Tag Archives: vRealize

vROPs Header

Collect VM Notes in (Aria) vRealize Operations: A Step-by-Step Guide

One of the most common questions I’ve come across in previous years is how do I get the VM notes held in vCenter into vRealize (Aria) Operations?

Great news, in vRealize Operations 8.10 and later, you can now collect those properties for the virtual machines simply by enabling the property to be collected in your Policy.

Enable the Notes property on your Policy
  • Click on Policies under Configure in the left-hand navigation pane
  • Select your active policy that you want to alter
    • You may need to change multiple policies due to inheritance settings

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy

  • Select the Edit Policy in the far right-hand side

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy 2

  • Set the object type as “Virtual Machine”
  • Search “note” to curate the list to show just the property we are interested in
  • Expand Properties > System
  • Highlight Notes and click on “Deactivated” and change to “Activated”
  • Click Save

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy - Metrics and Properties - Virtual Machine - Enable System Notes

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Policy - Metrics and Properties - Virtual Machine - System Notes - Activated

Viewing the VM notes and adding them to a view and reports

Now it’s a case of wait for the collection cycle of your vSphere environment, below you can see an example of a virtual machine which is configured with a note. Any note changes will also be captured.

vROPs - VM Notes - Virtual Machine Property - System - Notes

Now let’s look at adding this property to an existing report as well.

In the below, I’m going to edit the view “Virtual Machine Inventory” which is used to power the out-of-the-box report “Inventory Report – Virtual Machines”

  • Under Visualize on the left-hand navigation, click on Views
  • Click Manage Views, find your view and click to edit
  • Go to Step 2 – Data
  • The Selected Subject will already be Virtual Machine (red box)
  • Search for Note (1)
  • Drag the note property to the data column (2)
  • Set a vanity name for the property (3)
  • Set a preview source (green box)
    • Ensure that the VM note displays as expected (4)
  • Click Update

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit View

Now let’s check this updated view is reflected in our report:

  • Under Visualize on the left-hand navigation, click on Reports
  • Click to edit your chosen report
  • Expand the Views and Dashboards section in the report
  • In the red boxes you can see the matching name of the view I edited in the above screenshots, and the VM Notes Column is present

vROPs - VM Notes - Edit Report

Finally, when I run this report, I can see the additional VM note data added to the report.

vROPs - VM Notes - Run Report

Hopefully this new simple but much asked for feature will help in the ongoing management of your environments.

Regards

Dean Lewis

vRealize Operations Header

How to Add vSphere Tags to vRealize Operations Alert Emails using a Custom Payload

Wondering how to add the vSphere Tag for a virtual machine to emails sent out for alerts? I recently came across this Reddit post, so decided to try out the Custom Payload feature from vRealize (Aria) Operations and want to share the steps I took to achieve this setting.

Here‘s how to configure a Payload Template and Notification to include the vSphere Tag:

Creating the custom payload template to include the vSphere Tag

To get started, within your vRealize Operations interface (SaaS or on-premises), go to:

  • Configure > Alerts
  • Click on Payload Templates icon
  • Click Add to create a new template

vROPS - Custom Payload - Alerts - Payload Templates

  • Give your custom payload template a name,
  • a description,
  • and set which outbound method it’s tied to. For my example, it will be email.
  • Click Next

Continue reading How to Add vSphere Tags to vRealize Operations Alert Emails using a Custom Payload

vRealize Automation Header

vRealize Automation – Active Directory Integration – Configure LDAPS

In this blog post, I am going to cover the setup of the Active Directory integration with vRealize Automation using LDAPS.

Cloud Assembly supports integration with Active Directory servers to provide out of the box creation of computer accounts in a specified Organizational Unit (OU) within an Active Directory server prior to provisioning a virtual machine.

Note: to join to AD within the Guest OS, you can use CloudConfig properties or vSphere CustomizationSpec.

The VMware official documentation doesn’t really call out LDAPS configuration, only LDAP. So after helping a customer configure this, I thought I’d quickly write something up.

To get started, login into vRealize Automation and select Cloud Assembly.

  • Select the Infrastructure Tab
  • Select Integrations under the Connections header
  • Click the Add Integration button
  • Select Active Directory

vRealize Automation - Configure LDAPS - Cloud Assembly - Integrations - Active Directory Continue reading vRealize Automation – Active Directory Integration – Configure LDAPS

VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud Red Hat OpenShift header

How to configure Red Hat OpenShift to forward logs to VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud

In this blog post we will cover how to configure Red Hat OpenShift to forward logs from the ClusterLogging instance to an external 3rd party system, in this case, VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud.

Architecture

The Openshift Cluster Logging will have to be configured for accessing the logs and forwarding to 3rd party logging tools. You can deploy the full suite;

  • Visualization: Kibana
  • Collection: FluentD
  • Log Store: Elasticsearch
  • Curation: Curator

However, to ship the logs to an external system, you will only need to configure the FluentD service.

To forward the logs from the internal trusted services, we will use the new Log Forwarding API, which is GA in OpenShift 4.6 and later (it was a tech preview in earlier releases, and the configuration YAMLs are slightly different, so read the relevant documentation version).

This setup will provide us the architecture below. We will deploy the trusted namespace “OpenShift-Logging” and use the Operator to provide a Log Forwarding API configuration which sends the logs to a 3rd party service.

For vRealize Log Insight Cloud, we will run a standalone FluentD instance inside of the cluster to forward to the cloud service.

Openshift cluster logging to vmware log insight architecture

The log types are one of the following:

  • application. Container logs generated by user applications running in the cluster, except infrastructure container applications.
  • infrastructure. Container logs from pods that run in the openshift*, kube*, or default projects and journal logs sourced from node file system.
  • audit. Logs generated by the node audit system (auditd) and the audit logs from the Kubernetes API server and the OpenShift API server.
Prerequisites
  • VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud instance setup with Administrator access.
  • Red Hat OpenShift Cluster deployed
    • with outbound connectivity for containers
  • Download this Github Repository for the configuration files
git clone https://github.com/saintdle/openshift_vrealize_loginsight_cloud.git
Deploy the standalone FluentD instance to forward logs to vRealize Log Insight Cloud

As per the above diagram, we’ll create a namespace and deploy a FluentD service inside the cluster, this will handle the logs forwarded from the OpenShift Logging instance and send the to the Log Insight Cloud instance.

Creating a vRealize Log Insight Cloud API Key

First, we will create an API key for sending data to our cloud instance.

  1. Expand Configuration on the left-hand navigation pane
  2. Select “API Keys”
  3. Click the “New API Key” button

vRealize Log Insight Cloud API Key

Give your API key a suitable name and click Create.

vRealize Log Insight Cloud New API Key Continue reading How to configure Red Hat OpenShift to forward logs to VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud