the host present in the federation (Note: one OVC IP is sufficient to monitor the whole federation). To make sure that the OVC IP is reachable from the vROps appliance, use the Test connection button while adding the adapter.
The HPE SimpliVity MP comes with an open source license and is provided without any fee to the users. However, users would need an advanced or an enterprise vROps product license to run the MP as of now, because VMware does not support third party MPs on their standard license.
All of the details regarding the MP, including future updates, can be found in the github repo. Users can raise issues, request enhancements, and give feedback or get in touch with the development team through this repository.
Download the new MP for VMware vRealize Operations manager 7.5 from: https://github.com/HewlettPackard/simplivity-vrops-plugin
Madhav
Madhav Bharadwaj E M
Engineer, Product Management HPE SimpliVity
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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