Table of Contents · VMware vCenter Operations Manager is the key component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It provides a new and simplified approach to operations management

Table of ContentsLab Overview - Components ............................................................................................. 2

Infrastructure Components - vCenter...................................................................... 3Infrastructure Components - VMware ESXi hosts .................................................... 4Infrastructure Components - Virtual Machines ........................................................ 5Application Components - Microsoft SQL server...................................................... 6Infrastructure Components - VMware App HA......................................................... 7Infrastructure Components - VMware vCenter Operations Manager .....................10Business Critical Applications - About this Lab...................................................... 11

Module 1: High Availability for Business Critical Applications .........................................13M1.1 - Preparation................................................................................................. 14M1.2 - Test Policy................................................................................................... 24M1.3 - Summary.................................................................................................... 30

Module 2: CPU Contention Situation on the MS SQL Virtual Machine (CPU Limit in VirtualMachine Settings) ........................................................................................................... 31

M2.1 - Preparation................................................................................................. 32M2.2 - Analysis ...................................................................................................... 37M2.3 - Remediation ............................................................................................... 41M2.4 - Summary.................................................................................................... 46

Module 3: Memory Contention Situation on the MS SQL Virtual Machine (Memory Limit inVirtual Machine Settings) ................................................................................................ 47

M3.1 - Preparation................................................................................................. 48M3.2 - Analysis ...................................................................................................... 53M3.3 - Remediation ............................................................................................... 57M3.4 - Summary.................................................................................................... 58

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Page 1VMware Beta Program CONFIDENTIAL

Lab Overview -Components

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Infrastructure Components - vCenterIn this lab vCenter manages a 3-node vSphere Cluster and several VMs

Overview of the vCenter Environment Used for the vCloudSuite BCA Lab

This screenshot shows that you are using a relatively small environment for the lab.vCenter Server is built using the appliance.

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Infrastructure Components - VMwareESXi hostsOverview of VMware ESXi™ resources used.

vSphere Hosts

The lab consists of three ESXi servers.

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Infrastructure Components - VirtualMachinesListing of All Virtual Machines Contained in the Lab Setup

The lab is built on the following four virtual machines:

1 Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 running SQL Server 2008R2.

2 SLES 11 virtual machines running tc Server 2.8.

1 SLES 11 virtual machines running htproxy as an HTTP load balancer.

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Application Components - MicrosoftSQL serverSQL Server Management Studio

This lab uses Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 to host the databases that run the SpringTrader application.

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Infrastructure Components - VMwareApp HA

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vSphere App HA

Helps Minimize Downtime from Application Failure

vSphere App HA is a new feature that complements the functionality of VMwarevSphere® High Availability with application-level monitoring and automatedremediation. App HA improves application uptime through:

Policy-based application monitoring and remediation

Integration with vSphere HA to provide multiple recovery options, e.g. restart theapplication service or restart the virtual machine

Reduces Complexity

App HA eliminates the need for application-specific clustering solutions, thereforereducing the complexity involved in managing infrastructure silos, as well as costassociated with the solutions. App HA provides:

Uniform protection and support for many commonly used, off-the-shelf applications

Simple, centralized management through app-health visibility from VMware® vCenterServer™

Architecture Overview

vSphere App HA leverages VMware vFabric® to monitor applications. Deploying App HAbegins with provisioning two virtual appliances (per vCenter Server): App HA andHyperic. The App HA virtual appliance stores and manages App HA policies. Hypericmonitors applications and enforces App HA policies.

After the simple process of deploying the Hyperic and App HA virtual appliances,Hyperic agents are installed in the virtual machines containing applications that will beprotected by App HA.

App HA Policies

App HA policies are easily configured in the Administration section of the vSphere WebClient. Policies define items such as the number of times App HA will attempt to restarta service, number of minutes it will wait for the service to start, the option to reset thevirtual machine if the service fails to start, and reset the virtual machine when theservice is unstable.

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Infrastructure Components - VMwarevCenter Operations ManagerIntroduction to VMware vCenter Operations Manager

VMware vCenter Operations Manager is the key component of the vCenter OperationsManagement Suite. It provides a new and simplified approach to operationsmanagement of VMware vSphere® physical and cloud infrastructure. Using patented,self-learning analytics and an open, extensible platform, vCenter Operations Managerprovides operations dashboards that provide insights and visibility into health, risk andefficiency of your infrastructure, performance management, and capacity optimizationcapabilities.

Using vCenter Operations Manager, you can do the following:

• Gain comprehensive visibility into the health, risk, and efficiency of yourinfrastructure and applications.

• Proactively manage the health of vSphere, virtual machines, and applications.• Spot potential performance bottlenecks early and remediate before it affects end

users.• Right-size and reclaim overprovisioned capacity to increase consolidation ratios.• Manage thousands of virtual machines, physical servers, and applications across

multiple datacenters from a single console.• Automatically correlate and analyze monitoring data across infrastructure and

applications silos to gain a holistic view of root cause and effect.

vCenter Operations Manager and the vCenter Operations Management Suite areessential tools for infrastructure teams and operations teams who want to enablequality of service, operational efficiency, and continuous compliance of dynamic cloudinfrastructure and business critical applications.

