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VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.3 Users Guide VMTurbo Inc. One Burlington Woods Drive Burlington, MA 01803 USA Phone: (781) 373---3540 www.vmturbo.com

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Page 1: VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.3 Users Guide€¦ · What's New This release of VMTurbo Operations Manager includes the following new features: • Added Target Hypervisor Support Operations

VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.3Users Guide

VMTurbo Inc.

One Burlington Woods DriveBurlington, MA 01803 USAPhone: (781) 373---3540www.vmturbo.com

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Users Guide ii

COPYRIGHT

Copyright VMTurbo 2010 — 2013 ©, all rights reserved

TERMS OF USE

http://www.vmturbo.com/terms-of-use/

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Users Guide 1

Table of Contents

What's New 1

Introducing Operations Manager 3The Optimal Operating Zone 4The Market and Virtual Currency 4The Economic Scheduling Engine 5The Operations Manager Supply Chain 6

Virtual Application 6Applications 7Virtual Machines 9Physical Machines 10Storage 11Datacenters 12Provider Virtual Datacenters 13Organization Virtual Datacenters 14

Operations Manager Actions 15Supply Chain Terminology 16Resource Descriptions 17

The Operations Manager User Interface 19Menu Bar 20Tool Bar and Display Tools 21Navigation Panel 22

Navigation Tree Hierarchies 24Resource Icons 25

Notifications Bar 25Standard Panel Controls 26Show Top or Bottom Items in Chart 31Information Panels 33Utilization History 36

Logging In to Operations Manager 39

To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS 41Viewing Recommended Actions 42Executing Recommended Actions 43Viewing Risks and Efficiency Opportunities 45Action Categories 47Examples of Risks and Actions 49

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The Home View 51Standard Dashboards 52

Assure Service Performance 52Improve Overall Efficiency 57Project Cluster Resources 61Monthly Summary 65

Custom Dashboards 66

The Inventory View 69Summary 70Virtual Applications 73Applications 75Virtual Machines 78Physical Machines 83Storage 86Data Centers 88Provider Virtual Data Centers 90Organization Virtual Data Centers 94

The Plan View 97Use Cases 99

Increasing Virtual Load under Existing Constraints 99Running Plans 105Creating Plans 109

Managing Plan Files 109Tracking Plan Modifications 110Setting Plan Scope 111Selecting the Plan Baseline 113Specifying the Plan Workload 115Setting Advanced Options 123

Workload Distribution 126Summary View 127Physical Machine Utilization 128Storage Utilization 128Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data 129

Workload Projection 129Summary View 130Physical Machine Utilization 132Storage Utilization 133Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data 133

Hardware Replace 133Defining Replace Parameters 134Summary View 137Physical Machine Utilization 138Storage Utilization 139Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data 139

Recommended Actions 139

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Users Guide 3

The Deploy View 141Deploying VMs 142Creating and Editing Templates 143

The Optimize View 147Optimizer User Interface 147

Navigation Panel - Optimize View 148Utilization Summary Panel 148To Do Panel 150

Reports 151Standard Reports 152

Subscribing to Standard Reports 153Custom Reports 154Adding New Custom Reports 154Edit Custom Reports 155

Setting Basic Properties 156Choosing Query Fields 156Specifying Query Field Conditions 157Sorting Report Columns 158

Manage Subscriptions 159

The Admin View 161License Configuration 161Target Configuration 163

Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers 164Adding Hyper-V Servers as Targets 165Adding CloudStack Servers as Targets 167Adding vCloud Director Servers as Targets 167Adding Load Balancers as Targets 168

User Authentication Configuration 169Specifying an Active Directory Server 170Managing User Accounts 170Setting Scope for a User Account 171

Report Configuration 172Maintenance 173Extra Configuration Tasks 174

P2V — Planning Migration from Physical to Virtual 174Custom Branding of Operations Manager 177

The Policy View 181Policy Scope 182Policy Categories 186

Group Management 186Workload Placement 191Analysis 193Action Modes 200

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Application Priority 205Discovery Policies 207Infrastructure Cost 214Email and Trap Notification 216Retention Configuration 219

Aggregated Operations Manager Installations 221Versions and Licensing for Aggregation 222Aggregated User Accounts and Login 222Aggregation Details 222Configuring Aggregation 223

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Users Guide 1

What's NewThis release of VMTurbo Operations Manager includes the following new features:

• Added Target Hypervisor SupportOperations Manager now supports management of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 (RHEV) and VMWare vCenter Server 5.1 hypervisors. For more information, see Target Configuration - page 163.

• Improved CloudStack SupportOperations Manager now supports resize operations in CloudStack environments. The software discovers CouldStack templates, and uses those to perform resize operations. (Note that resize policies behave differently for CloudStack environments. For more information, see Resize Recommendation Settings - page 197.)

• Action Restriction WindowsOperations Manager now includes a scheduling utility to specify time windows when you can restrict the action mode for a given scope of devices. You can use this to allow or disallow automation for a given window of time. For example, you can direct that Operations Manager will automatically perform Resize actions only during periods of low activity.For more information, see Action Modes - page 200.

• Configurable MenusEarlier versions of Operations Manager used a tabbed display to show different views of your environment. The user interface now uses menu buttons to display these views. You can now choose which buttons to display in the menu bar at the top of the application window. In this way, you can reduce clutter by hiding buttons for the views you rarely use. For more information, see Menu Bar - page 20.

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What's New

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Users Guide 3

Introducing Operations ManagerThank you for choosing VMTurbo Operations Manager, the premier solution for intelligent workload management of cloud and virtual environments. Operations Manager maintains your environment within the optimal operating zone—operating conditions that achieve the following conflicting goals at the same time:

• Assured application performancePrevent bottlenecks, provision physical resources, upsize VMs, prioritize workload.

• Efficient use of resourcesConsolidate workload, downsize VMs, prevent VM sprawl and dormant VMs.

Keeping a virtual infrastructure within the optimal zone is not a simple problem. You have to consider many different resources, numerous control points for each device, and how devices and resources are used in relation to each other. As you add devices to your infrastructure, the factors for each decision increase exponentially. On top of that, the environment is constantly changing—to stay in the optimal zone, you are constantly trying to hit a moving target.

To perform intelligent workload management, Operations Manager models the environment as a market made up of buyers and sellers. These buyers and sellers make up a supply chain that represents tiers of devices in your inventory. Operations Manager uses Virtual Currency to give a budget to buyers and assign cost to resources. This virtual cur-rency assigns value across all tiers of your environment, making it possible to compare the cost of application transac-tions with the cost of space on a disk or physical space in a data center.

The price that a seller charges for a resource changes according to the seller’s supply. As demand increases, prices increase. As prices increase, buyers and sellers react. Buyers are free to look for other sellers that offer a better price, and sellers can duplicate themselves (open new storefronts) to meet increasing demand. Operations Manager uses its Economic Scheduling Engine to analyze the market and make these decisions. The effect is an invisible hand that dynamically guides your IT infrastructure to the optimal use of resources.

To get the most out of Operations Manager, you should understand how it models your environment, the kind of analysis it performs, and the optimal state it works to achieve. This section describes the following in more detail:

• The Optimal Operating Zone - page 4• The Market and Virtual Currency - page 4• The Economic Scheduling Engine - page 5• The Operations Manager Supply Chain - page 6• Operations Manager Actions - page 15• Supply Chain Terminology - page 16• Resource Descriptions - page 17

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The Optimal Operating Zone

The goal of workload management is to assure performance while maintaining efficient use of resources. When per-formance and efficiency are both maintained, you are in the optimal operating zone. You can measure performance as a function of delay, where zero delay gives the ideal QoS for a given service. Efficient use of resources is a function of utilization where 100% utilization of a resource is the ideal for the most efficient utilization.

If you plot delay and utilization, the result is an asymptotic curve. Up to a point, as you increase utilization, the increase in delay is slight. There comes a point on the curve where a slight increase in utilization results in an unac-ceptable increase in delay. On the other hand, there is a point in the curve where a reduction in utilization doesn’t yield a meaningful increase in QoS. The optimal operating zone lies within these points on the curve.

You could set a threshold to post an alert whenever the upper limit is crossed. In that case, you would never react to a problem until delay has already become unacceptable. To avoid that late reaction you could set the threshold to post an alert before the upper limit is crossed. In that case, you guarantee QoS at the cost of over-provisioning—you increase operating costs and never achieve efficient utilization.

Instead of responding after a threshold is crossed, Operations Manager analyzes the operating conditions and con-stantly recommends actions to keep the entire environment within the optimal operating zone. If you execute these actions (or let Operations Manager execute them for you), the environment will maintain operating conditions that assure performance for your customers, while saving you as much as possible by efficient utilization of your resources.

The Market and Virtual CurrencyTo perform intelligent workload management, Operations Manager models the environment as a market, and uses market analysis to manage resource supply and demand. For example, bottlenecks form when local workload demand exceeds the local capacity—in other words, when demand exceeds supply. By modeling the environment as a market, Operations Manager can use economic solutions to efficiently redistribute the demand or increase the sup-ply.

Operations Manager uses two sets of abstraction to model the environment:

• Modeling the physical and virtual IT stack as a service supply chainThe supply chain models devices in your environment as managed entities. These include applications, VMs, host machines (physical machines, or PMs), and data centers. Every entity is a buyer and/or a seller. A host machine buys physical space, power, and cooling from a data center. The PM sells host resources such as CPU cycles and memory to VMs. In turn, VMs buy host services, and then sell their hosting services (VMem and VCPU) to applications.

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The Economic Scheduling Engine

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• Using virtual currency to represent delay or QoS degradation, and to manage the supply and demand of services along the modeled supply chain. The system uses virtual currency to value these buy/sell transactions. Each managed entity has a running budget, and draws from that budget to pay for the resources it consumes. The price of a resource is driven by its utilization — the more demand for a resource, the higher its price.

Figure 2-1. Modeling the Environment as a Market

These abstractions open the whole range of the environment to a single mode of analysis—market analysis. Resources and services can be priced to reflect changes in supply and demand, and pricing can drive resource alloca-tion decisions. For example, a bottleneck (excess demand over supply) results in rising prices of the given resource. Applications competing for the same resource can lower their costs by shifting their workloads to other resource sup-pliers. As a result, utilization for that resource evens out across the environment and the bottleneck is resolved.

The Economic Scheduling EngineOperations Manager tracks the Utilization Index (UI) for specific resources in your environment. The higher this index, the more that resource is utilized, the greater the delay for consumers of that resource, and the greater the risk to your QoS. Operations Manager constantly works to keep the UI within acceptable bounds. You can think of UI as the cost for a resource—Operations Manager works to keep the cost at a competitive level. This is not simply a matter of responding to threshold conditions. Operations Manager analyzes the full range of buyer/seller relationships, and each buyer constantly seeks out the most economical transaction that is available.

This last point is crucial to understanding Operations Manager. The virtual environment is dynamic, with constant changes to workload and optimal workload distribution that correspond with the varying requests your customers make of your applications and services. By examining each buyer/seller relationship, the economic engine arrives at the optimal workload distribution for the current state of the environment.

For example, assume a PM that hosts one VM with a critical application, and two VMs with non-critical applications. Consider these similar situations:

• The critical application has increased use, and the non-critical applications are dormantIn this case, Operations Manager can suspend the two unused VMs (reduce VM sprawl) and devote more host resources to the critical application.

• The critical application has increased use, and both non-critical applications see increased useIn this case, Operations Manager can move the non-critical VMs to another host and devote more host resources to the critical application.

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This is an over-simple case, but it illustrates the value of constant analysis of all the relationships. For the critical appli-cation, the results are the same. But for the environment as a whole, the results arrive at different, economical solu-tions, to reflect the given conditions. The economic engine considers all the entities and resources in your environment, and analyzes them asynchronously to constantly tend toward the optimal operating zone.

NOTE: In principal, you can run Operations Manager with nothing more than its default settings. However, it’s likely that your environment has special services and resources that require different management decisions. Operations Manager provides a full range of policies that you can set to control how the software manages specific groups of entities. However, before you make such policy settings, you should understand how Operations Manager works by default. For more information about policies, see The Policy View - page 181.

The Operations Manager Supply ChainOperations Manager models your environment as a market of buyers and sellers. At its simplest, a market model could classify each entity as just a buyer and a seller. However, a virtual environment has tiers of resources and ser-vices. Also, different targets that Operations Manager can monitor represent different tiers or groupings. For example, a hypervisor represents applications, VMs, PMs, data stores, and data centers, while a load balancer represents vir-tual applications and a cloud stack represents virtual data centers. These tiers form a chain of supply and demand, where one tier supplies resources to meet the demands of another tier.

The Operations Manager user interface displays the supply chain in the following tiers. To see the full inventory, with navigation lists that show the full supply chain, see The Inventory View - page 69.

• Virtual Application - page 6• Applications - page 7• Virtual Machines - page 9• Physical Machines - page 10• Storage - page 11• Datacenters - page 12• Provider Virtual Datacenters - page 13• Organization Virtual Datacenters - page 14

Virtual Application

A virtual application is the logical application server (sometimes called a vserver) that a load balancer uses to marshall access to load-balanced applications. In the load balancer, each virtual application has bindings to the applications it manages. End users make requests to the virtual application, and the load balancer forwards those requests to the actual applications.

Synopsis

Budget: A virtual server has unlimited budget to buy application resources. As a result, a virtual application will never be suspended.

Provides: Transactions to end users and other applications.

Consumes: Applications running on VMs.

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers virtual application servers through load balancer targets (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

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Operations Manager displays virtual applications in the inventory as follows:

Figure 2-2. Virtual Applications

Load balancers manage the traffic of requests to applications in your environment. The virtual application is a logical construct of the load balancer. For information about binding load-balanced applications to the virtual application, see Discovery Policies - page 207.

Operations Manager does not recommend actions to perform on the virtual application itself, but it does recommend actions to perform on the VMs that host bound applications. For example, assume a virtual application that manages three SQL databases. If a surge in requests degrades performance across all three databases, then Operations Man-ager can start a new VM to run another instance of the database application, and bind it to the virtual application. On the other hand, if SQL requests drop off so that the load balancer only forwards requests to two of the databases, Operations Manager can suspend the dormant database and unbind it from the virtual application.

Applications

In a virtualized environment, an application is a process running on a VM. Applications typically serve human users, or other applications.

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Operations Manager displays applications in the inventory as follows:

Figure 2-3. Applications

By default, Operations Manager discovers the following applications:

Synopsis

Budget: An application gains its budget to buy resources as a function of its activity. The more active an application is (the more transactions the application performs), the more Operations Manager assumes the application is selling its services to a user. This gives the application more budget to purchase resources from a hosting VM. Operations Manager doesn’t perform actions on applications. Instead, it performs actions on the host VMs. If utilization is high enough on an application, Operations Manager can create a new copy of the host VM. When an application is idle, it loses budget. Ultimately, if the budget falls enough, Operations Manager will suspend or terminate the host VM.You can declare that an application is critical. Doing this gives the application unlimited budget, so its host VM will never be suspended. For more information, see Application Priority - page 205.

Provides: Transactions to other applications, to load balancer Virtual Application Servers, and to end users.

Consumes: VM resources, including VCPU, VMem, and VStorage.

Discovered through: Operations Manager uses WMI, SNMP, or JMX to discover applications through the current target hypervisors (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

Application Name Description

LSASS Microsoft Active Directory services

IIS Microsoft Internet Information Services

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In addition, your installation of Operations Manager might be configured to discover other applications running in your environment. For more information, see Application Discovery - page 207.

Guest Load

The Apps_GuestLoad item is a special entry in the Applications hierarchy. This item tracks the resources that Opera-tions Manager has not assigned to any specific application. This can occur for the following reasons:

• You do not have the licenses required to support Application monitoringIn this case, Operations Manager lists all the consumed VM resources in the Apps_GuestLoad entry—this is the only entry under Applications.

• Operations Manager fails to discover some applicationsIn this case, Operations Manager displays entries for the applications it has discovered, and lists the VM resources that are not accounted for under Apps_GuestLoad.

• VM resources are devoted to infrastructure, and not part of any applicationOperations Manager lists these resources under Apps_GuestLoad, and provides entries for the applications it has discovered.

Virtual Machines

A virtual machine (VM) is a software emulation of a physical machine, including OS, virtual memory and CPUs, and network ports.

XenDesktop Citrix XenDesktop

VMView VMWare View

MSSQL Microsoft SQL Server

SharePoint Microsoft Sharepoint Server

Guest Load The resources that Operations Manager has not assigned to any specific application (for more information, see Guest Load - page 9)

Synopsis

Budget: A VM gains its budget by selling resources to the applications it hosts. The more activity there is on its hosted applications, the more budget the VM has to purchase resources from its physical host. If utilization is high enough, Operations Manager can create a new copy of the given VM. If utilization falls off, the VM loses budget. Ultimately, if the budget isn’t enough to pay for the host services it consumes, Operations Manager will suspend or power off the VM.

Provides: Host resources for applications to use:• VMEM (Kbytes)• VCPU (MHz)• VStorage • IOPs (storage access operations per second)• Latency (capacity for disk latency in ms)

Consumes: Physical host resources, including CPU, Mem, and Storage.

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers VMs through hypervisor targets (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

Application Name Description

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Operations Manager displays VMs in the inventory as follows:

Figure 2-4. Virtual Machines

Note that the inventory groups VMs by the physical machines that host them. In the user interface, this is a logical grouping that makes it easier to visualize the distribution of VMs across your environment. Also, the VM icons identify managing hypervisors by vendor, and VM state (see Resource Icons - page 25).

Physical Machines

A physical machine (PM or host) is a server that runs a hypervisor process. This means the PM can host VMs that are managed by the given hypervisor. Note that a PM is not necessarily a physical box, or computing iron. A VM can be set up as a server that runs a hypervisor, and it can in turn host other VMs within its processing space. However, it’s most usual to use iron as your PMs.

Synopsis

Budget: A PM gains its budget by selling resources to the VMs it hosts. The more VMs running on a PM, the more budget the PM has to purchase storage and datacenter resources. If utilization of a PM is high enough, Operations Manager can recommend that you provision a new PM. If utilization falls off, the PM loses budget. Ultimately, if the budget isn’t enough to pay for the services it consumes, Operations Manager will suspend or power off the PM.

Provides: Host resources for VMs to use:• Mem (Kbytes)• CPU (MHz)• IO (throughput on the I/O bus)• Net (network throughput)• Swap (swap rate capacity measured in bytes/sec) • Ballooning (sharing of memory among hosted VMs)• CPU Ready Queue (wait time on the queue in ms)

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Operations Manager displays PMs in the inventory as follows:

Figure 2-5. Physical Machines

Storage

Storage is represented in Operations Manager as Datastores. A Datastore is a logical grouping of one or more physical storage devices that serve PM storage requirements.

Operations Manager displays Datastores in the inventory as follows:

Consumes: Datacenter resources (physical space, cooling, etc.) and storage.

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers PMs through hypervisor targets (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164). For some hypervisor vendors, the PM is the target, and for others the PMs are managed by the specified target.

Synopsis

Budget: A Datastore gains its budget by selling resources to the PMs it hosts. If utilization of a Datastore is high enough, Operations Manager can recommend that you provision a new one.

