Tag Archives: VMware Cloud on AWS

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Tanzu Observability – First look at monitoring OpenShift & VMware Cloud on AWS

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Recently, I was involved in some work to assist the VMware Tanzu Observability team to assist them in updating their deliverables for OpenShift. Now it’s generally available, I found some time to test it out in my lab.

For this blog post, I am going to pull in metrics from my VMware Cloud on AWS environment and the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster which is deployed upon it.

What is Tanzu Observability?

We should probably start with what is Observability, I could re-create the wheel, but instead VMware has you covered with this helpful page.

Below is the shortened table comparison.

Monitoring vs. Observability

As a developer you want to focus on developing the application, but you also do need to understand the rest of the stack to a point. In the middle, you have a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), who covers the platform itself, and availability to ensure the app runs as best it can. And finally, we have the platform owner, where the applications and other services are located.

Somewhere in the middle, when it comes to tooling, you need to cover an example of the areas listed below:

  • Application Observability & Root Cause Analysis
    • App-aware Troubleshooting & Root Cause Analysis
  • Distributed Tracing
  • CI/CD Monitoring
  • Analytics with Query Language and high reliability, granularity, cardinality, and retention
  • Full-Stack Apps & Infra Telemetry as a Service
  • Infra Monitoring
    • Performance Optimization
    • Capacity and Cost Optimization
    • Configuration and Compliance

So now you are thinking, OK, but VMware has vRealize Operations that gives me a lot of data, so why is there a new product for this?

vRealize Operations and Tanzu Observability come together – delivering full stack monitoring and observability from both the infra-up and app-down perspective, equipping both teams in the org to meet common goals.

Monitoring & Observability

It is about the right tool for the right team and bringing together harmony between them. Which is why at VMware, the focus has been on covering the needs of team across the two products.

vRealize Operations is going to give you SLA metrics for your infrastructure and even application awareness. However Tanzu Observability brings more application focused features to allow you as a business, report on Application Experience of your end users/customers, at an SLA/SLO/KPI approach with extensibility to provide an Experience Level Agreement (XLA) type capability.

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront delivers enterprise-grade observability and analytics at scale. Monitor everything from full-stack applications to cloud infrastructures with metrics, traces, event logs, and analytics.

High level features include:

To follow this blog, you can also easily get yourself access to Tanzu Observability.

Configuring data ingestion into Tanzu Observability using the native integrations

Configuring the OpenShift (Kubernetes) Integration using Helm

First, we need to create an API Key that we can use to connect our locally deployed wavefront services to the SaaS service to send data. Continue reading Tanzu Observability – First look at monitoring OpenShift & VMware Cloud on AWS →

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VMC vCenter email alerts not supported – Workaround with vRealize Log Insight Cloud

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The Issue

When configuring a VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) SDDC vCenter, Administrators trying to use the vCenter Alerts email feature find they cannot complete the configuration, as the necessary options such as setting email server settings are greyed out.

Thanks to Bilal Ahmed for discussing this issue with me, so we could find a solution.
The Cause

Today this feature is not supported in VMware Cloud on AWS

The Workaround

By creating the vCenter Alert, even if it triggers to alert a placeholder email address. This will generate a vCenter event which is captured by vRealize Log Insight Cloud (vRLIC), the offering which is included with VMC (the freemium version included with VMC will sufficed for the workaround).

Within vRealize Log Insight you can generate an email alert from a query.

Obviously, a full monitoring suite is where you should be really heading for these types of information gathering and notifications such as vRealize Operations Cloud. However, this will suffice as a workaround where that option is not possible.

The vRealize Log Insight Cloud collects and analyzes logs generated in your SDDC.

A trial version of the vRealize Log Insight Cloud add-on is enabled by default in a new SDDC. The trial period begins when a user in your organization accesses the vRealize Log Insight Cloud add-on and expires in thirty days. After the trial period, you can choose to subscribe to this service or continue to use a subset of service features at no additional cost. 
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Example – Datastore Usage

You can do this for any vCenter Alarm type, but I am using datastore usage space as an example

  • First, we will create the vCenter Alarm

Continue reading VMC vCenter email alerts not supported – Workaround with vRealize Log Insight Cloud →

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Horizon on VMC – Considerations and setting up a lab environment

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A few months back, I setup a Horizon Environment running in our VMC environment used for lab purposes. Since then, I’ve been asked by several people to go through the setup. So, I’ve also decided to create a blog post on the matter.

This blog post will cover the considerations for running VMware Horizon on VMC, and the technical setup itself of the lab environment I created.

Update 4th May: I recorded a session for the London VMUG on this subject, which you can watch here.

Topics covered;

  • Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS
  • Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS Deployment Guide and Supportability
  • Feature Support
  • Horizon on VMC architecture
  • Platform Considerations
    • Identity Management
    • File Shares
    • Image management
  • Network Service
    • VMC Network Segments
    • Load Balancing
    • DHCP
  • Firewall Rules
    • Logging
  • Horizon Connection Broker Configuration
  • Some finl considerations
  • Further Resources
Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS

I will not cover the details of VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) in this post, but you can read about it here.

Horizon 7 (or later), running on top of VMC, is not a Desktop-as-a-Service offering. For this, we have our Horizon Cloud offering, which currently supports Azure and IBM Cloud.

Horizon on VMC, acts the same as the on-prem offering, i.e. the same considerations and configurations as you would take, if you deployed Horizon in your own private datacentre.

You can stretch existing Horizon environments to also make use of the compute and storage in VMC, and setup Cloud Pod Architecture between the locations as well. Alternatively, you can run a full Horizon environment solely within VMC itself. By running within VMC, you also ensure your desktops are near in proximity to native AWS services, such as file services, global load balancing services to name some examples.

Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS is not DaaS Continue reading Horizon on VMC – Considerations and setting up a lab environment →