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Business Critical Applications - Aboutthis LabVMware vCloud Suite Business Critical Applications Lab

This Lab demonstrates the use of VMware technology such as vSphere APP HA andVMware vCenter™ Operations Manager™ to successfully operate and monitor BusinessCritical Applications.

The two most important considerations for virtualizing business critical applications(BCA) are high availability and performance management. This lab provides hands onexperience in using VMware solutions to manage availability and performance forbusiness critical applications.

Availability:

vSphere HA protect against hardware failures, while vMotion and DRS protect againstdowntime during planned maintenance activities. These aspects are covered in lab HOL-SDC-1310. These features protect business critical applications during unplanned andplanned hardware related downtimes.

Many business critical applications have single points of failure such as load balancers,central queue and lock management services, etc. that have a small compute footprintand can fit within 1 vCPU. These critical components can leverage vSphere FaultTolerance for protection and instantaneous always on recovery.

To protect against Application level failures there is a need for an app aware monitoringand remediation platform. vSphere APP HA with Hyperic provides application awaremonitoring and remediation. This lab will provide the user hands on experience withcreation of application protection policies and remediation.

Performance Management:

Performance management is critical for business critical applications. The ability tomonitor, troubleshoot and resolve performance related problems quickly is veryimportant. vCenter operations provides the capability to monitor, troubleshoot andmanage performance problems. In this lab vCenter Operations will be showcased totroubleshoot and perform a quick root cause analysis on a CPU related problem and aMemory related problem. The traditional IT manager dashboard will be used forinfrastructure visibility. The SQL dashboard that comes the vCenter OperationsManagement pack will be used to look at database level performance criteria.

Modules in this lab

Module 1: High Availability for Business Critical Applications

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Module 2: CPU contention situation on the MS SQL virtual machine (that is, CPU limit invirtual machine settings).

Module 3: Memory contention situation on the MS SQL virtual machine (that is, Memorylimit in virtual machine settings).

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Module 1: HighAvailability for Business

Critical Applications

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M1.1 - PreparationACME requires that the SQL database server for its business critical application behighly available. There is a requirement for SQL to be protected against hardware andapplication failures.

Login to vCenter web client

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Go to the administration menu and choose vSphere AppHA

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Create a new policy by pressing the + Sign

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Choose SQL 2008 R2 as the application service

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Setup remediation parameters for the service as shown

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Ignore Alarm setup and click next

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Finish Creating Policy

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The new policy that was created is now shown.

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Enable Policy

The created policy needs to be assigned to services for it to be enabled.

1. Browse to the vCenter server and click on the Monitor tab. Choose vCenter AppHA. All the compatible applications for APP HA in the environment are displayed.Select the MS SQL 2008 R2 and then right click and choose “Assign Policy”

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Assign Policy to MS SQL Application

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M1.2 - Test PolicyNow let's test to veryify the newly created VMware App HA policy is working

Remote desktop to the SQL server :

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Stop the SQL Service

Launch the services view with services.msc. Browse to the SQL server service and stopit.

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View App HA Alert in Hyperic Console

Login to the Hyperic console and look at the dashboard. The dashboard will show analert and the SQL server is automatically restarted.

Application HA Maintenance Mode (Optional)

Browse to the Application Availability under the Monitor for the vCenter and then put theMS SQL 2008 R2 service in maintenance mode.

Manually Stop the SQL service

You can now go back to your RDP session for the SQL server and shut down the SQLservice again.

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Wait for a few minutes and confirm that the SQL service is not restarted. This shows thatif a service is in APP HA maintenance mode it can be brought down without APP HAreacting to it.

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Restart SQL

Restart SQL manually from the services console.

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Exit App HA Maintenance mode

Browse to the Application Availability under the Monitor for the vCenter and Exitmaintenance mode for MS SQL R2 server instance.

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M1.3 - SummaryThis module demonstrated the workings of vSphere App HA and its ability to protectfrom application level failures. vSphere App HA works with VMware Hyperic to monitorand remediate supported applications. vSphere App HA is very simple to configure andis setup with a few mouse clicks.

Using APP HA along with vSphere HA and Fault Tolerance can protect business criticalapplications from hardware and software related failures. vSphere vMotion and DRS helpaddress planned downtime.

The VMware HA components improve SLA and availability metrics for business criticalapplications, with reduced planned and unplanned downtime.

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Module 2: CPU ContentionSituation on the MS SQL

Virtual Machine (CPULimit in Virtual Machine

Settings)

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M2.1 - PreparationThis use case put parts of the application into a resource contention situation for CPUresources. This simulates a scenario in which the Microsoft SQL Server does not getsufficient CPU resources and shows how this issue appears when vCenter OperationsManager is used.

Generate Resource Contention Situation - Log in tovSphere Web Client

*** For your convenience, you can use the file named “HOL-SDC-1317 CheatSheet.txt” to cut & paste commands and other information used in this lab. This file islocated on the desktop of the ControlCenter. ***

Select the vSphere Web Client tab in Internet Explorer and then log in with user nameadministrator with password VMware1!.