Provides: Host resources for VMs to use:• Storage amount • IOPs (storage access operations per second)• Latency (capacity for disk latency in ms)

Consumes: Disk arrays.

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers Datastores through hypervisor targets (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

Synopsis

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Figure 2-6. Datastores

Datacenters

For Operations Manager, a datacenter is the sum of VMs, PMs, datastores, and network devices that are managed by a given hypervisor target.

Operations Manager displays Datacenters in the inventory as follows:

Synopsis

Budget: A Datastore has unlimited budget.

Provides: Datacenter resources (physical space, cooling, etc.).

Consumes: N/A

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers Datastores through hypervisor targets (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

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Figure 2-7. Datacenters

Provider Virtual Datacenters

A provider virtual datacenter (vDC) is a collection of physical resources (PMs and datastores) managed by a cloud stack. The cloud administrator has access to these resources, and defines the datacenter members. Usually a provider vDC is created to manage resources that will be exposed to external customers through one or more organizational vDCs.

Operations Manager displays Provider vDCs in the inventory as follows:

Synopsis

Budget: A Provider vDC gains its budget by selling resources to the Organization vDCs that it hosts. If utilization falls off, the datacenter loses budget. Ultimately, if the budget isn’t enough to pay for the services it consumes, Operations Manager will terminate the Provider vDC.

Provides: Physical resources such as PMs and datastores.

Consumes: PMs and datastores

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers vDCs through cloud stack managers such as vCloud Director (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

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Figure 2-8. Provider Virtual Datacenters

Organization Virtual Datacenters

An Organization Virtual Datacenter (vDC) is a collection of resources that are available for external customers to man-age through the cloud. It is an environment customers can use to store, deploy, and operate virtual systems.

Operations Manager displays Provider vDCs in the inventory as follows:

Synopsis

Budget: An Organization vDC gains its budget as a function of its activity. The higher the utilization of the vDC, the more Operations Manager assumes the vDC is selling its services to a user.If utilization is high enough on an Organization vDC, Operations Manager can increase resources for the vDC. If utilization falls of, Operations Manager can reduce resource capacity, or ultimately terminate the vDC. Operations Manager can also resize VMs through the Organization vDC in response to changes in VM utilization.

Provides: Physical resources to host virtual systems.

Consumes: Provider vDC

Discovered through: Operations Manager discovers vDCs through cloud stack managers such as vCloud Director (see Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164).

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Figure 2-9. Operation Virtual Datacenters

While users can see some of the physical resources that support the organization vDC, organization-level users cannot modify these physical resources. Users of organization vDCs make changes to how the virtual devices are deployed in that environment, but the must ask administrators to add more physical resources to the organization vDC. Likewise, Operations Manager can change VMs running in the vDC, but it does not make any changes to physical resources through this vDC.

Operations Manager ActionsOperations Manager does more than track problems in your environment. Before problems occur, Operations Man-ager identifies actions you can take to avoid the problems. You can perform these actions manually, direct Operations Manager to perform the actions on command, or direct Operations Manager to perform actions automatically as they arise. You can set different action modes (whether to automate or not) for individual actions (see The Policy View - page 181).

The actions Operations Manager can recommend or perform include:

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Supply Chain TerminologyVMTurbo introduces specific terms to express IT resources and utilization in terms of supply and demand. These terms are largely intuitive, but you should be sure you understand how they relate to the issues and activities that are common for IT management.

Virtual Machine Physical Machine Datastore

• Move between hosts• Move between datastores• Start• Stop• Suspend• Change # of CPU• Change configured vMEM• Change thin provisioned storage• Provision required network• Provision required datastore

• Start• Stop• Suspend• Provision• Decommission

• Provision• Decommission• Reconfigure HBA:

throttle I/O bandwidth

Term: Definition:

Commodity The basic building block of VMTurbo supply and demand. Everything a VMTurbo product represents or analyzes is a commodity. For example, the CPU capacity or memory that a physical machine can provide is a commodity. The Operations Manager can also represent clusters and segments as commodities. When the user interface shows commodities, it’s showing the resources a service provides. When the interface shows commodities bought, it’s showing what that service consumes.

Composed Of The resources or commodities that make up the given service. For example, in the user interface you might see that a certain VM is composed of commodities such as one or more physical CPUs, an Ethernet interface, and physical memory.Compare Composed Of to Consumes, where consumption refers to the commodities the VM has bought. Also compare Composed Of to the commodities a service offers for sale. A physical machine might include four CPUs in its composition, but the commodities the machine offers will show these CPUs aggregated as a single commodity.

Consumes The services and commodities a service has bought. A service consumes other commodities. For example, a VM consumes the commodities offered by a physical machine, and an application consumes commodities from one or more VMs. Note that in the user interface you can explore the services that provide the commodities the current service consumes.

Environment The sum of data center, network, physical machine, storage, VM, and application resources that you are monitoring.

Inventory The list of all commodities in your environment.

Utilization Index A measure of the risk to Quality of Service (QoS) that a consumer will experience. The higher the UI on a provider, the more risk to QoS for any consumer of that provider’s services.For example, a physical machine provides host services to one or more VMs. The higher the UI on the provider, the more likely it is that the VMs will experience QoS degradation. Note that for optimal operation, the UI on a provider should not go into double digits. In the above example, if the PM has a UI of 16 or more, the VMs are very likely to suffer QoS degradation.

Service A functioning commodities group such as a physical machine, a VM, or an application.

Utilization The percentage over time that a commodity is used, where 100% is utilization of the full capacity.

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Resource Descriptions

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Resource DescriptionsOperations Manager measures different resources in your environment. The following table lists these metrics, and includes details about how they are collected or measured For charts of clusters or groups of devices, charts show the average of the percentage of allocated resources that are used.

VM Group The collection of VMs running on a given physical machine. Because an environment can have many VMs, the user interface shows VM groups as a way to simplify and organize their presentation.

Resource: Description:

1- 2- 4-CPU Rdy Wait time in the ready queue on the host, measured in ms. Charts show the percentage allocated ready queue capacity that is in use on the host. For host charts, this is a measure of the total ready queue wait time for all the VMs running on that host.

Balloon Ballooning capacity on the host, measured in Kbytes. Ballooning indicates the sharing of memory among the VMs on a given host. Charts show the percentage allocated ballooning capacity that is in use on the host.

CPU Host CPU capacity, measured in Mhz. This shows what percentage of CPU cycles are devoted to processing instructions.• Host charts show the percentage of the host’s CPU capacity that is in use.• VM charts show the percentage of the host’s CPU capacity that is consumed by the given VM.

IO Data rate through the host’s IO adapter, measured in KBytes/sec. • Datacenter charts show the average percentage of the host IO capacity that is in use, for all

the hosts in the datacenter.• Host charts show the percentage of the host’s total IO capacity that is in use.

IOPS Storage access operations per second. Charts show the percentage of allocated IOPS capacity that is used on a datastore.

Latency Allocated capacity for latency on a datastore. This measures the latency experienced vy allVMs and hosts that access the datastore. Charts show the percentage of allocated latency that is in use on the datastore.

Mem Host memory, measured in Kbytes.• Host charts show the percentage of the host’s memory that is in use.• VM charts show the percentage of the host’s memory that is consumed by the given VM.

NET Data rate through the host’s Network adapter, measured in KBytes/sec.• Datacenter charts show the average percentage of the host NET capacity that is used for all

the hosts in the datacenter.• Host charts show the percentage of the host’s total NET capacity that is in use.

Storage Datastore capacity, measured in KBytes. Datastore charts show the percentage of a datastore’s capacity that is in use.

Swap Allocated swap space on the host. Charts show the percentage of a host’s allocated swap space that is in use.

Transactions Transactions per second in an application. Charts show the percentage of an application’s allocated transaction capacity that is in use.

UI A measure of the risk to Quality of Service (QoS) that a consumer will experience. The higher the UI on a provider, the more risk to QoS for any consumer of that provider’s services. Charts show the UI for the given device.

Term: Definition:

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VCPU Virtual CPU capacity on a VM, measured in Mhz. Charts show the percentage of a VM’s VCPU cycles that are devoted to processing instructions.

VMem Virtual memory allocated on a VM, measured in Kbytes. Charts show the percentage of a VM’s allocated VMem that is in use.Note that percentages of allocated VMem are measured against whichever is the less of: The VMem limit (if set) or the allocated VMem capacity. This is also true in reports and recommended actions. For example, assume a VM with allocated VMem of 8 GB, but a limit of 4 GB. In this case, the percentage in a chart shows the percentage utilized of 4GB.

VStorage Virtual storage allocated on a VM, measured in Kbytes. Charts show the percentage of a VM’s allocated VStorage that is in use.

Resource: Description:

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Users Guide 19

The Operations Manager User InterfaceTo use Operations Manager, you open a web browser to the IP address of your product installation. Operations Man-ager serves the user interface to your browser, where you can observe, analyze, and manage your environment. The following figure shows the user interface opened to the Home view.

Figure 3-1. The Operations Manager User Interface — Home View

This section describes the different components of the user interface, including the following:

• Menu Bar - page 20• Tool Bar and Display Tools - page 21• Navigation Panel - page 22• Standard Panel Controls - page 26• Information Panels - page 33• Utilization History - page 36

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Menu BarOperations Manager presents views for the different activities you can perform. The menu bar at the top of the appli-cation window includes buttons you click to display these views. Operations Manager provides the following views:

• The Home View - page 51 — See dashboards that focus on:- Assuring service performance- Maintaining efficient allocation of resources- Projecting future resource requirements for clusters- Trending environment status over the last month

• The Inventory View - page 69 — See real-time and historical information about the various resources, services, and components in your environment

• The Plan View - page 97 — Run what-if scenarios to investigate how to change your infrastructure to achieve optimal performance

• The Deploy View - page 141 — Use Operations Manager to deploy new VMs in your environment, while maintaining the environment within the Optimal Operating Zone

• The Optimize View - page 147 — See side-by-side charts of the current environment compared with the optimal environment. Includes a To Do list of actions you can perform.

• The Admin View - page 161— Attach Operations Manager to specific hypervisors, create user accounts, specify data retention policies, and perform other maintenance activities

• The Policy View - page 181 — Define groups and make settings to define workload placement, analysis, and other policies

You can also open views to show information about specific components. For example, when you search for a specific virtual machine (see Search in Tool Bar and Display Tools - page 21), Operations Manager opens a new view for that VM. That view includes a navigation panel and information panels that list only information about the given VM. When you are through with this kind of view, click the view button’s close box to discard it.

You can choose which buttons to include on the menu bar, and Operations Manager will save your changes with your user account. If you remove buttons from the menu bar, you can add them back again at any time.

Deleting, Adding, and Arranging Menu Buttons

To delete a button from the menu bar, click the close box in the button’s upper-right corner.

To add a button to the menu bar, click the product logo at the top-left of the application window, then drag buttons from the menu panel to the menu bar. To change the order of buttons in the menu bar, drag them to the position you want.

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Tool Bar and Display Tools

Users Guide 21

Tool Bar and Display ToolsThe Operations Manager tool bar provides the following:

• ReportsThe reports tool opens a new web page that presents all the Reports that are defined for your installation of Operations Manager. It generates reports in PDF that you can view or send to specific e-mail addresses. You can also save reports in the Microsoft Excel XML format. Operations Manager presents a standard set of reports, and you can also define custom reports. Reports are not available until Operations Manager has been running for 24 hours.

• SearchThe search tool opens a dialog box you can use to search for components or services by name. As you type a Search Expression, the dialog box lists all the items that match your string. When you select an item and click OK, Operations Manager opens a new view to show information about that item. You can select multiple items. Use Shift-Click to extend the selection, or use Ctrl-Click to select discontinuous items.

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• Help MenuThis menu provides access to:- Quick Help

Descriptions of various panels in Operations Manager, that overlay the panel content.- User Guide

The Operations Manager documentation.- Support Center

This command opens the Support Center web site.- About

Operations Manager version information• Logout

Use this tool to log out of your Operations Manager session.

The Display tools specify the following:

• CollapseThis button collapses all the entries in the Navigation panel.

• RefreshThe Refresh button causes Operations Manager to update the data it displays.

• Auto-RefreshSpecifies regular update periods for Operations Manager. Specify the Refresh Interval in seconds. For example, to auto-refresh every ten minutes, enter “600”.

Navigation PanelThe Home view includes a navigation panel that lists available dashboards, as well as controls to create or delete cus-tom dashboards. The Inventory and Optimize views include a navigation panel that shows hierarchical trees of resources, services, and components in your environment. For example, the following figure shows the navigation panels for the Inventory view.

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Navigation Panel

Users Guide 23

Figure 3-2. Navigation Panels for the Inventory View

This figure shows the Inventory tree and the Groups tree. You can navigate these trees to see what each item con-tains. The Inventory tree shows a hierarchy of items in your environment. The Groups tree shows the groups that are standard with Operations Manager, as well as custom groups you have defined (see Group Management - page 186). When you select an item, the information panels on the right display data about the selected item.

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Browsing Disabled

In some circumstances, the item you want to expand in the tree contains more than 500 items. To keep from tying up the GUI in displaying a very large tree node, Operations Manager disables the display of that tree node. When you open the tree node, it displays the statement, “Browsing Disabled”.

Navigation Tree Hierarchies

The navigation tree shows the hierarchy of services and commodities Operations Manager has discovered in your environment. The Inventory tree groups these according to the supply chain — Virtual Applications, Applications, Vir-tual Machines, Physical Machines, Storage, etc. The Groups tree displays the items in groups defined by Operations Manager, as well as other groups that you define.

A tree branch for a given service (a named VM or named storage, for example) can include the following:

• Composed Of — The constituent parts that make up the service; for example, a physical machine might include four CPUs in the Composed Of list, but only show one Processor entry in the Commodities list.

• Consumes — The service providing commodities that the parent service consumes; for example, a VM consumes a Host and a data store

• Hosts — For a physical machine, the VMs hosted on that PM.

For example, the following figure shows a selected virtual machine named vm-005b. This VM uses three CPUs on its host. One of those CPUs is selected, and the information panel shows the properties of that commodity.

Figure 3-3. Inventory Tree Showing an Offered Commodity

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Notifications Bar

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Resource Icons

The Navigation Panel displays icons for the different resources Operations Manager handles. These icons indicate:

• Resource type • Hypervisor type • Resource State

Notifications BarOperations Manager generates notifications to alert you when events occur that affect the operation of the Opera-tions Manager server. For example, if a target hypervisor loses connectivity, or if other network problems occur, you need to troubleshoot the issue and resolve it so Operations Manager can continue to manage your workload. You can review these notifications to see whether such problems have occurred.

NOTE: Do not confuse these notifications with recommended actions in the To Do list, or their associated risks and opportunities. The notifications described in this topic do not represent the health of your virtual environment. They pertain to the connectivity between your target hypervisors and Operations Manager, or to other operational details, such as whether your target hypervisors have the proper tools installed.

The Operations Manager GUI displays a notifications bar at the bottom-right of the window. This bar lists the number of notifications that are currently active. It also displays the color of the most severe notification that is active.

Resource Type Hypervisor Type Resource State

Virtual Application

Application

VM

PM

Data Store

Datacenter

Provider Virtual Cloud

Organization Virtual Cloud

Microsoft Hyper-V

VMWare VCenter

XenServer

VMWare Virtual Cloud Director

Normal

Maintenance

Suspended

Powered Off

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Figure 3-4. Notification Bar and Notification Log

To display the notification log, click an icon in the notification bar.

Standard Panel ControlsChart panels include a number of controls you can use to display more details, or to customize how the charts show data. These controls include:

• Tooltips - page 26• Chart Legend Pulldowns - page 27• Chart Display Radio Buttons - page 27• Maximize/Minimize - page 28• Export to XML - page 28• Customize Heatmap - page 28• Chart Date Ranges - page 30

Tooltips

To show extra details about an item in the information panels, hover the pointer over the item until a tooltip appears. The tooltip displays extra information such as the actual value of a data point or the resource it is charting.

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Most lists and tables display tooltips. If a data field in a list or table is not large enough, use the tooltip to display the complete information.

Most buttons and other controls in the GUI also display tooltips that provide a brief description of the action that con-trol will perform.

Figure 3-5. Displaying a Tooltip

Chart Legend Pulldowns

To save space, many charts show their legends on a pulldown.

Figure 3-6. Displaying a Pulldown Legend

Chart Display Radio Buttons

Many charts include radio buttons you can use to determine which metrics to plot. If the chart panel is to small to dis-play all the radio buttons, you can scroll them to the left or right.

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Figure 3-7. Choosing the Metrics to Plot

Maximize/Minimize

Information panels include Maximize and Minimize icons ( ) you can click to show or hide the panels, or to expand them to a full view. As you minimize panels, the remaining panels expand to fill in the information display area.

Export to XML

Many panels have an Export to XML icon ( ). These panels display data that can be represented in a table or spread-sheet. When you click the icon, you can navigate to a directory and export the panel data to an XML file. You can then open that XML in a spread sheet.

Customize Heatmap

Heatmap panels include a customize icon ( ) to specify which columns to show, and the scope of the chart. When you click the icon, the panel displays the Customize control board, with Columns and Scope accordions to display the specific controls.

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Figure 3-8. Choosing the Columns to Display

When you set the scope of a panel, you limit the number of resources it will display. This reduces the number of rows that will display in the panel.

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Figure 3-9. Setting Panel Scope

NOTE: To restore default views, click on the Customize tool and choose Reset.

Chart Date Ranges

Bar chart panels include sliders to specify the date or date range for the data. You can show the current data or show data from a previous point in time.

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Figure 3-10. Controlling a Panel’s Display

Show Top or Bottom Items in ChartFor an environment with a large inventory, it’s not practical to chart every device in a single panel. For this reason, bar charts and data grids are designed to show the top or bottom items in the given list, sorted by the values of a given commodity. For example, a summary chart of VMs can show the top 30 VMs, sorted by Usability Index (UI) or VMem consumption.

For these charts, you can specify:

• Whether to show the top or bottom items• What commodities to show in the chart• Which commodity to sort by when showing the top or bottom items

For charts that show multiple commodities per charted device (multiple bars for each VM, for example), you specify these settings in a Customize Chart dialog box.

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For charts that show only one commodity at a time, you make these settings directly on the chart.

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Information Panels

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Sorting of Comparison Charts

A number of charts in Operations Manager compare the current state of your environment with a target state. These comparison charts sort according to the values in the target. You can find comparison charts in the:

• Projected Improvements chart of the Assure Service Performance dashboard (see Projected Improvements - page 54)

• Plan summary charts in the Plan view (see The Plan View - page 97)• Optimize view (see The Optimize View - page 147)

Information PanelsAs you select a dashboard or an item in the navigation panel, you can see information about that item in panels to the right. These panels show different charts and listings of properties, depending on the item you select.

The panels have standard controls you can use to modify their display (see Standard Panel Controls - page 26).

Summary Panels

In the Inventory view, the Inventory tree begins with a Summary entry. When you select this entry, Operations Man-ager shows summary information about your environment. The information displays in Summary panels for Applica-tions, VMs, Physical Machines, and Storage. The following figure shows a VM summary panel.

