vRealize Operations Openshift Container Platform Monitoring header

vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments

VMware, Kubernetes, , , ,

The latest release of  vRealize Operations (the “manager” part of the product name has now been dropped), brings the ability to manage your Kubernetes environments from the vSphere infrastructure up.

The Kubernetes integration in vRealize Operations 8.1;

  • vSphere with Kubernetes integration:
    • Ability to discover vSphere with Kubernetes objects as part of the vCenter Server inventory.
    • New summary pages for Supervisor Cluster, Namespaces, Tanzu Kubernetes cluster, and vSphere Pods.
    • ​Out-of-the-box dashboards, alerts, reports, and views for vSphere with Kubernetes.
  • The VMware Management Packs that are new and those that are updated for vRealize Operations Manager 8.1 are:
    • VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring 1.4.3

Where does OpenShift Container Platform fit in?

All though the above highlighted release notes point towards vSphere with Kubernetes (aka project pacific), the Container monitoring management pack has been available for a while and has received a number of updates.

vRealize Operations Management Pack for Containers compatiibility

This management pack can be used with any of your Kubernetes setups. Bringing components into your infrastructure monitoring view;

  • Kubernetes;
    • Clusters
    • Nodes
    • Pods
    • Containers
    • Services

So this means you can add in your OCP environment for monitoring.

Configuring vRealize Operations to monitor your OpenShift Clusters

Grab the latest Container monitoring management pack to be installed in your vRealize Operations environment.

  1. Log in to the vRealize Operations Manager with administrator privileges.
  2. In the menu, select Administration and in the left pane select Solutions > Repository.
  3. On the Repository tab, click Add/Upgrade.
  4. Browse to locate the temporary folder and select the PAK file.
  5. Click Upload. The upload might take several minutes.
  6. Read and accept the EULA,and click Next.
  7. When the vRealize Operations Management Pack for Container Monitoring is installed, click Finish.

vRealize Operations add Management Pack

To link any Kubernetes to your environment for monitoring, you need to install the cAdvisor Daemon.  For OCP I used the cAdvisor YAML Definition on HostPort, secondly you need to create some credentials to authenticate to your cluster from your connection in vROPs. Continue reading vRealize Operations – Monitoring OpenShift Container Platform environments →

PowerCLI

PowerCLI – Import-VApp Name or service not known

VMware, ,

I kept running into the error whilst running PowerCLI on Ubuntu. After wracking my brains, I realised that the issue is DNS, my Ubuntu box couldn’t resolve the FQDN for the ESXi host, which is a mandatory parameter for the Import-vApp command.

Import-VApp             Name or service not known

Import-VApp Name or service not known

Dean

vmware

vCenter 7.0 – Image based backup is still supported, but won’t be in future versions

VMware, , ,

When vSphere 7.0 (and therefore vCenter 7.0) went GA, a number of customers were hit with a very important change;

  • vCenter support for image based backups was no longer supported

Since the GA, after customer feedback, the vCenter 7.0 release notes have been updated and I’m happy to report that Image based backups are still supported.

However, note that this method is now deprecated and will not be supported in a future release.

My advice is to start planning your move to using the native backup capabilities within the vCenter appliance itself, and for further information please see the following resources;

vCenter 7.0 imaged based backups supported but deprecated in the future

 

 

Regards

Dean Lewis
Veeam Backup for Azure Header 605

Veeam Backup for Azure – Unable to check required permissions.

Veeam, , ,

The Issue

When connecting my newly deployed instance of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, I keep hitting the same error message after authenticating my account with Microsoft.

Error: Unable to check required permissions. This might be a problem in Microsoft Azure. Please wait and continue with the wizard later.

Simple enough message, I don’t have the right permissions, yet I knew on my test tenant I was a global admin, (and the only user configured in this tenant) so why was I seeing this error?

Veeam Backup for Azure Logon to Microsoft Azure

Veeam Backup for Azure Logon to Microsoft Azure Unable to check the required permissions

The cause

When I downloaded the logs, I found the following, it indicated that my account is connected to two tennants, both of the same name “Default Directory” to make things confusing, and the error was happening on the permissions check with the tenant.

Continue reading Veeam Backup for Azure – Unable to check required permissions. →

VMware.cloud .logo

vROPs Dashboard – Display port group with VLAN ID and map to virtual machines

VMware, ,

My customer asked me how to display the VLAN ID for a virtual machine in vROPs.

The short answer is, due to the VLAN ID only being available from the Distributed switch adapter, its not simple to display this in a single list view.

So after some thinking around this, I came up with the following simple dashboard which was edited from the default “Distributed Switch Configuration” dashboard.

The dashboard is simple, and shows a selectable list of port groups, which then will refresh the virtual machine list, so you can see which virtual machines are attached to that port group.

You can download the dashboard and edited view here:

vROPs Dashboard Display port group with VLAN ID and map to virtual machines

 

Regards

Dean Lewis