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Browse to the MS SQL Server Virtual Machine

Click VMs and Templates.

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Browse to the MS SQL Server Virtual Machine (cont.)

1. Click Related Objects.2. Click Virtual Machines.3. Click sql-w8-01a.

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Manage the MS SQL Server Virtual Machine

1. Click Manage.2. Click Edit.

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Set CPU Limit

1. Click to expand the virtual machine CPU settings.2. Change Limit from Unlimited to 250 MHz.3. Click OK.

It takes a while for the effects to be visible in vCenter Operations Manager or Hyperic.

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M2.2 - AnalysisNote: It can take a few minutes for the actual behavior to show up.

ACME is running into a resource contention situation on their Microsoft SQL Server.Observe the IT Manager dashboard to see whether this can be observed.

Login to vCenter Operations

Using the bookmark shortcuts in Internet explorer add a new tab and choose thebookmark for Custom UI vCenter Operations. Login as admin user.

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Observe CPU Alerts in vCenter Operations:

Select the IT Manager tab on the vCenter Operations Manager screen.

Sort the Active Alerts in descending order by Start time. Locate the SQL Server alert anddouble click.

Examine the Alerts More Closely

Under the Root Cause tab, explore the message event and the related change eventthat caused this alert. This is useful to correlate alerts to potential change events in theenvironment.

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Troubleshooting

Click on the Troubleshoot button and then choose the Mashup tab to look at graphicaldetails of the alert for analysis.

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Alert Metrics & Anomalies

Go to the Metric Charts tab which shows the anomaly relating to the alert with CPUReady above normal threshold

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M2.3 - RemediationRemediate Resource Contention Situation - Log in tovSphere Web Client

Log in with user name Administrator and password VMware1!.

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Remove CPU Limit

1. Click to expand the virtual machine CPU settings.2. Change Limit from 250 MHz to Unlimited.3. Click OK.

It takes a while for the effects to be visible in vCenter Operations Manager or Hyperic.

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M2.4 - SummaryThis module showed you the ability to use vCenter operations for troubleshooting CPUrelated problems at the VM level and performing root cause analysis that ties it back tochanges made in the environment. VCOPS also provides metrics and anomaly data thatspeeds up the troubleshooting process. This is invaluable for business criticalapplications as downtime should be minimized or avoided. This also demonstrates thatsetting limits on CPU can be dangerous.

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Module 3: MemoryContention Situation on

the MS SQL VirtualMachine (Memory Limit inVirtual Machine Settings)

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M3.1 - PreparationGenerate Resource Contention Situation - Log in tovSphere Web Client

*** For your convenience, you can use the file named “HOL-SDC-1317 CheatSheet.txt” to cut & paste commands and other information used in this lab. This file islocated on the desktop of the ControlCenter. ***

Log in with user name Administrator and password VMware1!.

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Configure Memory Limit to Simulate a ResourceContention Issue

1. Click Memory to expand.2. For Limit,enter 250 MB and enter 0 for Reservation.3. Click OK.

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M3.2 - AnalysisNote: It can take several minutes for the actual behavior to show up.

ACME is experiencing memory resource contention on their Microsoft SQL Server.

Observe the IT Managers Dashboard

Browse to the Alerts Overview tab to look at the initial alerts generated.

Alerts for MemoryContention are displayed in the Active Alerts pane.

Double-click the one of the memory related alerts for the SQL server.

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A Detailed View of the Memory Alert

The more detailed view shows that multiple KPIs are breaching for memory contentionin the mashup pane.

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Root Cause Analysis

When further examining the change events shown in the Root Cause pane, you willeventually find the resource allocation change you did in the preparation section.

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What Can the SQL Administrator Observe?

Select the SQL Server Overview tab on the vCenter Operations Manager screen. Thisdashboard shows how the SQL administrator can observe the issue surfacing. Due to thememory contention, swapping would go up (2). This leads to higher disk I/O (1) andhigher CPU usage (3).

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M3.3 - RemediationThe resource contention can be remediated by reversing the change regarding memorylimits.

Reverting it back in this lab will not necessarily produce any results in a timely manner.This is because the pages that have been swapped out due to memory shortage andcould take hours to go back into real memory based on the usage characteristics of theSQL server.

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M3.4 - SummaryThis module showed you the ability to use vCenter operations for troubleshootingmemory related problems at the VM level and at the SQL server application level. TheSQL Server Management pack for VCOPS provides the ability to collect and look at SQLlevel metrics from VCOPS and correlate events across the entire infrastructure stack.Application specific management packs for VCOPS can help the infrastructure andapplication team members collaborate in problem resolution.

This also demonstrates that setting limits on memory can be dangerous.

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ConclusionThank you for participating in the VMware 2013 Hands-on Labs. Be sure to visithttp://hol.vmware.com/ to continue your lab experience online.

Lab SKU: HOL-SDC-1317

Version: 20140213-185244

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http://hol.vmware.com/

Documents

Table of Contents · VMware vCenter Operations Manager is the key component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It provides a new and simplified approach to operations management