Figure 3-11. Panels Showing the Virtual Machine Summary

The summary panel displays a heatmap with colored cells to show utilization of resources, as well as the Utilization Index. By default, heatmaps only show the Utilization Index, but you can customize them to show other values (see Customize Heatmap - page 28). To get more details about an item, click on the colored entry. The figure above shows the details panel for utilization on a cluster of virtual machines.

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Clicking a named entry in the Summary panel opens a new view for that named item. When you are finished with this view, discard it by clicking the view button’s close box.

Utilization Charts

When you select a named service or group in the Inventory tree, Operations Manager displays panels for that item. One of the panels is the Utilization Chart. This chart shows utilization percentage and utilization index for the selected item. If the item represents a group of resources, the panel displays a bar chart showing utilization values for each resource. To show utilization history of a single service, click the corresponding bar in the chart.

NOTE: The default user interface shows up to one hour’s worth of data. You can install licenses to enable the display of more historical data.

The following figure shows utilization for the data stores in the current environment. It also shows the latency of a sin-gle data store. You can hover over a data point to display its tooltip, or click the data point to display a chart.

Figure 3-12. Panels Showing the Utilization

Dashboard Panels

In the Home view, you select the dashboard you want, and Operations Manager displays system data in the associated dashboard panels. These panels include a To Do list, various charts, and expanding tables.

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Device Charts

Figure 3-13. Expanding Table

Some dashboard charts include the option to choose which type of device to plot. Choose the type from the drop-down menu.

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Expanding Tables

Figure 3-14. Expanding Table

Some dashboard tables include items that expand to show more data. You can quickly browse to the item you want to inspect, then expand it to see more information. Often, you can click the main entry to open a window that shows charts and details for that item.

Utilization HistoryWhen you select an entry for a specific device in the Inventory tree or Groups tree, the corresponding Utilization panel displays metrics for that device. By default, the panel displays metrics for the last two hours. Depending on the license you have installed, you can view up to 48 days of data in this panel.

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Figure 3-15. Viewing historical data in the Utilization chart

You drag a slider to set the range to view. Note that Operations Manager has to have been running long enough to dis-play the range of data you want. For example, if it has only been running for 30 days, you cannot view more than 30 days of data.

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Users Guide 39

Logging In to Operations ManagerTo get started, you open a web browser to your Operations Manager installation. Operations Manager serves the user interface to your browser, where you can use it to observe your environment. In this way, you can access the unique capabilities of Operations Manager from any internet connection. Before you can log in, an instance of Operations Manager must be installed in your environment. To get an Operations Manager installation package, contact VMTurbo — you can register online at http://www.vmturbo.com.

To log in to Operations Manager:

1. Navigate your Web browser to the Operations Manager installationFor the URL, provide the IP address or machine name for the installation. This URL opens the VMTurbo Operations Manager Login page. You should bookmark this URL for future use.

Figure 4-1. Login Screen

2. Provide the user name and password for your accountYour system administrator creates user accounts. Contact your system administrator for login information.

After you log in, the browser opens to the The Home View - page 51. This view displays information about your virtual environment.

To display this information, Operations Manager communicates with target platforms such as hypervisors, load bal-ancers, and cloud stacks. Note that your Operations Manager administrator sets up the target configuration. For more information, see Target Configuration - page 163.

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To Do Lists - Maintaining QoSBefore problems occur, Operations Manager identifies actions you can take to avoid problems. By continually per-forming these actions, you can keep your virtual environment running within the optimal operating zone. You can per-form these actions manually, direct Operations Manager to perform the actions on command, or direct Operations Manager to perform actions automatically as they arise.

To show you the actions it recommends, the Operations Manager user interface includes To Do lists in most of the views. The To Do log window includes one view to list the actions, and another view to list the risks and efficiency opportunities those actions address. Operations Manager displays a To Do panel in most views, including various dashboards on the Home view and on the other views that display system data.

Some views include a Navigation tree. As you select items in the Navigation tree, the To Do list focuses on the items you select.

Figure 5-1. To Do Panel

NOTE: For very long lists of entries, the To Do panel uses paging to limit the number of entries it loads up and displays at one time. To page forward or back, click the << and >> buttons or the page numbers at the bottom-left of the panel.

The To Do panel switches between an Action Log (listing recommended actions) and a log of opportunities and risks. The panel includes the following toggle buttons to change its views. Click these buttons to switch from one view to the other:

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The To Do list shows the actions Operations Manager recommends. It can perform many of these actions, but other actions (such as installing more memory in a physical machine) are recommendations that an operator must perform. With this list you can:

• Filter the actions by category, severity, or string match• Select one or more actions to perform• Direct Operations Manager to perform the actions• View the progress of each action as Operations Manager performs it

The Risks/Opportunities log gives you a detailed view of the health of your environment. With this log you can:

• See risks or efficiency opportunities as they arise• Open up detailed views of the issues, including associated charts and recommended actions

The following sections describe how to work with To Do lists:

• Viewing Recommended Actions - page 42• Executing Recommended Actions - page 43• Viewing Risks and Efficiency Opportunities - page 45 • Action Categories - page 47• Examples of Risks and Actions - page 49

Viewing Recommended ActionsThe To Do list shows actions that Operations Manager recommends for you to achieve optimal performance in your environment. For views that include a Navigation Panel, the list updates to show actions for navigation items you select. For example, if you select Summary in the Inventory tree, the panel shows actions for the whole environment. Then if you select a single physical machine, the panel updates to show only the actions identified for that machine.

The Recommended Actions list includes the following information:

• To Do: The short name of the action to perform; for example, a Move or Resize action (hover to display the long description in a tooltip)

• Target: The resource that will be changed; for example, the VM to move• From: The resource that contains the target (the PM that hosts the VM), or the resource to be modified (the

memory to be resized)• To: The resulting resource; for example, the PM that will host the moved VM, or the new memory capacity• Risk/Opportunity: The risk or opportunity that justifies the action• Status: Recommended, Pending, or other states for this action• Category: See Action Categories - page 47 for full descriptions

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Figure 5-2. Recommended Actions

You can also view the recommended actions for individual entities on a Summary panel. To view the recommended actions, click the item’s risk icon. This view shows only the recommended actions for the given entity. For example, if you click a VM risk icon the list shows only the actions that can be performed on the host PM.

Figure 5-3. Problems and Recommended Actions in the Summary View

Executing Recommended ActionsThe To Do list shows actions that Operations Manager recommends. By performing these actions, you can keep your environment within the optimal operating zone.

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NOTE: The To Do List can show a large number of actions, many of which share the same source and destination. When performing actions, you should always click the Show Top radio button to limit the list of actions. These top-10 actions do not share the same source or destination, and it is safe to perform these actions all at once. You should not accept multiple actions that share the same source or destination, and execute them all at once with a single click of the APPLY button.

You can execute actions in the following ways:

• AutomaticallyOperations Manager performs the actions as it recommends them. You don’t need to do anything to perform these actions.

• Manually, through Operations ManagerOperations Manager shows the actions in the To Do list, with active check boxes you can select. You select the actions to perform, and then click Apply.

• Externally, outside of Operations ManagerOperations Manager recommends the action, but cannot execute it. Either an Operations Manager policy specifies that the action cannot be executed, or there is no way for Operations Manager to direct the hypervisor to perform the action. For example, there is no way for Operations Manager add more memory to a physical machine. You execute these actions outside of Operations Manager.

In addition, you can create policies that completely disable certain actions. In that case, Operations Manager never shows the action in the To Do list.

You can specify action policies for VMs, hosts, storage devices, and cloud stacks. These policies determine how to exe-cute each action. You can specify global policies for all entities of each type, and you can also specify policies for spe-cific groups of entities. For more information, see Action Modes - page 200.

Figure 5-4. Executing Recommended Actions

To execute actions, select them in the To Do list, and click Apply. In the illustration above:

• Clicking Apply directs Operations Manager to execute two Move actions• Any actions that were set to Automatic in the policies have already been executed by Operations Manager

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Viewing Risks and Efficiency OpportunitiesOperations Manager logs events for risks and opportunities that arise in your current environment. You can think of risks and opportunities as justifications for actions in the To Do list. The log shows icons for severity—for a given risk or opportunity, the severity can be:

Critical —These affect the QOS that your environment can deliver, and you are strongly advised to address them

Major — These can affect QOS and should be addressed

Minor — These affect cost or workload distribution, but they do not impact the QOS your users will experience

Figure 5-5. Recommended Actions

In this figure you can see major and minor risks and opportunities. If you can’t see the full text of a table cell, hover over that cell to display the text in a tooltip.

You can choose to filter the listings by Top-10:

• Severity — The impact (to see the impact value for an item, hover over the Severity icon)• Duration — How long the item has been active• Count — How often the same risk or opportunity has occurred

If you click the Details button for a log entry, Operations Manager opens a new view that provides a full summary of the affected host machine.

If you click the Severity icon, Operations Manager displays a panel that shows recommended actions, and a chart of details related to the problem.

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Figure 5-6. Problem Resolutions Panel

Viewing Risks and Opportunities from the Inventory View

On the Inventory view, you can view a summary of all the devices in your environment. This view shows summary panels for applications, VMs, PMs, and datastores. These panels display severity icons next to each entity in the panel—each icon corresponds to the worst-case severity for any risks on that device. You can click these icons to open a Risks/Opportunities log for that device.

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Action Categories

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Figure 5-7. Problems in the Summary View

Action CategoriesOperations Manager organizes entries in the To Do log into different categories. These categories do not strictly define the severity of an issue, but they indicate the nature of the issue.

Prevention

Operations Manager constantly monitors conditions, and works to keep your environment running in the optimal operating zone. As it finds issues that risk moving the environment out of this zone, it places these issues in the Pre-vention category. You should attend to these issues, and perform the associated actions. If you do not, the environ-ment may drift out of the operating zone, and the QoS for some services may be put at risk.

Performance Assurance

Ultimately, the reason to keep your environment running within the optimal operating zone is to assure performance and meet QoS goals. When Operations Manager detects conditions that directly put QoS at risk, it places the associ-ated actions and risks in the Performance Assurance category. You can consider these critical conditions, and you should execute the recommended actions as soon as possible.

Actions Risks/Opportunities

• Move VM• Start VM or PM

• <Resource> CongestionHigh resource utilization on the named VM, host, or datastore. For example, CPU congestion or Memory congestion can occur on a VM or physical machine. Excess latency on a data stream. For example, an IOPs bottleneck can occur on a datastore.

• Workload BalancingExcess workload on a given physical machine that can be addressed by moving a VM to another host.

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Compliance

A virtual environment can include policies that limit workload placement or availability of resources. It’s possible that the environment configuration violates these defined policies. It’s also possible that an entity is mis-configured in some way. For example, a VM might be configured to access a network that is not available in its current cluster. In such cases, Operations Manager identifies the violation and recommends actions that bring the entity back into com-pliance.

Efficiency Improvement

Efficient utilization of resources is an important part of running in the optimal operating zone. Running efficiently maximizes your investment in hardware and reduces cost. When Operations Manager discovers underutilized resources, it recommends actions to consolidate your operations. For example, it can recommend that you move cer-tain VMs onto a different host. This can free a physical machine to be shut down.

There are times when Operations Manager suspends a VM in order to free up resources for a critical application. When those resources are no longer stressed by the critical application, Operations Manager can restart the sus-pended VM. This is a special type of efficiency improvement—rather than consolidating workload and shutting down unused machines, this action restarts a suspended VM to increase resource utilization and provide more services.

Actions Risks/Opportunities

• Connect a new application (to virtual application server)

• Provision a new VM, PM, Datastore

• Increase number of VCPUs• Decrease number of VCPUs• Increase resource• Reduce resource

• <Resource> CongestionHigh utilization of application managed by a load balancer. High utilization of resources on VM, PM, or datastore.

Actions Risks/Opportunities

• Move VM• Provision VM, PM,

Datastore, Network

• Placement ViolationThe placement of a VM is in violation of an Operations Manager policy or an imported Placement Policy.

• MisconfigurationThe configuration violates discovered requirements. For example, a VM is configured to access a network that is not available from the current cluster.

Actions Risks/Opportunities

• Disconnect Virtual App • Move VM • Suspend VM • Delete VM • Terminate VM • Reduce resource• Restart suspended VM

• OverprovisioningExcess resource capacity in a PM or datastore.

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Examples of Risks and ActionsFollowing are some types of the risks and efficiency opportunities Operations Manager can identify, and actions it can recommend to optimize your system deployment.

Critical Over-Utilization

Whenever any system resource reaches critical utilization, your infrastructure can experience bottlenecks. Applica-tions running on VMs that are hosted by critically over-utilized machines will show performance problems, and so your QoS may suffer.

The resources that can be affected are:

• Memory• CPU • IO• Network utilization• CPU Ready Queues• Data storage

Possible Resolutions:

• Move VMs from the affected host to a host with less utilization. Operations Manager can perform this action automatically.

• Start or provision a new host machine. You must perform this action manually.• Provision a new data store. You must perform this action manually.

Low Utilization

Under-utilization presents an opportunity to increase efficiency, because it results in higher costs to maintain exces-sive hardware.

The resources that can be affected are:

• Memory• CPU • IO• Network utilization• CPU Ready Queues

Possible Resolutions:

• Move VMs from an under-utilized host to another host. Operations Manager can perform this action automatically.

• Suspend the under-utilized host. Operations Manager can perform this action automatically.

Mis-configured VMs

Bottlenecks can arise when a VM is not configured with enough virtual processing power to support its applications.

The resources that can be affected are:

• Number of VCPUs in a virtual machine

Possible Resolutions:

• Reconfigure the affected VM. You must perform this action manually.

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Mis-configured Infrastructure

Optimizer can identify general configuration problems in your infrastructure. These problems can result in poor QOS, even though none of the hosts show over-utilization problems.

The resources that can be affected are configuration of:

• Network• Cluster• Storage

Possible Resolutions:

• Reconfigure the affected infrastructure resource. You must perform these actions manually.

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The Home ViewThe Home View gives you dashboard views of your environment’s overall operating health. Operations Manager dis-plays this view by default when you log in.

At a glance the Home view gives you insights into service performance health, overall efficiency of your workload dis-tribution, projections into the future, and trends over the last month. The dashboards show you whether your envi-ronment is staying within the optimal zone, what actions you can take to return to the optimal zone, and the target operating conditions that you would see if you accepted the recommended actions.

Figure 6-1. Home View

When using the Home view, you can view Standard Dashboards - page 52, and you can also create and view Custom Dashboards - page 66.

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Standard DashboardsOperations Manager ships with the following standard dashboards:

• Assure Service Performance - page 52Shows environment health, focusing on actions you can execute to assure performance and QoS.

• Improve Overall Efficiency - page 57Shows how you can consolidate services and utilize physical resources more efficiently.

• Project Cluster Resources - page 61Based on historical workload data, projects the future capacity requirements for different clusters in your environment.

• Monthly Summary - page 65Based on historical data, shows the trend for workload distribution and utilization of resources such as memory and storage space.

Viewing Standard Dashboards

To switch between dashboards, choose the one you want from the Dashboards list.

You can set the scope of a standard dashboard while you’re viewing it. For example, you can focus a dashboard on a specific cluster. This limits the dashboard to only display data for that cluster.

After you set the scope, you can save it as a custom dashboard (see Custom Dashboards - page 66). You can set scope on the following dashboards:

• Assure Service Performance• Improve Overall Efficiency• Monthly Summary (Physical Machine Clusters, only)

To set the scope of a dashboard, click the Scope button ( ) and choose the cluster or group you want.

At any time, you can click the Reset Scope button ( ) to return to the default scope for the dashboard.

Assure Service Performance

This dashboard illustrates how to assure workloads have the resources they need to perform well. Use this dashboard to prevent performance degradation.

You can use this dashboard to inspect the workload and utilization of resources on hosts and on datastores. You can see how VMs utilize resources and what actions you can take to achieve an optimal workload distribution. If utiliza-tion levels present risks to the final QoS for end users, this dashboard points out the risks and gives you a list of actions you can take to correct the situation before any problems arise.

The dashboard displays this information in the following panels:

To Do

This panel displays actions you can execute to maintain optimal operating conditions. You can toggle the panel between a To Do list and a list of current risks to service performance. (For a complete description of To Do panels, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41.)

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The To Do list shows actions that you can execute in the following ways:

• AutomaticallyOperations Manager performs the actions as it recommends them. You don’t need to do anything to perform these actions.

• Manually, through Operations ManagerOperations Manager shows the actions in the To Do list, with active check boxes you can select. You select the actions to perform, and then click Apply.

• Externally, outside of Operations ManagerOperations Manager recommends the action, but cannot execute it. Either an Operations Manager policy specifies that the action cannot be executed, or there is no way for Operations Manager to direct the hypervisor to perform the action. For example, there is no way for Operations Manager add more memory to a physical machine. You execute these actions outside of Operations Manager.

NOTE: You can specify action policies for VMs, hosts, storage devices, and cloud stacks. These policies determine how to execute each action. You can specify global policies for all entities of each type, and you can also specify policies for specific groups of entities. For more information, see Action Modes - page 200.

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Health

The Health chart shows the current status of the physical machines in your environment. You can choose to chart host machines or datastores. The pie chart shows the status of your physical devices. You can click the chart to open a heatmap that lists the status of each physical device.

Projected Improvements

The Projected Improvements chart shows the current state of your environment, compared to the target results you would achieve if you executed all the recommended actions in the To Do list. The bars show the current state, and the line chart shows the target results. You can set the chart to show data for the hosts or datastores in your environment.

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When charting hosts, you can select the following metrics to show in the chart:

• UI — The Utilization Index, a measure of the overall utilization of resources on the host• Mem — The percentage of the host’s memory capacity that is utilized, measured in Kbytes• CPU — The percentage of the host’s CPU capacity that is utilized, measured in MHz• IO — The percentage of the host’s IO capacity that is utilized• Net — The percentage of the host’s network throughput capacity that is utilized• VMs per host — The number of VMs running on each host

When charting datastores, you can show the following metrics:

• UI — The Utilization Index, a measure of the overall utilization of resources on the datastore• Storage — The percentage of the storage capacity that is utilized• IOPs — The percentage of the capacity for read and write IO operations per second that is utilized• Latency — The percentage of latency capacity that is utilized, measured in ms

To see precise utilization values, hover over a data point to display a tooltip.

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Figure 6-2. Displaying the Utilization Comparison Chart

In the Projected Improvements chart, you can click the Details icon to open a Utilization Comparison chart for your environment. This chart is the same as the view you get in the Optimize view, minus the navigation panel. For infor-mation about this view, see The Optimize View - page 147.

Optimal Operating Zone

This chart projects how your environment can change over time from the current state to a state within the optimal operating zone (see The Optimal Operating Zone - page 4). You can view projections for Memory and CPU utilization, aggregated for all the hosts in your environment.

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The chart shows the historical data that it uses to make the projection. You can drag the Time sliders to set dates for the historical data.

The chart then projects the values for maximum, minimum, and average forward into a period of one week. This pro-jection assumes you have accepted the actions in the To Do list. You should see the average trend toward the center of the optimal operating zone. The Max and Min values should trend toward the same point, indicating that the size of the operating zone is shrinking to within an acceptable range of deviations from the average.

Improve Overall Efficiency

This dashboard shows you opportunities you can exploit to improve the operating efficiency of your environment. You can use this dashboard to see how to consolidate workloads and utilize underlying infrastructure more efficiently.

The dashboard displays this information in the following panels:

To Do List

This panel displays actions you can execute to improve operational efficiency. You can toggle the panel between a To Do list and a list of current efficiency opportunities. (For a complete description of To Do panels, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41.)

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Virtual Machine and Storage

This panel lists clusters of VMs that you can inspect to see how they consume storage resources.

When you expand a VM cluster, the panel shows how many VMs are in the cluster, and how much storage is devoted to them. The panel also shows how many VMs are dormant (no application is active on the VM) and how many are powered off. In this way, you can see how much storage is held in reservation for unused VMs.

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Wasted Storage

The Wasted Storage panel lists datastore clusters, showing the amount of wasted storage for each. In Operations Man-ager, wasted storage is any disk space devoted to files that are not required for operations of the devices or applica-tions in your environment. For datastores that you have set aside to support VMs, wasted storage may indicate opportunities for you to free up disk space, and provide more disk capacity to running VMs and applications.

NOTE: You can specify directories that Operations Manager will not consider when calculating wasted storage. For more information, see Storage Settings - page 199.

Virtual Machine Efficiency

This panel lists VM clusters, showing how they consume their available memory and CPU resources. Expand the clus-ter and the Memory or CPU resource to see the values.

For each resource type, the table shows the following amounts. These values show the total amount of the resource that is devoted to the indicated number of VMs.

• Current Amount — How much of the resource is currently devoted to the indicated VMs• Target Amount — If Operations Manager sees an opportunity to improve efficiency by reducing resource

allocation, the amount that should be devoted to the indicated VMs• Change — The amount of resource savings you would see by executing the change

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The table shows three rows for each resource type:

• Reservation — The amount of the resource that is reserved for the indicated VMs; before starting up a VM, the host must be able to provide the reserved amount

• Limit — The limit for that resource as set on the indicated VMs• Capacity — The amount of the resource that the indicated VMs can utilize; capacity is a property of the VM, and

indicates how much of the resource that VM is able to use

For example, assume the above illustration. For the expanded cluster, you can say:

• 11 VMs consume memory• For those VMs, the reserved memory totals 9,019,392 KB• None of the VMs have limits to memory consumption. However, two of the VMs have limits such that the both of

them cannot consume more than 4,800 MHz of CPU resources• The 11 VMs have an aggregate memory capacity of 14,925,824 KB• Six of the VMs have reserved a total of 3,300 MHz CPU processing• The 11 VMs consume a total of 55,800 MHz CPU processing• The 11 VMs consume 640,494 MB of storage space

You can click a VM Cluster item to display details, including a To Do list and resource consumption of each VM in the cluster.

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Figure 6-3. Displaying VM Cluster Details

Project Cluster Resources

This dashboard projects your future needs for VMs, hosts, and datastores. With it you can see when and where you will you need additional resources to satisfy growing workload demand. The dashboard starts from the current state of your environment and:

• Shows the deployment you would achieve if you accepted the recommended actions in the Operations Manager To Do list

• Projects your needs into the future, assuming you maintain system health by continually executing recommended actions

• Updates its projections daily to respond to changing patterns of workload requirements

To make these projections, Operations Manager adds the projected number of VMs to a hypothetical environment for the given projection period. It then runs Workload Projection planning scenarios for the given clusters on your envi-ronment, without taking constraints into account (see Workload Projection - page 129). The dashboard shows a series of projections for:

• One month• Two months• Three months

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• Six months• Nine months• One year

NOTE: When you first install and start up Operations Manager, it builds up the list of cluster projections daily. By default, it runs a year’s worth of projections for two clusters each day. So if you environment has ten clusters, you will see a full set of cluster projections after five days of operation.

The reliability of a projection depends on the amount of historical data it can use to establish a curve and extrapolate. For example, a 12 month projection based on two weeks of data is not as reliable as 12 months based on 90 days of historical data. If the system has not been running long enough to accumulate 60 days of data, Operations Manager uses the available data to generate projections as follows:

• With less than 6 days of historical data, the first- and second-month projections will show flat lines. The other projections will be blank.

• With less than 30 days of historical data, the dashboard calculates the first- and second-month projections. The other projections will be blank.

• With more than 30 days of historical data, the dashboard calculates projections up to the 12th-month.

The projections use historical data to investigate how workload has been added in the past, and projects the antici-pated workload in the future. For example:

• For the first-month projection, it looks at how many VMs were added in the month previous, and are still present in your environment. For example, if you added 6 VMs last month, and one has been removed, then the 1-month projection adds another five VMs.

• For the second-month projection, Operations Manager uses two months of history in a similar way. For example, if you added eight VMs two months ago, and five of those are still in your environment, then the projection assumes 10 VMs — five for two months ago, and five for last month.

• For the third-month projection, the calculations are the same, only using three months of data.• For the 6-, 9-and 12-month projections, Operations Manager uses the three-month calculation, and multiplies it

by 2, 3, and 4, respectively.

For example, as workload changes and you add more VMs to your environment, the projections assume a similar rate of growth. If growth continues at that rate, the projections show when you will need to add new physical resources to support growing demand.

The dashboard displays the following panels:

Cluster Summary

This panel lists the current state of the VM clusters in your environment.

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You can use this panel to see details about the current deployment of VMs, hosts, and datastores. You can expand a cluster entry to see the counts for VMs, hosts, and datastores into the future.

NOTE: This release of Operations Manager does not support the projection of totals for datastores. If you expand the Total item, the Datastores column shows NA for each row.

As you select a cluster in this panel, the other dashboard panels update to show data for that cluster. In this way you can see how each cluster will change into the future. To see projection data for the full environment, select the Total item.

Cluster Projection Chart

This chart shows a projection of total memory and CPU usage, based on the historical performance of your environ-ment. When you select an item in the Cluster Summary panel, this chart updates to show the associated projection data.

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Provisioning Projections

These charts show how your requirements for VMs, hosts, and datastores will change into the future.

The green horizontal line indicates the number of devices you have in the environment today. The bars show the pro-jected number of devices you will need into the future, with blue bars for projections within the current capacity, and red bars for projections that exceed the current capacity. Note that while the projections for physical machines and datastores are below current capacity, you can probably save money by consolidating your VMs on fewer physical devices. When projections exceed capacity, the charts indicate when you will need to invest in more hardware resources.

In the above example, the dashboard projects that you will not need to add storage in the next year. However, it appears that you will need eight physical machines before the year’s end.

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Monthly Summary

This dashboard shows how your environment has changed over the last month. You can spot trends such as periods of peak load, or a constant increase in demand. This information can help you understand the recommendations Opera-tions Manager makes in the To Do list, so you can better prioritize the actions and choose which to execute first.

NOTE: When you first start Operations Manager, it will not have the historical data necessary to display charts in this dashboard. As historical data accumulates, the charts will show more information.

By default, the dashboard scope is for the entire virtual environment. You can set the dashboard scope to see monthly summaries of individual clusters (see Viewing Standard Dashboards - page 52 for information about setting scope).

Summary

This panel compares the current state of your environment to its state the previous month.

Each cell in the panel shows the following information:

• Last MonthThe average of last month’s data for that cell.

• This MonthThe average of the data collected so for this month for that cell.

• Monthly ChangeThe difference between Last Month and This Month.

• TargetThe value you would have if your environment was currently in the Optimal Operating Zone. If the target value is a dash, this means there are no recommended actions that will change the target for this cell. Note that Operations Manager doesn’t calculate a target for every cell in this panel — In that case the target is gray (NA). Hover over the cell for a tooltip that describes which metrics make up the basis of the target calculation.

Device Summaries

These charts show how the number of VMs and PMs, and the consumption of storage space has changed over a period of months. Each data point shows the average value for the given month. The image below shows two months of historical data — as Operations Manager retains more historical data, the charts can show trends over a longer period of time.

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The charts show data for the current dashboard scope. Note that the Storage chart shows two plots:

• Storage Capacity — The amount of storage that is available to the clusters in the current scope• Allocated Storage — The amount of storage that is used by the VMs running on the clusters in the current scope

Custom DashboardsAs you view dashboards, you can set their scope to focus on specific clusters or groups (see Viewing Standard Dash-boards - page 52). After setting a scope that you want, you can then save the resulting display as a custom dashboard. For example, you can save off separate dashboards for each cluster in your environment. In that way, you can use standard dashboards to inspect the whole environment, and use custom dashboards to quickly zoom in on specific clusters.

You can set scope and customize the following dashboard types:

• Assure Service Performance• Improve Overall Efficiency

To create a custom dashboard:

1. Select a standard dashboard — either Assure Service Performance, Improve Overall Efficiency, or Monthly Summary.You cannot set scope to the Cluster Projection dashboard.

2. Set the scope of the current dashboard.Click the Scope button ( ) to open the Define User Scope dialog box. Then navigate to the cluster or group you want, select the item, and click Ok.

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3. Save the scope results as a custom dashboardIf you are satisfied with the scope results, click the Save button ( ) to open the Save Custom Dashboard dialog box. Name the dashboard and click Ok.The new dashboard appears in the My Dashboards list.

4. Return the standard dashboard to its default scope.Select the standard report and click the Reset Scope button ( ) to return to the default scope.

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The Inventory ViewThe Inventory View is where you go to observe the full virtual infrastructure. Here you can see the health of your entire virtual environment from a single view. You can identify bottlenecks and other resource and performance anomalies, and assess your overall workload distribution. You can also see recommended actions to improve perfor-mance in your environment, and direct Operations Manager to execute various actions.

If your current licensing supports the retention of historical data, panels in the Inventory View can show up to 48 days of utilization on specific devices. For more information, see Utilization History - page 36.

In the Inventory View, the Navigation panel shows all the resources, services, and commodities Operations Manager has discovered for your environment. As you browse the navigation tree, the information panels display charts and tables to describe the items you select.

Figure 7-1. Inventory View

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Chart panels in the Inventory view include tools you can use to:

For more information, see Standard Panel Controls - page 26.

Chart panels can display historical data. For more information, see Utilization History - page 36.

The Inventory view includes To Do lists that show recommended actions. For more information, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41.

The following sections describe the information you see as you select the different Navigation items:

• Summary - page 70 • Virtual Applications - page 73 • Applications - page 75 • Virtual Machines - page 78 • Physical Machines - page 83 • Storage - page 86 • Data Centers - page 88 • Provider Virtual Data Centers - page 90 • Organization Virtual Data Centers - page 94

SummaryWhen you select Summary in the Inventory tree, the Inventory View displays its summary panels. These panels show summaries of your Applications, Virtual Machines, Physical Machines, and Data Stores to give you an overview of the environment’s status.

Each of these panels shows a heatmap for the items in a level in the supply chain. For each item the panel shows the status of its resources and the item’s utilization Index. The status indicators are color-coded, as follows:

Maximize/minimize

Customize display

Export content to XML

Display a legend

Display tooltips

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As Operations Manager monitors and analyzes your environment, it uses specified constraints to identify the status of a resource. You specify these constraints in the Policy view. Changes to these settings can affect the status display in the summary panels. For more information about policy settings, see Policy Categories - page 186.

You can get additional information for the items in these panels as follows:

• To display tool tips that show actual values, hover the mouse over the colored indicators• To display a chart that shows details about a specific item, click the colored indicator• To display a separate view for an item, click the item’s name• To display the Risks/Opportunities for a specific item, click its severity icon

In addition to information panels, the Summary display includes a To Do panel — This panel toggles between a To Do list of recommended actions and a list of risks and efficiency opportunities. You can execute the recommended actions to maintain optimal performance in your environment. The risks/opportunities describe the issues that drive action recommendations. For more information, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41.

Figure 7-2. Summary Panels

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Summary Reports

To launch a report from the Inventory view, click the Reports icon next to the given entry in the Navigation tree.

Figure 7-3. Launching a Summary Report

You can launch a report for all the items in a tree item, or you can expand the item and launch a report for a single item. For example, you can launch a report for all virtual machines on a host, or you can expand the tree and launch a report for a single virtual machine.

For more information about reporting, see Reports - page 151.

Severity Icons in Summary Panels

The panels in the summary view show a severity icon for each entry. You can click the icons to display the Risks/Opportunities Log to help track issues for the given item. For information about executing recommended actions and using the problem log, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41.

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Figure 7-4. Problems Per Device

NOTE: The heatmap does not directly correspond with the existence of risks to QoS. The heatmap might show red, but Operations Manager doesn’t show a risk. Conversely, the heatmap might show greens and blues, but Operations Manager recognizes a risk and a corrective action to take. For example, if there is no fix for overconsumption in the heatmap, Operations Manager does not list the risk. On the other hand, if Operations Manager recognizes a fix that can improve utilization for a device, it lists that as a risk or opportunity.

Virtual ApplicationsA virtual application is the logical application server (sometimes called a vserver) that a load balancer uses to marshal access to load-balanced applications. For a full definition, see Virtual Application - page 6 in Introducing Operations Manager - page 3.

Each virtual application has one or more running applications bound to it. The load balancer passes requests to these bound applications. Note that Operations Manager discovers running applications, but you must bind these to the vir-tual applications that are in a load balancer as part of your load balancer configuration. For more information about applications and application discovery, see Applications - page 75 and Application Discovery - page 207.

When you select Virtual Applications in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Virtual Applications Utilization ChartThe percentage of allocated transaction capacity the virtual applications are using. To see a history of usage for a virtual application, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

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• Virtual Applications Utilization TrendThe percentage of maximum and average transactions over time.

• To Do list — Recommended actions for Virtual Applications• Usage for Virtual Applications

A tabular display of the percentage of transaction capacity for each virtual application.

Figure 7-5. Virtual Applications Summary

In the Inventory tree, the Applications branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-6. Applications Hierarchy

Underneath Virtual Applications, the list shows the application service types. These service types are defined on the load balancer — Operations Manager discovers the service types through each load balancer that is registered as a target. For each service type, the panels show charts for the current service type:

• Virtual Applications Utilization ChartThe percentage of transaction capacity used by virtual applications of this service type. To see a history of usage, click the associated bar.

• Virtual Applications Utilization TrendThe percentage of maximum and average transactions over time.

• Virtual Applications To Do list • Usage for Virtual Applications

A tabular display of the percentage of transaction capacity for virtual applications of this service type.

When you expand a Service Type item, the Inventory tree lists the individual virtual applications within that service type. Each virtual application consumes the running applications that are managed by the load balancer.

ApplicationsOperations Manager discovers and monitors applications running on VMs in your environment. By default, Operations Manager discovers the following applications:

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In addition, your installation of Operations Manager might be configured to discover other applications running in your environment. For more information, see Application Discovery - page 207.

Figure 7-7. Applications Summary

When you select Applications or an applications group in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

Application Name Description

LSASS Microsoft Active Directory services

IIS Microsoft Internet Information Services

XenDesktop Citrix XenDesktop

VMView VMWare View

MSSQL Microsoft SQL Server

SharePoint Microsoft Sharepoint Server

Guest Load The resources that Operations Manager has not assigned to any specific application (for more information, see Guest Load - page 78)

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• Applications Utilization ChartThe percentage of VMEM, VCPU and transaction capacity the applications are using. To see a history of usage for a given metric, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Applications Utilization TrendThe consumption of commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to choose which statistics to show in the chart. You can show averages for all resources, or average and max for individual resources.

• To Do list — Recommended Actions for Applications• Usage for Applications

A tabular display of VCPU and VMEM usage for the VMs that support your applications.

In the Inventory tree, the Applications branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

Figure 7-8. Applications Hierarchy

When you expand an Applications item, the Inventory tree lists application groups and individual applications within each group. If you select an application group, the view displays a set of panels showing information about all the applications in that group. If you select an individual application, the view displays a set of panels devoted to the spe-cific application.

These panels show:

• Application Utilization ChartThe percentage of VMEM, VCPU and transaction capacity the application uses.

• Application Utilization TrendThe consumption of commodities over time for this application. Click the radio buttons to choose which statistics to show in the chart. You can show averages for all resources, or average and max for individual resources.

• Recommended Actions for the Application • Usage for the Application

A tabular display of VCPU and VMEM usage for the VMs that support your applications.

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Figure 7-9. Panels for an individual application

Guest Load

The Apps_GuestLoad item is a special entry in the Applications hierarchy. This item tracks the resources that Opera-tions Manager has not assigned to any specific application. This can occur for the following reasons:

• You do not have the licenses required to support Application monitoringIn this case, Operations Manager lists all the consumed VM resources in the Apps_GuestLoad entry—this is the only entry under Applications.

• Operations Manager fails to discover some applicationsIn this case, Operations Manager displays entries for the applications it has discovered, and lists the VM resources that are not accounted for under Apps_GuestLoad.

• VM resources are devoted to infrastructure, and not part of any applicationOperations Manager lists these resources under Apps_GuestLoad, and provides entries for the applications it has discovered.

Virtual MachinesWhen you select Virtual Machines in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays information about groups of vir-tual machines. The virtual machines are grouped by the physical machines they run on. The view lists VMs in these groups because the number of VMs in your environment can be very large. Grouping them by their physical machines makes the amount of data in each panel easier to view and understand.

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For the Virtual Machines item, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Virtual Machines Utilization ChartThe percentage of CPU and memory capacity used by groups of virtual machines. To see a history of usage for a group, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Virtual Machines Utilization Trend The consumption of commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to show CPU or memory statistics.

• Recommended actions for Virtual Machines• Usage for Virtual Machines

A tabular display of usage of resources such as CPU and memory for the VMs in your environment.

Figure 7-10. Virtual Machines

In the Inventory tree, the Virtual Machines branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-11. Virtual Machines Hierarchy

When you expand the Virtual Machines item, the Index tree lists the individual VM Groups by the names of their physical machines. If you select an individual VM group, the view displays a set of panels similar to the following fig-ure. Note that the Utilization bar chart shows bars for each VM in the group.

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Figure 7-12. Virtual Machines — One Group of VMs

When you expand a VM group, the Index tree lists the individual VMs. If you select an individual VM, the view displays a set of panels similar to the following.

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Figure 7-13. Virtual Machines — Individual VM

The Data Store Utilization panel shows metrics for the utilization of the data stores that are available to this VM. Beneath that, the Physical Machine Utilization panel shows the VM’s resource utilization on the hosting PM, including CPU, memory and CPU ready queue utilization.

The Virtual Machine Consumption panel shows metrics for the utilization of physical resources by the selected VM. The title bar of the chart shows the VM name. You can see the name of that VM’s physical host in the Navigation Tree. The table lists the utilization of each resource, compared to the overall capacity on the physical machine. Next to the utilization percent column, the table lists the actual resource used and the full available capacity, in the following units of measurement:

• Ballooning - KBytes• CPU - MHz• CPU Ready Queues - ms of wait time• IO Throughput - KBytes/sec• IOPS - Storage access operations per second• Latency - ms (milliseconds)• Memory - KBytes• Net Throughput - KBytes/sec• Storage Amount - KBytes• Swapping - KBytes

For more complete descriptions of these resources and their measurement, see Resource Descriptions - page 17.

From the Navigation Tree you can expand each VM to show the following:

• Composed Of• Consumes• Hosts

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Physical MachinesWhen you select Physical Machines in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Physical Machines Utilization ChartThe percentage of physical machine CPU and memory commodities that are used within your environment. To see a history of usage per machine, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Physical Machines Utilization TrendThe consumption of commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to show memory, CPU, IO, or network throughput statistics.

• Recommended actions for Physical Machines• Usage for Physical Machines

A tabular display of resource usage for the physical machines in your environment.

Figure 7-14. Physical Machines

In the Inventory tree, the Physical Machines branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-15. Physical Machines Hierarchy

When you expand the Physical Machines item, the Inventory tree lists the individual physical machines in your envi-ronment. If you select an individual machine, the view displays a set of panels similar to the following.

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Figure 7-16. Physical Machines: — Individual Physical Machine

The physical machine Resources panel shows metrics for the consumption of physical resources by the hosted VMs. The table lists the utilization of each resource, compared to the overall capacity on the physical machine, in the fol-lowing units of measurement:

• Ballooning - KBytes• CPU - MHz• CPU Ready Queues - ms of wait time• IO Throughput - KBytes/sec• IOPS - Storage access operations per second• Latency - ms (milliseconds)• Memory - KBytes• Net Throughput - KBytes/sec• Storage Amount - KBytes• Swapping - KBytes

For more complete descriptions of these resources and their measurement, see Resource Descriptions - page 17.

You can expand each physical machine to show the following:

• Composed Of• Consumes• Hosts

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StorageThe Storage item shows statistics for storage devices such as disks or disk arrays. When you select Storage in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Storage Utilization ChartThe percentage of storage amount and storage IOPS capacity that are used in the environment. To see a history of usage per storage device, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Storage Utilization TrendThe consumption of commodities over time.

• Recommended actions for Storage• Usage for Storage

A tabular display of storage amount and storage IOPS and other usage for the storage devices in your environment.

Figure 7-17. Storage

In the Inventory tree, the Storage branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-18. Storage Hierarchy

When you expand the Storage entry, the Inventory tree lists the individual datastores in your environment. If you select an individual datastore, the Inventory view displays a set of panels similar to the following.

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Figure 7-19. Data Stores — Individual Data Store

When you expand a data store item, the view shows the following:

• Consumes

Data CentersWhen you select Data Centers in the Inventory tree, the view displays the following panels:

• Data Centers Utilization ChartThe percentages of Space, Power, and Cooling capacity that are used within your environment. To see a history of usage per data center, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Physical Machines by Data Center Utilization TrendThe consumption of commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to show Space, Power, or Cooling statistics.

• Recommended actions for Data Centers• Usage for Physical Machines by Data Center

A tabular display of usage for the data centers in your environment.

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Figure 7-20. Data Centers

In the Inventory tree, the Datacenters branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-21. Data Centers Hierarchy

When you expand the Data Centers item, the Inventory tree lists the individual data centers in your environment. If you select an individual data center, the data display is similar to the above figure, but for that single data center. For each individual data center, the Inventory tree shows the following:

• Consists Of• Hosts

Provider Virtual Data CentersProvider Virtual Data Centers expose the resources that you will deliver to customer organizations. Virtual Data Cen-ters are managed by vCloud Director. Note that you must have installed the Cloud Edition license to access this fea-ture.

When you select Provider Virtual Data Centers in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Provider Virtual Data Centers Utilization ChartThe percentage of allocated memory, CPU, and storage resources that are used by your provider vDCs. To see a history of usage per data center, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Provider Virtual Data Centers Utilization TrendThe consumption of allocated commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to show memory, CPU, or storage statistics.

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• Recommended actions for Provider Virtual Data Centers• Usage for Provider Virtual Data Center

A tabular display of usage for the data centers in your environment.

Figure 7-22. Provider Virtual Data Centers

In the Inventory tree, the Provider Virtual Datacenters branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-23. Provider Virtual Datacenters Hierarchy

When you expand the Provider Virtual Datacenters item, the Inventory tree lists the individual Provider vDCs in your environment. If you select an individual Provider vDC, the Inventory view displays a set of panels similar to the follow-ing.

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Figure 7-24. Individual Provider Virtual Data Center

These panels show:

• Provider vDC Utilization ChartThe percentage utilization over time of memory, CPU, and storage commodities that are allocated to this vDC.

• Provider Physical Machine Utilization The percentage utilization of resources on the physical machines that host this vDC.

• Provider Datastore Utilization The percentage utilization of resources on the datastores that service this vDC.

• Recommended Actions for the Provider vDC • Provider vDC Consumed Resources

A tabular display of the utilization of resources, compared to the capacity that has been allocated to the vDC.• Organization Virtual Data Center Utilization

The percentage of resource capacity on the Provider vDC that is utilized by the hosted Organization vDCs.

If you expand an individual Provider vDC, the Inventory view shows the following:

• Hosts — The Organization vDCs that are hosted by this Provider vDC

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Organization Virtual Data CentersOrganization Virtual Data Centers expose the physical resources that are allocated to specific customer organizations. Virtual Data Centers are managed by vCloud Director. Note that you must have installed the Cloud Edition license to access this feature.

When you select Organization Virtual Data Centers in the Inventory tree, the Inventory view displays the following panels:

• Organization Virtual Data Centers Utilization ChartThe percentage of allocated memory, CPU, and storage resources that are used by your organization vDCs. To see a history of usage per data center, click the associated bar.

To change the metrics to plot or change the chart sort order, edit the chart . Note that utilization index shows a measure of the utilization of resources. The more equal the utilization indexes are for your applications, the more evenly distributed their loads.

• Organization Virtual Data Centers Utilization TrendThe consumption of allocated commodities over time. Click the radio buttons to show memory, CPU, or storage statistics.

• Recommended actions for Organization Virtual Data Centers• Usage for Organization Virtual Data Center

A tabular display of usage for the data centers in your environment.

Figure 7-25. Organization Virtual Data Centers

In the Inventory tree, the Organization Virtual Datacenters branch includes a hierarchy similar to the following figure.

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Figure 7-26. Provider Virtual Datacenters Hierarchy

When you expand the Organization Virtual Datacenters item, the Inventory tree lists the individual Organization vDCs in your environment. If you select an individual Organization vDC, the Inventory view displays a set of panels similar to the following.

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Figure 7-27. Individual Provider Virtual Data Center

These panels show:

• Organization vDC Utilization ChartThe percentage utilization over time of memory, CPU, and storage commodities that are allocated to this vDC.

• VMs on Organization vDCFor each VM on this vDC, the percentage utilization of resources.

• Provider Virtual Datacenter UtilizationThe percentage of the host Provider vDC resources that are utilized by this Organization vDC.

• Recommended Actions for the Organization vDC • Organization vDC Consumed Resources

A tabular display of the utilization of resources, compared to the capacity that has been allocated to the vDC.

If you expand an individual Organization vDC, the Inventory list shows the following:

• Consumes — The Provider vDC that hosts this Organization vDC

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The Plan ViewThe Planner gives you the tools to create what-if scenarios that explore possibilities such as:

• Optimal workload distribution across current resources• Projected system requirements• Adding new and more powerful hardware• Impact of downsizing, or removing resources

Operations Manager runs these scenarios and displays target results that give you optimum utilization indexes for your proposed environment. A scenario shows a summary of your target environment, utilization charts for your resources, as well as recommended actions you can perform to achieve the target results.

For example, assume you run a plan that adds virtual machines to a cluster. The summary might show that you gain a lower and more evenly spread utilization index if you add more virtual machines to a smaller number of physical hosts. The recommended actions would then indicate which hosts you can take offline, and how to distribute your vir-tual machines among the remaining hosts.

To use the Planner, open the Plan view, then create and run plans. The following figure shows the Planner user inter-face, with these features:

• The summary shows that the target utilization index has been evened out across all the host machines. The green plot is the target index, while the bars on the chart indicate the current utilization index. You can display charts for utilization index, memory consumption, CPU percentage, IO utilization, and network utilization.

• The Changes panel also shows that this scenario suggests you add two new hosts to support the 20 new VMs.• There are a number of suggested actions you can perform to achieve this target.

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The Planner tool bar includes the following:

Display the different Planner views: • Summary View - page 102• Physical Machine Utilization View - page 104• Storage Utilization View - page 104• Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization View - page 104Limit the physical devices that are included in the planning scenario—for example, limit to a given cluster. See Setting Plan Scope - page 111.

Specify workload parameters for the plan—add or remove VMs, PM, and data stores to change load or capacity. See Specifying the Plan Workload - page 115.

Specify baseline utilization statistics (current or historic) for the plan. See Selecting the Plan Baseline - page 113.

Restrict planning to the current hardware inventory (don’t add new hardware). Note: If you have specified a value for Target Utilization - page 199, you should not restrict to the current hardware. Otherwise, the plan results may not be satisfactory. Specify advanced parameters for utilization, VM Constraints, and Workload Placement. See Setting Advanced Options - page 123.

Run the plan. The plan can recognize existing constraints (clusters, network/storage constraints, and workload placement policies), or it can disable the constraints before running (merge and run). While a plan is running, the Stop button appears. You can stop a running plan if necessary. See Running Plans - page 105.Create, save, load, or delete plans. See Creating Plans - page 109.

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Use CasesThe Planner is especially useful for system architects and system administrators.

System architects can use Planner to investigate how to expand the physical and virtual inventory to the best effect. Planner can indicate how much new hardware to add, how to distribute VMs among clusters of hosts, and whether components of the proposed network will be over- or under-utilized.

System administrators can use Planner to answer immediate questions. If you expect a surge in utilization or demand, you can use Planner to explore how to deploy new VMs that perform specific functions.

The following sections show example scenarios that can address these use cases.

Increasing Virtual Load under Existing Constraints

Assume you want to determine the load distribution if you add more VMs to your environment. To do this, you would create a Workload Distribution scenario that adds the new VMs, and then determines the best way to spread the increased load among your physical hosts and data stores.

Your environment already has its physical systems assigned to clusters and resource pools. As you add VMs to the environment, you want to respect these constraints. When thinking about this scenario, imagine asking, “What would happen if I add ten VMs running Web servers, and ten VMs running database servers? How can I optimally deploy these VMs in my current environment?”

To plan out the best way to add these VMs to your inventory, you create a Workload Distribution scenario that:

• Identifies how many VMs to add• Uses an existing Web server VM as a model for your new Web server VMs• Uses an existing database VM as a model for your new database VMs

The following steps show how to create such a scenario in the Plan view:

1. Display the Workload Distribution tab in the Planner.

2. Choose New from the Plan popup menu.

This clears the Planner so you can specify a new plan.

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3. Edit the load for your plan.For this plan you will add 20 VMs to your environment. - Click the Load icon ( ) to open the Edit Load dialog box- Specify the properties of the VMs that you will add

For this scenario, you will add copies of existing VMs to your load. Copying existing VMs is just one way to specify the properties of your new VMs. To add copies of a specific VM, expand the VM group and select the VM you want, then click ADD. In the following image, the dialog box is set up to add 10 copies of a VM named Fedora 2:

- Now select another VM to copy, and add 10 more VMs to your loadBe sure to click ADD after you have selected the new VM to copy.

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- Now that you have defined the new load, click Close and RunAlternatively, you can just click Close and make other settings before running the planner scenario. For example, to plan for a recurring peak load you can run the scenario against a load that occurred in the past. Or you can specify the scope of the scenario so that it will only run on a specific group of physical hosts. After making these other changes, you would then click Run to execute the plan.

- When Operations Manager is finished running the plan, verify that the process completed with successThe Plan Details show the current status of the plan:

After a successful run, you can review the results in the Plan view. To see the results, choose one of the following view categories from the View dropdown menu:

• Summary View - page 102• Physical Machine Utilization View - page 104• Storage Utilization View - page 104• Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization View - page 104• Action Plan - page 105

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Summary View

This view shows an overview comparison of the current and target configurations. It includes the following panes:

Plan Setup

This pane displays the setup and status of the current scenario.

• Name — If the plan scenario has been saved, the saved name• Scope — What clusters or groups in your environment the plan was run over• Baseline — Utilization statistics from this date form the basis of running the plan• State — Whether the plan is running, has succeeded, or was stopped before completion• Last Run Time — When the plan completed or was stopped• Plan Modification Log — How the plan scenario differs from the current environment

Host/Datastore Changes

This pane shows the overall results of your proposed changes as they compare to your current environment. It pres-ents a table showing changes to the number of physical hosts and VMs, as well as an estimate of total savings or cost of investment.

After running this scenario, the table shows a target of 19 hosts, compared to the current environment that uses 25. To achieve 19 hosts, the plan suggests you add two new hosts, and suspend eight of the old ones. The table also shows that the target environment supports 223 VMs, to account for the 20 VMs we added in the setup.

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Plan Improvements

This pane shows charts that compare the current environment to the target in terms of the device type and metrics you choose to plot. To see actual values in tooltips, hover over the data points in the chart. Use the following tools to control the chart display:

These charts show the top 10 or bottom 10 for hosts or datastores, sorted according to the target results. The sorting is for the target results, so the highest utilization for the target could be plotted over a device in the original environ-ment, or it could be plotted as a new device. For example, in the figure below, the UI chart (top-left) plots the highest target UI as a newly added host (no bar for any device in the current environment).

Choose the type of device to plot — Hosts or datastores.

Choose the metrics to plot:• UI (utilization index)• Mem (host memory utilization)• CPU (host CPU utilization)• IO (IO throughput on the host)• Net (network utilization on the host)• VM per Host• Storage (Utilization of allocated capacity on datastore)• IOPS (Input operations per second)

Click this button to toggle between Top 10 and Bottom 10.

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Physical Machine Utilization View

These charts show current and target utilization for the physical machines that support your VMs. With them you can easily compare the current and target states.

Storage Utilization View

This view is similar to Physical Machine Utilization View, except it shows storage amount, IOPS, and latency. For this scenario, we have not made any changes that would affect storage.

Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization View

This view shows tables of utilization metrics for your physical machines and storage devices. The tables show current and target metrics. Note that the values here are the same as the values shown in the various bar charts, but they are in tabular form.

The following image shows the target utilization for physical machines.

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Action Plan

After running a scenario, Operations Manager posts actions that it recommends you take to achieve the target config-uration. You can browse these actions and perform them as appropriate.

Running PlansYou can use plans to compare hypothetical conditions against the current conditions of your environment. You can modify a plan by setting conditions such as:

• Adding or removing VMs• Using historical load conditions• Respecting or ignoring constraints such as clusters or workload placement policies• Adding hardware or restricting the plan to the current inventory

NOTE: By default, a new and untitled plan mirrors your current environment. You can run the Planner against such a scenario, and it will give you results for your current environment. For example, to check the workload distribution of your current environment you simply run a new and untitled plan.

The Planner can run scenarios to calculate three types of results:

• Workload Distribution The Planner calculates the configuration of your environment that will best distribute the planned load across your devices. You can run the plan with no modifications to distribute the current load on your environment, or you can create a plan that specifies a different load. For more information, see Workload Distribution - page 126.

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• Workload ProjectionThe Planner uses historical resource consumption data to calculate the future consumption you can expect under the plan’s conditions. Run a plan with no modifications to see how your current configuration will hold up into the future. Or you can run a projection with plan conditions that test how the environment would respond in the future to a different load. For more information, see Workload Projection - page 129.

• Hardware ReplaceUse templates for hosts or data stores to plan the effects you will see if you change the capacity of the physical devices in your environment. For more information, see Hardware Replace - page 133.

By default, a plan incorporates all the constraints (cluster, storage, and network) and workload placement policies that are in effect. You can run a plan in two modes with respect to these constraints:

When you run a plan, you can control whether the plan results assume you will add new hosts, or you will support the

planned conditions with your current host inventory. Click the Enable Host Provisioning tool to enable or disable

the addition of new hosts in your environment.

NOTE: The results of running a plan are incremental — if you run the same plan twice, the summary compares the first plan’s results to the second plan’s target results. For example, assume you click Run to run a plan that respects all the constraints in your environment, and it suggests suspending a host — for example, from a current inventory of 15 hosts, to a target inventory of 14 hosts. The Summary panel will show a bar chart for 15 hosts in your current environment, compared to a target result with 14 hosts. Then if you click Merge and Run to disable constraints, the Summary panel will show a bar chart for 14 hosts in your current environment, compared to the new target results.

To ensure clean results that are easy to understand, you should not run the same plan successively. Instead, you should load a new plan, or reload a saved plan before clicking Run or Merge and Run. For information about loading plans, see the procedure below, or see Managing Plan Files - page 109.

To run a plan:

1. Display the plan type you want: Workload Distribution, Workload Projection, or Hardware Replace.

2. Either load a saved plan, or clear the current plan to create a new and untitled plan.

Normal mode:The plan incorporates all the constraints. For example, in this mode the plan will not give resources from one cluster to a VM that is constrained to another cluster.Merge mode:The plan disables all the constraints before running. For example, in this mode the plan results can include:• Moving VMs to hardware that is in a different cluster• Moving VMs to hardware that uses different storage• Changes that violate enabled workload placement policies

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To clear the plan, choose New. To load a plan, choose Open, and then pick the plan you want to load.

3. Click to decide whether to run without adding new hosts.

This tool determines how the planner manages hosts. As it calculates the new workloads in the plan, Operations Manager can recommend that you add new hosts to support increased load. However, if you turn on this option, the planner results will not include the addition of any new hardware.Note: If you have specified a value for Target Utilization - page 199, you should not restrict to the current hardware. Otherwise, the plan results may not be satisfactory.

4. Make any special settings you need for the type of planning scenario you want to run. If you are running a Workload Projection, set the projection parameters.The projection parameters determine:- The range of time for the projection’s base

The projection will perform a linear interpolation based on historical workload data. As you set a time range, the dialog box charts the CPU and memory statistics for that range.

- Period: how far into the future to project the workloadUsing the base time range, the Planner will project the workload this far into the future.

You can only set these parameters if you are in the Workload Projection tab. In this tab, the Utilization Chart includes controls to set the projection’s base and period. After you run the plan, this chart will show the projection data.

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For more information, see Workload Projection - page 129.If you are replacing hardware, set the scope of the hardware you will replace, and choose templates to describe the new hardware. For more information, see Hardware Replace - page 133.

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5. Run the planRun the plan in Normal or Merge mode.

Note that Run icon changes to Stop ( ) while a plan is running. You can stop a running plan if necessary.

After running a plan, you can review the results according to the type of plan you have run. For more information, see Workload Distribution - page 126 and Workload Projection - page 129.

Creating PlansA plan defines the workload, resources, and rules that you want to use when calculating results. You can think of a plan as a description of your desired environment. Operations Manager then calculates the results that can come from the planned changes.

NOTE: When you create a new and untitled plan, it is a description of your current environment. You can run the Planner against such a plan, and it will give you results for your current environment. For example, to check the workload distribution of your current environment you can simply run a new and untitled plan.

To create a plan, you specify its properties and then save it. After saving a plan you can open it, run it, edit it, or delete it.

The following sections describe the steps for plan creation:

• Managing Plan Files - page 109• Tracking Plan Modifications - page 110• Setting Plan Scope - page 111• Selecting the Plan Baseline - page 113• Specifying the Plan Workload - page 115• Setting Advanced Options - page 123

Managing Plan Files

The Plan dropdown menu ( ) provides the following commands:

• NewClear the current plan, and load a new, untitled plan. The properties of this new plan are the same as your current environment.

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• OpenChoose a saved plan to open.

• SaveSaves any changes you made to the current plan.

• Save AsOpens the Save As dialog box, where you can name and save the current plan.

• Delete Saved PlanYou can delete plans you saved, or shared plans.

• Show Plan ReportOpens a report for the current plan in a new browser tab.

Tracking Plan Modifications

As you make changes to the loaded plan, the Summary Grid pane displays a running log of your modifications. In this way you can track the progress of your edits. For example, the following image shows that the plan has been changed to remove one host from the environment (among other changes to the plan).

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Note that if you want to start over after making many changes, you can reload the plan, or save your changes as a new plan.

Setting Plan Scope

Plan scope determines which devices in the environment will be affected by the plan. For example, you can specify that a plan will only run on your Development cluster of PMs. In that case, the current environment for your plan would only include PMs in the Development cluster, the VMs hosted by those machines, and data stores that support those machines. Likewise, the target results would only correspond to those machines.

Scope is determined differently if you select VMs or physical hosts:

• Scope by VMWhen you set scope by VMs, Operations Manager limits the plan to the physical hosts that those VMs are allowed to run on. Likewise, the plan includes all the data stores that are available to the VMs in your scope.

• Scope by PMWhen you set scope by PM, Operations Manager limits the plan to those physical hosts. For data stores, Operations Manager identifies all the VMs that can run on the hosts in your scope, and identifies all the data stores that are available for those VMs.

NOTE: When setting scope for a plan, you can choose multiple groups. However, you should be sure to choose groups of the same type. For example, you should not scope by PM and VM groups for the same plan.

To set the current plan’s scope, click the Scope icon ( ). This opens the Define User Scope dialog box.

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Ctrl-click to select multiple items in the list. When you click OK, Operations Manager sets that scope to the current plan. You can see the scope for the current plan in the Plan Details table.

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Selecting the Plan Baseline

The plan baseline is the set of utilization statistics that the Planner uses to calculate target or projected results. You can use the current statistics, or you can choose statistics from a past period. For example, if utilization typically peaks at a certain time of the day, or a certain day of the week, you can choose that moment as your baseline.

To set the baseline, click the Set Baseline icon ( ). In the dialog box that appears, click a data point to choose the moment you want. You can set the baseline for Workload Distribution and Hardware Replace scenarios.

After you click a data point, the dialog box displays the statistics for loads on the environment’s physical hosts.

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When you are satisfied with the baseline settings, click Apply Baseline. You can see the plan’s current baseline in the Plan Details table.

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Specifying the Plan Workload

The plan workload is determined by the set of VMs that are deployed in your environment, compared to the PMs and Data Stores that provide resources to them. The more VMs you have for a given number of PMs and data stores, the greater the load will be on these physical devices. With a plan you can add or remove VMs, PMs, and Data Stores to see what the target or projected results would be. For example, you can define a plan that adds VMs to the same set of PMs and Data Stores. Or you can upgrade your physical hosts so they have more CPU or memory resources, and see how that would affect the way your environment supports the current crop of VMs.

To set the plan’s load, click the Edit Load icon ( ). The dialog box that appears displays a list of the load modifications you can specify.

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The dialog box gives you actions to perform on VMs, physical hosts, and data stores. The actions you can perform are similar for all three types; examples will show performing these actions for VMs.

The actions you can perform are:

• Add - page 117Add one or more devices to the environment.

• Add Using Template - page 118Use a template to specify the properties of the devices you want to add.

• Replace Using Template - page 119Use a template to specify properties, and replace existing devices with these new devices. For example, use this to upgrade a physical host with more memory or CPU resources.

• Remove - page 120Select the devices you will remove.

• Change Resource Utilization - page 120 (for VMs, only)Increase or decrease the load on selected VMs by a given percentage point.

You can also create templates for add and remove operations. For more information, see Creating Templates - page 121.

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Add

Select a device to serve as a model of what you want to add, then specify how many copies of that device you want to add to the environment.

1. Choose the Add action.2. Navigate the list of items to choose which item to add.3. Specify the number of copies to add, then click Add.

The list of items will include folder called New Entities. You can expand that folder to see these items you have added.

You can repeat these steps — select another item to copy, specify the number of copies, then click Add. New additions will appear in the New Entities folder.

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4. When you have finished adding items to the plan’s load, close the dialog box.Click Close to close the dialog box. Use this option if you want to make more changes to the plan, or if you want to save the plan before you run it.Click Close and Run to close the dialog box and run the plan immediately.

Add Using Template

Select a template to serve as a model of what you want to add, then specify how many copies of that templated device you want to add to the environment. You can also choose to create a new template or edit an existing template (see Creating Templates - page 121).

1. Choose the Add Using Template action.2. Choose the template you want to use.

Note that in the above example, the templates with IP addresses have been discovered on the indicated hypervisors. Templates without IP addresses in their names have been created by a user of Operations Manager. You can use either type of template in a plan.

3. Specify the number of copies to add, then click Add.The list of items will include folder called New Entities. You can expand that folder to see these items you have added. You can add other items, and this folder will update to show the new items.

4. When you have finished adding items to the plan’s load, close the dialog box.Click Close to close the dialog box. Use this option if you want to make more changes to the plan, or if you want to save the plan before you run it.Click Close and Run to close the dialog box and run the plan immediately.

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Replace Using Template

Select the items you want to change, then select a template to serve as a model for what you will replace the devices with. You can also choose to create a new template or edit an existing template (see Creating Templates - page 121).

1. Choose the Replace Using Template action.2. Navigate the list of items to choose which items you will change. You can select individual items, or groups of

items. 3. Choose the template you want to use.4. Click Replace.

The list of items will include folder called New Entities. You can expand that folder to see the replacement templates you have added to the plan. You can replace other items, and this folder will update to show the new items.

5. When you have finished replacing items to the plan’s load, close the dialog box.Click Close to close the dialog box. Use this option if you want to make more changes to the plan, or if you want to save the plan before you run it.Click Close and Run to close the dialog box and run the plan immediately.

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Remove

Select the items you want to remove from your environment.

1. Choose the Remove action.2. Navigate the list of items to choose which items you will remove. You can select individual items, or groups of

items. 3. Click Remove.4. When you have finished removing items in the plan’s load, close the dialog box.

Click Close to close the dialog box. Use this option if you want to make more changes to the plan, or if you want to save the plan before you run it.Click Close and Run to close the dialog box and run the plan immediately.

Change Resource Utilization

Use this to see what will happen if the VMs in your environment were to consume a different amount of resources. For example, you can set the scope of your plan to a production cluster, increase the load by 20%, and run a plan. This is the same as saying, “What would happen if all the VMs in my production cluster saw a 20% increase in their con-sumption of host memory and CPU cycles?”

This option is for VMs, only. Select the VMs you want to reallocate, and raise or lower the resource utilization by per-centage points.

1. Choose the Change Resource Utilization action.2. Navigate the list of VMs to choose which ones you will change. You can select individual VMs, or groups of

VMs. Ctrl-click to select multiple items.

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3. Click Change Load.4. When you have finished changing VMs in the plan’s load, close the dialog box.

Click Close to close the dialog box. Use this option if you want to make more changes to the plan, or if you want to save the plan before you run it.Click Close and Run to close the dialog box and run the plan immediately.

Creating Templates

When you specify the load for a plan, you can use templates to define the items you will add to the load.

To create a new template:

1. Click the Edit Load icon ( ) to open the Modify Load dialog box.2. Select either of the template actions:

- Add Using Template- Replace Using Template

3. When you choose a template to use, scroll the dropdown list to select Add New Template.4. Specify your template settings and click Create Profile.

To edit an existing template:

1. Click the Edit Load icon ( ) to open the Modify Load dialog box.2. Select either of the template actions:

- Add Using Template- Replace Using Template

3. Choose a template to use.4. Click the Edit icon for that template.

If you want to delete the template, click the Delete icon.Note that Operations Manager discovers VM templates that have been created on target hypervisors. Discovered templates begin with the hypervisor IP address in their names. You cannot edit or delete these discovered VM templates.

5. Change your template settings and click Update Template.

When you create a new template or edit a template, the Modify Load dialog box expands to display the template set-tings. The settings you can make are different, depending on the type of item the template is for.

Template Settings for VMs

These settings identify a VM type, and specify the resources that VM type will consume.

For VCPU, Operations Manager assigns 75% of the physical CPU resources to the VM. For example, if you specify 1 VCPU for this VM type, Operations Manager assigns 75% capacity of a CPU on the machine that hosts the VM. This ensures that the host machine has CPU capacity to perform infrastructure tasks.

For VMEM and VStorage, Operations Manager assigns 100% of the physical resources that you specify here.

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Template Settings for PMs

These settings identify a PM type, and specify the resources it can provide. The Planner uses the Price entry to calcu-late costs or savings when adding or removing host machines.

Template Settings for Data Stores

These settings identify a type of data store, and specify the resources it can provide.

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Setting Advanced Options

For a given plan, you can make the following advanced settings:

• Utilization - page 123 (for Physical Hosts, Data Stores, and Target Utilization)• VM Constraints - page 124• Workload Placement - page 125

Utilization

Utilization specifies the percentage of a physical resource that you want to make available in the given plan. By default, hosts and data stores have utilization set to 100%. For a given plan, you can set the utilization to a lower value.

For example, assume you have one data store that you want to share evenly for two clusters of VMs. Also assume that you are creating a plan for one of those clusters. In that case, you can set the data stores to 50% utilization. This saves storage resources for the other cluster that will use this storage.

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To set utilization:

1. Click the Advanced Options icon ( ) to open the advanced Planning Options dialog box.2. Display the Set Utilization tab.3. Choose which type of device to modify:

- Set Max Host Utilization- Set Max Storage Utilization

4. Navigate the list to select the device you want to modify.5. Specify the percentage you want, then click Set Max Level.

VM Constraints

By default, VMs are constrained to the cluster, network group, or storage group that their hosts belong to. When you run a plan, Operations Manager does not consider moving VMs to physical hosts outside of the current cluster if they are constrained by cluster. But if you disable the Cluster constraint for a VM, then Planner can evaluate the results of hosting that VM on any other physical machine in your environment. If the best results come from adding that VM to a different cluster, then Planner will show that result.

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To set constraints:

1. Click the Advanced Options icon ( ) to open the advanced Planning Options dialog box.2. Display the VM Constraints tab.3. Navigate the list to select the VMs you want to modify.4. Choose the types of constraints to set:

- All- Cluster- Network- Storage

5. Specify whether to enable or disable the constraints.6. Click Apply.

Workload Placement

In this tab you can enable or disable imported placement policies or Operations Manager placement policies for the VMs in your plan. The tab shows the workload placement policies that are currently defined for your environment. You can also click the Plus or Minus icons to create new Operations Manager placement policies from this tab. For more information about these policies and how to manage them, see Workload Placement - page 191 on the Policy view.

Click the Plus or Minus icons to create or delete Operations Manager placement policies.

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To set enable or disable placement policies:

1. Click the Advanced Options icon ( ) to open the advanced Planning Options dialog box.2. Display the Workload Placement tab.3. Navigate the list to select the policies you want to enable, then click Enable Rule.

Workload DistributionWorkload Distribution scenarios show you the optimal distribution of VMs across hosts and data stores for the given plan. The view compares your current distribution with target results. The view includes an Action Plan that displays a list of actions you can take to achieve the target results.

To see distribution data, display the Workload Distribution tab.

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To see different views of the workload distribution data, choose from the View dropdown menu. A Workload Distribu-tion plan displays the following views:

• Summary View - page 102• Physical Machine Utilization - page 128• Storage Utilization - page 128• Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data - page 129

Summary View

This view provides an overview of the current distribution and target results.

The Summary pane charts the current results. You can view charts for the different resource types (utilization index, memory, CPU utilization, input/output, network utilization, and VMs per host). The target results display as a green plot. The plot is laid over a bar chart of the current resource distribution. If a bar is grayed, that means the Planner recommends you suspend that device. If the chart shows no bar to correspond with a target result data point, this indicates a new device to be added in the target results.

The Plan Summary pane shows the current target numbers of VMs and hosts. It includes a total savings/cost at the top of the pane. This value is calculated from the costs you assign to resources. For example, you can assign a cost when you create a host template (see Creating Templates - page 121).

This view also includes a Summary Grid, that describes the currently loaded plan. For example, you can see the scope of this plan, or the date for the baseline data. (For more information, see Creating Plans - page 109).

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Physical Machine Utilization

This view focuses on the physical machines in your environment. It shows charts for the current PM utilization, com-pared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

Storage Utilization

This view focuses on the data stores in your environment. It shows charts for the current storage utilization, compared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

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Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data

This view provides data grids of current and target utilization distribution for hosts and data stores.

Workload ProjectionWorkload Projection estimates the VM consumption of VCPU and VMem resource, projected to a given time in the future. The Planner uses past utilization data to make its calculations. To run a projection, you provide the following:

• PlanYou choose the plan to use and load it into the Workload Projection. If you use a new and unnamed plan, the Planner calculates a projection for your current environment.

• Historical date rangeIn the Summary View, you specify the start and end dates for the data that you want the Planner to use when calculating the projection.

• Projection periodHow many days, weeks, or months into the future you want to extend the projection.

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To see projection data, display the Workload Projection tab.

After you run a projection, you can display different views to see the results in detail. To see different views of the workload projection data, choose from the View dropdown menu.

A Workload Distribution plan displays the following views:

• Summary View - page 102 (Use this to specify historical dates and projection period)• Physical Machine Utilization - page 128• Storage Utilization - page 128• Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data - page 129

Summary View

The Summary view serves two purposes:

• Specify the projection parameters• Display an overview of projection results

When you first display the Workload Projection tab, the Summary View is ready for you to provide projection param-eters.

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To specify the projection parameters, make your settings in the Utilization Chart:

The projection parameters determine:

• The range of time for the projection’s baseThe projection will perform a linear interpolation based on historical workload data. As you set a time range, the dialog box charts the CPU and memory statistics for that range.

• Period: how far into the future to project the workloadUsing the base time range, the Plannerwill project the workload this far into the future.

As you drag to set the time range, the chart updates to show you the historical values. When you are satisfied with your settings, click Run.

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After the projection runs, the Summary View updates to show you the results:

The Utilization Chart shows the projected values for CPU and memory utilization. If you want to see different results, you can change the projection parameters (historical range or projection period) and run the projection again.

In the above image, the projection begins where the Memory and CPU plots change colors. For example, the Memory plot changes from green to blue.

The Plan Summary pane shows the current target numbers of VMs and hosts. It includes a total savings/cost at the top of the pane. This value is calculated from the costs you assign to resources. For example, you can assign a cost when you create a host template (see Creating Templates - page 121).

This view also includes a Summary Grid, that describes the currently loaded plan. For example, you can see the scope of this plan, or the date for the baseline data. (For more information, see Creating Plans - page 109).

Physical Machine Utilization

This view focuses on the physical machines in your environment. It shows charts for the current PM utilization, com-pared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

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Storage Utilization

This view focuses on the data stores in your environment. It shows charts for the current storage utilization, compared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data

This view provides data grids of current and target utilization distribution for hosts and data stores.

Hardware ReplaceHardware Replace scenarios calculate the optimal performance you can achieve after replacing existing PMs or data stores with other equipment. To create a new Hardware Replace scenario, you provide the following:

• ScopeYou set the scope to determine which physical devices the plan will run against. For example, you can select a single cluster, or a specific data center. The plan will consider only on the physical devices that are within the specified scope.

• Hardware typeA single plan can calculate replacement results for hosts, for data stores, or both.

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• Hardware templateTemplates specify the capacity and cost of the replacement hardware. You can use existing templates, or create and save your own.

• Hardware to replaceAfter choosing the hardware template, you then choose the hardware you want to replace. You choose from devices that are within the plan’s scope. For example, if the current scope includes a set of 10 hosts and two data stores, you can choose to replace any of those devices with a templated device.

To see projection data, display the Hardware Replace tab.

After you run a Hardware Replace plan, you can display different views to see the results in detail.

A Hardware Replace plan displays the following views:

• Summary View - page 102 (Use this to specify historical dates and projection period)• Physical Machine Utilization - page 128• Storage Utilization - page 128• Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data - page 129

Defining Replace Parameters

To plan hardware replacement, you must specify which hardware you will replace, and what you will replace it with. When you create the plan scenario, you can make the same settings that you make for any other plan. For example, you can set the baseline to past conditions, or you can add more VMs to the workload. For more information, see Cre-ating Plans - page 109.

The following sections describe settings you make that are special for hardware replacement:

• Scope - page 135 (You set scope for any plan, but the effect is slightly different for hardware replacement.)• Hardware Type - page 135• Template - page 135• Hardware to be Replaced - page 136

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Scope

Plan scope determines which devices in the environment will be affected by the plan. For example, if you set the scope to a cluster, then replacement planning will only affect the physical devices in that cluster. Note that you can set the scope to groups of VMs or to Virtual Data Centers. In this case, hardware replacement will affect only the physical machines that provide resources to these virtual entities.

To set the current plan’s scope, click the Scope icon ( ). This opens the Define User Scope dialog box

where you can navigate the inventory tree and set the plan scope. For more information, see Setting Plan Scope - page 111.

Hardware Type

Hardware Replace plans support Hosts and Data Stores. The type you choose determines which templates you can select, and which hardware you can replace.

One plan scenario can be devoted to replacing hosts or storage, or you can define a single scenario that replaces both hosts and data stores.

Template

The template you choose describes the new hardware for your plan. Operations Manager ships with predefined tem-plates, and you can create your own templates to describe specific hardware that you have in mind.

To create a new template, select Add New Template, and then click Edit Template. Note that as you define your own templates, they are stored with Operations Manager installation, and are available to anybody else who uses the plan-ner on the same installation.

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The templates you use here are also available when specifying workloads for a planning scenario. For more informa-tion, see Creating Templates - page 121.

You can make the following settings in a template:

• User Information- Template Name- Vendor- Description

• Price: Operations Manager uses this price to calculate replacement costs or savings• Capacity Data: Values Operations Manager uses to calculate capacity and utilization

- CPU Cores and Speed- Memory- Network Throughput- IO Throughput

When you run a plan, Operations Manager uses the template’s pricing and capacity data to calculate the plan results. For example, if you replace your current hosts with less powerful models to address under utilization, Operations Manager will use the template to recalculate the optimal workload distribution. You might see that workload is more evenly distributed across the smaller machines, giving you a saving in actual cost.

Hardware to be Replaced

Once you have specified the plan scope, hardware type, and the template you want for the scenario, you can specify which hardware you will target for replacement. You can specify individual devices, or you can select groups of devices to replace.

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When you expand items in this dialog box, the physical devices you can select are limited by the scope you have set for this scenario. For example, assume you selected a cluster of VMs that are restricted to PMs in Cluster-1. In that case, then you browse for hosts to replace, you will only see the hosts in that cluster.

After you select the hardware to replace, Operations Manager commits your parameters to the current scenario. The Plan Modification Log shows the replace actions you have specified for this scenario.

Once you have made settings for Host, you can then add in settings to replace data stores as well.

After you have made the settings you want, you can then run the plan, save it, or start a new plan to discard your changes.

Summary View

This view provides an overview of the current hardware, and the target hardware replace results.

The Summary pane charts the results. You can view charts for the different resource types (utilization index, memory, CPU utilization, input/output, network utilization, and VMs per host). The target results display as a green plot. The plot is laid over a bar chart of the current resource distribution.

Assume a Hardware Replace scenario that will replace three of five hosts. In the figure below, notice that the target plot is laid over the two hosts that are not replaced. The target plots a lower utilization than the hosts currently exhibit. The other three data points for the target show utilization for the replacement hosts. On the right, the chart shows bars for the replaced hosts so you can compare target to current values.

The Plan Summary pane shows the current target numbers of VMs and hosts. It includes a total savings/cost at the top of the pane. This value is calculated from the costs you assign to resources. For example, you can assign a cost when you create a host template (see Creating Templates - page 121 and Template - page 135).

This view also includes a Summary Grid, that describes the currently loaded plan. For example, you can see the scope of this plan, or the date for the baseline data. (For more information, see Creating Plans - page 109).

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Physical Machine Utilization

This view focuses on the physical machines in your environment. It shows charts for the current PM utilization, com-pared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

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Storage Utilization

This view focuses on the data stores in your environment. It shows charts for the current storage utilization, compared with the target utilization. You can hover over data points to display tooltips.

Physical Machine and Storage Detailed Utilization Data

This view provides data grids of current and target utilization distribution for hosts and data stores.

Recommended ActionsPlanner lists actions you can perform to achieve the target utilization metrics. These recommendations can range from adding more storage or physical machines to your environment, or moving or changing the configuration of vir-tual machines. Each action includes a tooltip that displays a full description of the suggested action.

Operations Manager provides the following categories of suggestions:

• Prevention — Actions that prevent the environment from drifting out of the Optimal Operating Zone.• Performance Assurance — Actions that directly address risks to QoS.• Compliance — Actions that address violations of placement policies, or mis-configuration of VMs. For example, a

VM might be configured to access a network that is not available in its current cluster. In such cases, Operations Manager identifies the violation and recommends actions that bring the entity back into compliance.

• Efficiency Improvement — Actions that consolidate operations and free up resources.

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The Deploy ViewUse the Deploy View to add VMs to your environment. For example if you need to deploy more applications, you can use this view to calculate where to place new VMs and actually deploy them in your environment. In this way, Opera-tions Manager provides end-to-end intelligent workload management, from specifying actions to keep your environ-ment in the Optimal Operating Zone, to deploying new VMs in the optimal locations, as calculated by Operations Manager.

There are two ways to specify resource allocation and other details for the VMs you will deploy:

• Choose templates that are built from discovered dataMany hypervisors store source VMs, and copy data from those source files to deploy new VMs. Operations Manager discovers these source VMs to build templates that you can choose on the Deploy View. Note that discovered templates are read-only — you cannot edit these templates.

• Choose templates that have been authored in Operations ManagerYou can create and edit templates that specify your VM configuration, and use those to specify resources for the new VMs.

NOTE: TERMINOLOGY ISSUE — Some hypervisors refer to source VMs as templates. Within Operations Manager, templates are files that describe a VM, host, or datastore. For this topic, the word template refers to an Operations Manager template. VM Templates specify the resources allocated for a VM, and Deployment Profiles specify details such as the datacenter or cluster to host the new VM, and the package files (OVF or VHD) for the source VM. The term source VM refers to the VM deployment data that is stored on a hypervisor.

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The data in a VM template specifies the resources to allocate for the deployed VMs. When Operations Manager looks for the appropriate host for the VM, it looks for a host that can best provide these resources.

The following topics describe how to use the Deploy view:

• Deploying VMs - page 142• Creating and Editing Templates - page 143

Deploying VMsNOTE: An instance of Operations Manager can only support one deployment session at a time. The calculations to propose

and to execute a deployment take a certain amount of time. While these processes are under way, Operations Manager will not allow you to begin a new deployment session. Any other users logged into the same Operations Manager instance will receive an error if they try to deploy VMs while these processes are under way.

To deploy VMs, you will perform the following steps:

1. Provide a name for the VM or VMs.Provide a descriptive name so you can easily find these VMs in the inventory.

2. Choose the VM Template to use for the new VMs.VM Templates specify the resources available to the VM, including:- VCPUs- Virtual Memory- Storage- Network Throughput- IOPs- IO ThroughputChoose the VM Template that specifies the resource allocation that you want for the VM.

To inspect VM Templates, open the Edit Templates dialog box ( ), and select the template you’re interested in. (For more information about using this dialog box, see Creating VM Templates - page 144.) Note that if the VM Template was discovered, its name begins with the IP address of the hypervisor that manages that VM template data. Also, a discovered template is read-only (you cannot edit discovered templates).When you choose a VM Template, the Deployment Profiles list becomes active.

3. Specify how many VMs to deploy with this action.When you deploy more than one VM, Operations Manager appends a number to the VM name you provide (MyVM_0, MyVM_1, MyVM_2, etc.).

4. Choose the Deployment Profile to use as the basis of your new VMs.The Deployment Profile specifies physical details about how to deploy the VM, including:- The path to the VM package files (OVF or VHD) that will be copied to deploy this VM

Note that if the Deployment Profile data was discovered by Operations Manager, then the profile does not show a path to the VM package files.

- Optional placement constraints (constrain to datacenter or cluster)If the Deployment Profile does not specify a datacenter or cluster, then Operations Manager is free to deploy the VM anywhere in your virtual environment.

To inspect Deployment Profiles, open the Edit Templates dialog box, and select the template you’re interested in. (For more information about using this dialog box, see Creating Deployment Profiles - page 144.) Note that if the Deployment Profile was discovered, its name begins with the characters DEP- for “Deployment”. A discovered profile is read-only (you cannot edit discovered Deployment Profiles).

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5. Begin the deployment action — Operations Manager displays details for the VMs it will deploy.After you have made your choices, click Begin Deploy. Operations Manager starts to calculate the optimal placement for the VMs you have decided to deploy. Operations Manager does not deploy the VMs at this step. After it finishes the calculations, Operations Manager displays a list of proposed VM deployments, one for each VM that you specified. You may have to wait briefly while Operations Manager makes these calculations.

6. Review the proposed deployment, and commit the action.Be sure to review the deployment details list, and make sure you want to deploy these VMs. If you do not, you can cancel the operation now, before Operations Manager makes any changes to your environment.If you agree with the proposed VM deployment, click Commit to create the VMs. You may have to wait a few minutes while Operations Manager performs the deployment actions.When the deployment has finished, you can see a listing of the status for each deployed VM. If a deployment failed, the listing includes the reason for the failure.

If for some reason you log out of Operations Manager, the deployment action completes anyway. When you log in again, Operations Manager displays an alert telling you that you logged out while a deployment was pending.

Figure 9-1. Interrupted Deployment Action

Creating and Editing TemplatesTo deploy VMs, you select a VM Template to specify desired resources for the VM, and a Deployment Profile to specify deployment details such as the source VM package (the OVF or VHD files) and optional placement constraints.

Operations Manager creates a number of VM Templates automatically as it discovers source VM data on the target hypervisors. These templates are read-only; you cannot edit them because they reflect data that is specified in target hypervisor. Operations Manager also discovers associated Deployment Profiles that correspond with the discovered templates (also read-only).

You can create your own VM Templates and Deployment Profiles, and use them to deploy VMs. In this way, you can plan for and deploy VMs with different configurations than any VMs currently defined in your environment. Opera-tions Manager users can edit these templates if they have privileges to use the Deploy view.

This following sections describe:

• Creating VM Templates - page 144 • Creating Deployment Profiles - page 144 • Discovered Deployment Data - page 145

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Creating VM Templates

VM Templates describe the resource allocation that you want to provide for a class of VMs. When deploying VMs, Operations Manager uses the values that are specified in a chosen VM template. Before creating the template, you should plan allocation of the following resources:

• VCPUsThe virtual CPUs assigned to the VM.

• Virtual MemoryThe memory size for the VM, in MB. Note that you should never allocate less than is required for the guest OS.

• StorageThe amount of disk storage assigned to the VM, in GB.

• Network Throughput UsedThe amount of the host’s network throughput to assign to the VM, in MB/s.

• IOPsThe input operations per second allocated to the VM.

• IO Throughput UsedThe amount of the throughput on the host’s IO bus to assign to the VM, in MB/s.

The values you set for these resources determine the configuration of any VMs you deploy using this template.

To create a VM Template:

1. Click the Create/Edit icon ( ) to open the dialog box.

2. In the dialog box, click the Add icon for the VM Templates list.To edit an existing template, select the template and click the Edit icon. Note that you can only edit user-created templates.

3. In the fields that appear, enter settings for the VM Template.The Template Name and Vendor fields help identify the template for future use.

4. Click Apply when you’re done.

Creating Deployment Profiles

A Deployment Profile specifies the physical files that will be copied to deploy the VM, as well as optional placement limitations.

NOTE: In many cases it’s best to simply let Operations Manager choose where to place the VMs you deploy. However, if you want to limit deployment to a specific datacenter or cluster, you can use a Deployment Profile to specify these constraints. If you are creating a profile for VMs in a Hyper-V environment, you should always select a Hyper-V datacenter or cluster for the profile.

Before creating the profile, you should know:

• The path to the VM package files (OVF or VHD) that will be copied to create the VM• Optionally, the name of the datacenter or cluster that you want to deploy the VMs to

To create a Deployment Profile:

1. Click the Create/Edit icon ( ) to open the dialog box.

2. In the dialog box, click the Add icon for the Deployment Profiles list.3. In the fields that appear, provide the settings for the Deployment Profile.4. Click Apply when you’re done.

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Discovered Deployment Data

Many hypervisor technologies support the use of source VMs as files that can be cloned, and the clones can be deployed as running VMs. For example, XenServer and CloudStack require the use of such source VMs to deploy new running VMs in their environments. When it performs discovery, Operations Manager identifies the source VM data on each hypervisor, and builds a corresponding set of VM Templates and Deployment Profiles.

NOTE: Hyper-V targets do not include discovered VM Templates and Deployment Profiles. You must create these files to deploy VMs in a Hyper-V environment. In the Deployment Profile, you must specify a Hyper-V datacenter.

For discovered VM Templates and Deployment Profiles, Operations Manager uses the following naming conventions:

• VM Template — These names begin with the IP address of the hypervisor that stores them• Deployment Profile — These names begin with the characters DEP- for “Deployment”, and if they match a

discovered template, the profile name mirrors the template’s name

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To view the settings for a discovered template or profile, open the template editor and select the item you want to inspect. The editor shows the template or profile in a dimmed view.

You cannot edit a discovered VM Template or Deployment Profile. This is to preserve the integrity of the template and profile in relation to the source VM data.

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The Optimize ViewThe Optimizer analyzes the current status of your infrastructure, looking for utilization patterns that indicate opportu-nities to achieve optimal performance and reduce operational risk. Using this analysis, it displays utilization charts and tables in a Summary panel. These summaries show metrics for your current configuration, as well as target metrics — the metrics you can achieve by performing the recommended actions to optimize system deployment.

Beneath the Summary panel, Operations Manager shows a To Do list of recommended actions (see To Do Lists - Main-taining QoS - page 41 for more information).

You can use the Optimizer to analyze and proactively address problems related to workload and resource distribution among physical hosts and storage devices. Further, Optimizer can automatically perform most recommended actions that do not include changes to physical configurations of hosts or storage.

Once you execute a recommended action, the environment changes. Operations Manager performs its analysis again and presents further actions you can perform to optimize your deployment. In this way, you can iteratively change your configuration and workload distribution to improve overall performance.

As Operations Manager monitors and analyzes your environment, it uses specified thresholds to identify risks and opportunities that it will consider for planning and optimization. You specify these thresholds in the Policy view. For more information, see Analysis - page 193.

Optimizer User InterfaceThe Optimize view displays the following panels:

• Navigation Panel - Optimize View - page 148 — Lists the physical devices in your inventory. Use this to set the scope of the view’s display.

• Utilization Summary Panel - page 148 — Charts and tables that show utilization metrics for the current deployment, and target metrics that you can achieve by resolving the identified problems.

• To Do Panel - page 150 — Actions you can take to achieve the target results.

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Figure 10-1. Optimizer Information Panels

Navigation Panel - Optimize View

For Optimizer, the Navigation Panel limits the scope of the data it displays. For example, if you select Summary in the Inventory tree, it shows data for all the physical and virtual devices in your inventory. If you select Physical Machines, then it only shows data for physical machines.

You can also use the Groups tree to focus on specific segments of your environment. For example, you can use a pre-defined group to focus only on the physical machines in your production environment. You can also use custom groups to set your own scope. (For more information about groups, see Group Management - page 186).

Utilization Summary Panel

The Summary panel shows the current and target metrics for your inventory. The scope of display for this panel changes depending on the selections you make in the Navigation panel.

Utilization Charts

These bar charts display utilization metrics for physical machines and storage devices. To see more information about each plot, hover over a bar to display its tooltip. The chart legend shows which metrics are plotted in the chart. In the following figures you can see charts for target metrics.

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Figure 10-2. Optimizer Utilization Charts

Customizing Charts

You can specify whether the chart shows utilization metrics or Utilization Index. For charts that show utilization met-rics, you can specify which metrics the chart shows.

To customize a chart, click its Customize button and make settings in the dialog box that appears. For more informa-tion, see Standard Panel Controls - page 26.

Figure 10-3. A Price Index Utilization Chart

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Utilization Grids

Utilization grids present current and target metrics in tabular form. You can see the actual values, and sort the tables by a given metric. For example, the following figure shows target metrics sorted by Utilization Index.

Figure 10-4. An Optimizer Utilization Table

To Do Panel

This panel displays actions you can execute to maintain optimal operating conditions. You can toggle the panel between a To Do list and a list of current risks to service performance. For a complete description of To Do panels, see To Do Lists - Maintaining QoS - page 41. This will show you how to:

• View recommended actions or risks to QoS and efficiency opportunities• Execute recommended actions• Understand action and risk categories

Note that as you make selections in the Navigation panel, the To Do list changes to show actions for the items you select.

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ReportsOperations Manager reports give you selective snapshots of the state of your environment.

• Host reporting provides comprehensive customizable reports to track, analyze and trend your physical and virtual infrastructure operations.

• Storage reporting provides reports to track, analyze and trend the storage resources in your environment.

The reporting utility includes a set of already defined reports, and you can design your own custom reports.

Standard reports are in PDF format, and you can also export XML versions to view as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. Operations Manager generates standard reports every day at a determined time (2:00 am on the Operations Manager system clock). With these reports you can see historical information about the state of your environment.

NOTE: Operations Manager must run for at least 24 hours before the it can generate standard reports.

You can view these reports in your web browser, or you can send them to a specified e-mail address. You can also add lists of subscribers to each report, including e-mail and reporting interval (daily or weekly). In this way, you can use Operations Manager reports to keep a specific group of people informed about the state of your environment.

When you create custom reports, Operations Manager generates them per your request. These reports can display five-minute data, hourly data, or data that is consolidated daily. The Reports page displays a customized report as HTML — you can print it or save it as PDF, CSV, or XML. You can also send custom reports to a specified address and set up subscriptions.

When you click the Reports tool ( ) or a report icon for an inventory item ( ), Operations Manager dis-plays the reporting utility in a new web page.

NOTE: The first time you launch the reporting page, you must provide login credentials. Us the same credentials that you provided to log into Operations Manager.

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Figure 11-1. The Reports GUI

In the Reports GUI, the Management Panel provides access to individual reports, and any tools you need to show or edit reports. This panel displays different tools, depending on the Report Tab you are using. Operations Manager maintains categories of reports, and you open or close accordion buttons to show/hide each category.

The View Panel shows whichever report you choose to view. When you create or edit a custom report, the Edit Panel displays in this location.

The Reports page includes three tabs that present the following capabilities:

• Standard Reports - page 152 — Use this tab to view the standard reports that Operations Manager generates. The reports that appear in this list are determined by settings in the VMTurbo Admin view (see Report Configuration - page 172).

• Custom Reports - page 154 — Use this tab to create custom reports, and show only the information you want.• Manage Subscriptions - page 159 — Use this tab to see at a glance who is subscribed to your reports, and add or

remove subscriptions.

Standard ReportsThis tab presents all the standard reports that Operations Manager generates. These reports include tabular data and charts to present the information. Each report heading in the Management Panel includes an icon to indicate the types of charts it includes.

The Standard Reports include categories such as:

• Capacity Management for Hosts— Available and utilized PM resource capacity• Capacity Management for Storage — Available and utilized storage capacity• Capacity Management for VMs— Available and utilized VM resource capacity

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• Workload Distribution — Resource utilization for physical and virtual machines• Machine and Data Store Summaries — Summarizes physical and virtual machines, generated on request• Group and Cluster Summaries — Summarizes PM and VM groups, generated on request

To view a report, choose the creation date you want. Then click:

• PDF to view the report as PDF in the View panel• Excel to generate the report in the Excel XML format and either save it to disk or view it in Microsoft Excel

To send a report to one or more people, click Send, and provide a comma-separated list of e-mail addresses.

Subscribing to Standard Reports

Operations Manager provides subscription, so that Operations Manager will send reports to given e-mail addresses at regular intervals. Note that there are two types of standard reports:

• Fixed reports - generated for a predetermined set of entities, such as all hosts, or all data stores• On-demand reports - generated for the set of entities that you specify

When you create a subscription, you specify:

• The recipient’s e-mail address.• The reporting period - how often to send the report.• For On-demand reports, the set of entities to include in the report subscription. Operations Manager generates a

separate report for each entity.

Fixed Reports Subscriptions

To create a subscription, click the Subscribe link that is in the report’s entry.

In the form that appears, provide the e-mail address and reporting period, then click Save.

To edit this subscription (for example, to change the reporting period), use the Manage Subscriptions tab (see Manage Subscriptions - page 159).

On-Demand Report Subscriptions

To create a subscription, click the Edit Subscriptions link that is in the report’s entry.

In the form that appears, provide the e-mail address and reporting period, choose the set of entities for the report, then click Save. To edit subscriptions, click the link and modify the table of subscriptions.

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For example, this figure shows an existing subscription for Jane Smith. The form is prepared to create 4 separate sub-scriptions for John Doe. When the user clicks Save, those reports will appear in the table.

Custom ReportsCustom reports show tabular data for the fields you specify. The Operations Manager database stores historical data in five-minute data records. At specified intervals, the database consolidates the five-minute data into hourly records, and it consolidates the hourly records into daily records. The administrator uses Retention Configuration - page 219 to manage how Operations Manager performs this consolidation.

To view, send, or subscribe to a custom report, click the associated link next to that report.

To edit a report, click Edit and make your changes. See Edit Custom Reports - page 155.

To create a report, click Add New at the bottom of the Management Panel. See Adding New Custom Reports - page 154.

Adding New Custom ReportsWhen you create a new report, you first choose what type of report to create.

To create a new Custom Report:

1. Display the Custom Reports tab.

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2. Click Add New.The New Custom Report page displays.

3. Either click Select to begin by selecting the type of report, or click Copy to base your work on a copy of an existing report.When you create a new report, you can either select from a list of report types, or you can choose to base your new report on a copy of an existing report.The report type determines the time range for the individual data records, as well as a focus on utilization or capacity data. For information about the time represented by each record, see Custom Reports - page 154 and Retention Configuration - page 219. To create a new report that is based on a report type, click Select for the report type you want to use. The New Custom Report page lists all the report types you can use for your report, with descriptions of each. To create a new report based on a copy of an existing custom report, click Copy for the report you want to copy. At the bottom of the New Custom Report page you will find a list of the existing custom reports, along with their descriptions.

When you click Select or Copy, the Edit Custom Reports - page 155 page appears. You make changes in this page to define the new report.

NOTE: The easiest way to learn how to create a custom report is to use a copy of an existing report. The reports utility ships with a number of reports you can use as examples.

Edit Custom ReportsThis page presents the tools to add fields to your custom report, specify sort order of the report table, and specify conditions that you can use to filter the table by field values. Changes you make on this page automatically apply to the current report — except for the Basic Properties form (report title, category, description, etc.), you do not need to apply any changes.

When you are finished specifying your report, click Done Editing. This takes you to the initial page of the Custom Reports tab, and displays the current report category.

If you no longer want the report in your collection, click Delete This Report. Note that if you’re creating a new report, that report exists in the collection even if you have made no changes whatsoever. If you change your mind and don’t want to create this report, click Delete This Report.

To create or edit a report, you perform the following tasks:

• Setting Basic Properties - page 156 — Provide information that describes the report, and specify the maximum number of records.

• Choosing Query Fields - page 156 — From the list of available fields for this report type, move fields into the Query Fields list. Each item in the Query Fields list will create a column in your report.

• Specifying Query Field Conditions - page 157 (optional)— For each field in the Query Fields list, you can specify conditions to filter the report by that field.

• Sorting Report Columns - page 158 (optional) — For each field in the Query Fields list, you can specify ascending or descending sort. You can also specify sort order — which column to sort first, then second, and so on.

NOTE: The easiest way to learn how to edit a custom report is to use a copy of an existing report. Reporter ships with a number of reports you can use as examples.

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Setting Basic Properties

The Basic Properties form provides a description of the report, and also limits the number of records the report will contain.

Figure 11-2. Basic Properties for a Custom Report

NOTE: When you make changes to the Basic Properties form, you must click Apply Form Changes to assign these changes to the report.

The Basic Properties form includes the following information. Make your settings and then click Apply Form Changes:

• Report Type — This shows the report type that is the basis for this report.• Title — Provide your own descriptive report title.• Category — Provide any name for a category. If you use an existing category name, this report will be a member. If

you provide an new name, you will create a new report category. You should use a descriptive name that can apply to multiple custom reports. When you open the Custom Reports tab, the Management Panel will include an accordion button for each report category you create.

• Short Description — The short description appears in the report as a tool tip when you hover over the title.• Long Description — The long description appears in the report, and also in the list of custom reports you can copy

when you create new reports (see Adding New Custom Reports - page 154). • Max Records — The default is 500. You should specify a reasonable number of records for your report. Too many

records make your report difficult to read. Generating a report with a very large number of records can monopolize Operations Manager resources.

Choosing Query Fields

The fields that you add to the Query Fields list will appear in the report’s table. To add an Available Field to the list, click the arrow for that available field.

Each field creates a column in the table — to move the column position to the left, click the query field’s up arrow. Use these arrows to arrange the layout of your report’s table.

To remove a field from the Query Fields list and return it to Available Fields, click the field’s Remove button.

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Figure 11-3. Query Fields for a Custom Report

Specifying Query Field Conditions

You can optionally specify a query condition for a given query field. In this way, you can filter the report to only show specific data. For example, the following figure shows an existing query for the instance_name field that limits it to the storage device named “iSCSISharedDisk1”. The figure also shows a new condition that gets storage latency data from the property_type field.

Figure 11-4. Editing a Field Condition

To add a condition, click the plus (+) icon. To remove an existing condition, click its minus (-) icon.

To specify a condition:

• Choose a Field Name — You can choose from the fields that are available for this report. • Choose an operation — For example, to match a string, choose “equal”.• Specify a value — You can provide a literal string or integer, or you can provide an SQL expression that returns a

value. For example, in the above figure the new condition will have the following expression for its value: date(date_sub(now(),interval 1 day)).

As you specify a condition for a field, it is useful to know what values are available in the database for a given field. The Value text box includes a Show Choices link that displays the Field Values Reference list. This list shows values for the database fields. This list shows live values that it gets from the database. For example, the list of values for the instance_name field shows the names of every entity that Operations Manager has discovered for your environment.

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Figure 11-5. Existing Field Values for Instance Name

To see a list of values for a field, click the arrow next to that field.

To use a value, you can copy it from the list and paste it in the Condition Value text field. For example, you could make a condition such as instance_name = datastore3 to limit your report to information about the entity named datastore3.

This Field Value Reference does not show values for calculated fields. The following is a table of these fields, and how the values are treated:

Sorting Report Columns

For any field in the Query Fields list, you can specify sort direction and sort order. When you generate a report, it will sort the columns of data according to the settings you make.

Field Name: Value Description

utilization A percentage, where 0.5 = 50%

stddev_property_valueavg_property_valuemin_property_valuemax_property_valueused_capacityavailable_capacitycapacity

A raw number, where the units of measure depend on the resource this field represents.

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Figure 11-6. Specifying Sort

By default, the query fields do not sort. To define sorting for a field, click the hyphen character in the Sort column. This changes the specification to ASC, for ascending sort. For a descending sort, click the Sort field again (click ASC) — this changes the specification to DSC. Click the field again to turn of sorting and change the specification to a hyphen char-acter.

To specify sort order, click the Up Arrow to move the entry up in the list. The Sort Order column indicates the ordering of each field.

Manage SubscriptionsThis tab shows you at a glance all the subscriptions to your standard and customized reports. The tab divides the list-ing by category, and gives you the tools to add or delete subscriptions for each report. The following figure shows that John Doe is subscribed to two daily reports, and Jane Smith is subscribed to one weekly report.

Figure 11-7. Manage Subscriptions

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To add a subscriber, click the PLUS button, and specify the following information:

• e-mail Address — The address of the report subscriber• Period — One of Daily, Weekly, or Monthly, to specify how often the subscriber receives the report• Day of Week — For a weekly period, the day of the week to send the report

Do delete a subscriber, click the MINUS button.

NOTE: You can specify the From address for emails to report subscribers. By default, Operations Manager uses the email address that is associated with the installed Operations Manager license. You can specify a From address as part of your current Email Notification policy. For more information, see Email and Trap Notification - page 216.

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The Admin ViewThe Admin view provides settings to manage Operations Manager sessions and perform other administrative tasks. In this view you assign the instances of any hypervisors Operations Manager will connect to as it manages your environ-ment. You can also use the Admin view to manage user accounts on Operations Manager, manage how Operations Manager retains system metrics and other data, manage custom groups, and perform maintenance tasks such as managing configuration files or refresh intervals.

The Configuration panel of the Admin view includes the following accordion buttons for specific administrative tasks:

• License Configuration - page 161Apply license keys to activate VMTurbo Operations Manager features.

• Target Configuration - page 163Use these tools to specify the list of VMware Virtual Center servers Operations Manager will connect to as it monitors your environment.

• User Authentication Configuration - page 169Create and manage user accounts for the Operations Manager.

• Report Configuration - page 172Specify which reports Operations Manager will generate daily.

• Maintenance - page 173Perform general tasks such as managing configuration files or refresh intervals.

License ConfigurationOperations Manager provides a range of capabilities, from observing your environment, to planning resource man-agement, to the automation of load balancing. The user interface presents these capabilities via different views and tools. The following table lists the main Operations Manager features for each edition of the product. The Community Edition features do not require licensing, but all other features do.

Key Feature Cloud Edition

Enterprise Edition

Community Edition

APM Module

Infrastructure Performance Visibility

Capacity and Performance Alerting

Management Reporting

Capacity Planning

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To activate features outside of the Community Edition, you must purchase licenses from VMTurbo. When you pur-chase a new product, VMTurbo sends the license key to you in an e-mail message.

To activate a license, Click License Configuration to display the form. Copy the license key and paste it into the text box, and then click Save.

Resource Optimization & Tuning

Problem Prevention

Automated Recommendations

Multi-hypervisor Management

API Integration & Support

Multi-tenant Management

Cloud-scale Management

Cloud Architecture Integration (vCD/CloudStack)

Guided Workflow for Onboardiong Workloads

Aggregated Views/Management of Distributed Deployments

Application Performance Visibility

Application Discovery and Policy

Application Load Balancing Integration

Key Feature Cloud Edition

Enterprise Edition

Community Edition

APM Module

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Figure 12-1. License Configuration Form

Target ConfigurationTarget Configuration determines which Virtual Management servers Operations Manager will monitor. To use Opera-tions Manager, you must install it in a network that has access to these servers. Then you can add the management servers as targets to your Operations Manager installation.

Target Configuration displays an Environment Summary panel and a list of current target servers. The environment summary charts the numbers of PMs, VMs, data stores, DataCenters, and network nodes in your environment.

The list of targets displays all the target servers Operations Manager currently monitors. Operations Manager cur-rently supports:

• Hypervisors- VMware vCenter- RHEV-M (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager) version 3.0- Microsoft Hyper-V- Citrix XenServer

• Cloud Managers- VMware vCloud Director- CloudStack

• Load Balancers- Citrix NetScaler

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Figure 12-2. Operations Manager Targets

This section includes the following topics. Unless there is a specific entry in this list for the target you intend to add, you can use the general instructions, Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164. You should review the general instructions in any case, for information about target credentials, removing, and editing tar-gets:

• Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers - page 164General instructions for working with target servers.

• Adding Hyper-V Servers as Targets - page 165• Adding CloudStack Servers as Targets - page 167• Adding vCloud Director Servers as Targets - page 167• Adding Load Balancers as Targets - page 168

Adding and Removing Target Virtual Management Servers

The target servers your Operations Manager installation will manage appear in the Target Configuration list. You can add, remove, and edit entries in this list. Note that the target server’s account must be configured with privileges that support the Operations Manager activities you want to perform. For example, the following list shows how vCenter privileges correspond to activities Operations Manager can perform:

• VCenter Administrator — Enables Operations Manager monitoring, simulation (what-if scenarios), and automation functions

• Read Only — Enables Operations Manager monitoring and simulation (what-if scenarios) only• Enable Datastore Browse — Enabling this property for the account gives Operations Manager the privileges it

needs to enable its storage management functionality

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To add a target server, click the Add button to open the Target Configuration dialog box. Provide the requested infor-mation, then click Save. Typical information you provide includes:

• Target Type — Choose among the supported VM Management technologies (Hypervisor, Cloud Management, or Load Balancer)After you choose the technology, then choose the specific target type for that technology. You may see a different target types, depending on your current license.

• Hostname or IP address — The address of the target server you want to add• User Name — A valid account username for the target server• Password — A password for the target server account• VC user name and password — Optional credentials for vCloud Director (if you do not provide these values,

Operations Manager will use the User Name and Password you provide for the server account)For vCloud Director, Operations Manager discovers the virtual datacenters that are managed by that target. However, ion order to discover and manage these vDCs, Operations Manager needs login credentials for each one. If your vDCs use the same credentials as the vCloud Director server, then you do not need to provide VC Username and VC Password. However, if the vDCs use different credentials, then you must provide them in addition to the vCloud Director credentials.

Figure 12-3. Adding a Load Balancer Target

To edit a target server entry, select the entry in the list and then click Edit. The Target Configuration Form opens, where you can make your changes.

To remove a target server, select the entry in the list and then click Delete.

Adding Hyper-V Servers as Targets

To add a Hyper-V server as a target, you must provide domain\username in the User Name field. In addition, the user that you specify must be one of the server’s WBEM Scripting Locater owners.

Each Hyper-V server requires specific permissions to allow management via WMI. These permissions are set in the host’s WBEM Scripting Locater registry key. To set the permissions, edit the registry key to add owners and grant them full control.

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To add an owner to the Hyper-V server’s registry key:

1. Launch regedit on that machine as Administrator2. Find the following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{76A64158-CB41-11D1-8B02-00600806D9B6} 3. Right click the key and choose Permissions 4. Click Advanced and display the Owner tab5. In the owners list, add the user you want to allow to connect to the machine 6. Click Ok 7. Highlight the user and grant Full Control

Once you have done this you can specify the Hyper-V server as an Operations Manager target, using credentials for an owner that has Full Control privileges.

Adding Multiple Hyper-V Servers

You can add Hyper-V targets as one at a time, by providing the host name or IP address of each. If you have many such Hyper-V servers, it is more efficient to use a single command to add all the Hyper-V servers that are in a cluster. To do this, provide the following information:

• Host Name or IP Address — Any valid address for a Hyper-V server within the cluster• Full Domain Name — The full domain name for the given cluster• Username and Password — Credentials that are valid for all the Hyper-V servers in the cluster (see above for

information about enabling WMI management)

Figure 12-4. Adding a Hyper-V Target

When you specify a full domain name for the cluster, Operations Manager discovers all the Hyper-V servers within that cluster and adds them as targets. In addition, Operations Manager monitors your environment and automatically adds new targets whenever it discovers a new Hyper-V server in the cluster.

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Adding CloudStack Servers as Targets

If you have installed the Cloud Edition Operations Manager license, you can add CloudStack servers as targets. To add a CloudStack server, you specify the following information:

• Host Name or IP AddressOperations Manager assumes port 443 — You can specify a different port in the address field.

• Username and PasswordThe credentials must be for a user who is a member of the ROOT account, and has a generated pair of API and Secret keys for CloudStack. Operations Manager uses these credentials to log onto the CloudStack server and discover the user’s key values.

NOTE: After setting a CloudStack server as a target, you must then set the hypervisors that server will manage as Operations Manager targets.

Adding vCloud Director Servers as Targets

If you have installed the Cloud Edition Operations Manager license, you can add vCloud Director (VCD) servers as tar-gets. To add a VCD server, you specify the login address and credentials for the VCD machine, as well as user name and password for the vCenter hypervisors managed by this VCD server.

Figure 12-5. Adding a vCloud Director Server

For a VCD target, Operations Manager discovers the virtual datacenters (VDCs) that are managed by that target. To discover all the resources in these VDCs, Operations Manager must access the vCenter hypervisors that manage them. However, in order to discover and manage these vCenter hypervisors, Operations Manager needs login credentials for each one. Operations Manager uses VC Username and VC Password to access these vCenter servers.

VC Username is an optional field. If you do not provide this value, Operations Manager will obtain the VC username that is specified in the vCloud Director’s configuration. Even if you leave this field blank, you must provide a valid pass-word for the obtained username.

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When specifying VC credentials, you should consider the following:

• Operations Manager uses the same credentials for all vCenter servers associated with this vCloud Director target. Operations Manager adds all these vCenter servers to the targets list.

• If the credentials are not valid for a vCenter Server, Operations Manager shows it in the list of targets, but it has a Target Status of Not Valid. (All the targets in the following figure are valid.)

Figure 12-6. Operations Manager Targets showing vCloud Director and associated vCenter Servers

Adding Load Balancers as Targets

Figure 12-7. Adding a Load Balancer Target

To add a load balancer as a target, you specify the IP address and credentials for the load balancer. Operations Man-ager discovers the service types that are assigned to that load balancer. These service types appear in the Operations Manager supply chain as virtual applications. To enable discovery of virtual applications, you must configure load bal-ancer discovery.

Configuring Load Balancer Discovery

After you add a load balancer as a target, you must configure Operations Manager to discover the virtual applications that load balancer manages. The steps to do this are:

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1. Specify discovery for the applications the load balancer will manageThe load balancer manages workload across instances of running applications in your environment. Operations Manager must be configured to discover and manage these running applications before it can recognize that they are managed by the load balancer. For example, To specify discovery of a specific application, you define its application signature and then provide credentials for the given protocol (WMI, SNMP, or JMX) that Operations Manager can use to access the VMs that host the application. For more information, see Application Discovery - page 207.

2. Assign application signatures to specific virtual applications Operations Manager discovers the virtual applications that the load balancer uses to manage applications. After you have specified signatures and discovery for the applications you want the load balancer to manage, you can then assign those application signatures to specific virtual applications. For more information, see Load Balancer Discovery - page 211.For example, assume the load balancer uses virtual applications named web and sql to manage web servers and SQL databases. Also assume that you have defined an application signature named IIS for IIS Web Server applications, and another signature named SQL for Microsoft SQL Server applications. In that case, you need to map the IIS signature to the web virtual application, and SQL to the sql virtual application. Now Operations Manager can discover these applications and represent them as the running components within the load balancer.

User Authentication ConfigurationAs an Operations Manager administrator, you can specify user accounts that grant specific access to Operations Man-ager. You assign a role to each account which determines the kind of access that user will have.

Operations Manager supports Active Directory user authentication as well as local authentication. For local authenti-cation, each user account is configured on Operations Manager. For Active Directory authentication, you specify the name of the Active Directory server that maintains the user database.

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Specifying an Active Directory Server

To specify an Active Directory server to use for authentication, provide the Active Directory server’s full domain name or IP address, then click Apply.

When creating a user account that is managed by Active Directory, you must specify the user name and the Active Directory domain. You can use the following formats for a user name:

• mydomain\theuser• [email protected]

When the user logs in, he or she must use the same format that you specified for the account. For this reason, we sug-gest that you use the same format for all user accounts that are managed by Active Directory.

Managing User Accounts

To create a new user account, click Add new user, and provide the following information. When you’re finished, click Create.

• Username and Password — The credentials the user must supply to log in.

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• Role — A profile that determines the user’s access privileges. The supported roles are:- observer — Can use Operations Manager Observe functions; the most restricted user role. You can specify a

scope to limit this user’s view of the environment (see Setting Scope for a User Account - page 171).- advisor — Can use Operations Manager Observe and Plan functions; can use more functions, but cannot use

Operations Manager to change the environment.- automator — Can use all the Operations Manager environment management functions, but cannot perform

administration tasks.- administrator — Can use all Operations Manager functions.

• Local — When enabled, this user’s authentication is performed by Operations Manager• Active Directory — When enabled, this user’s authentication is performed by the assigned Active Directory

service.

Figure 12-8. Specifying User Credentials

To edit or delete a user account, select the user in the list. Then make changes and click Update, or to remove the user you can click Delete.

Setting Scope for a User Account

When creating an account, you can define a scope for that user. The scope limits what the user can monitor. For exam-ple, assume you have created a group that contains only the physical machines that support this user’s VMs or appli-cations. You can then set the user’s scope to that group. When the user logs in, Operations Manager will only display information about those machines, and resources associated with them such as hosted VMs and data storage that they use. In the figure below, the scope is set to a specific virtual datacenter. The user’s account can only access resources associated with that datacenter. Dedicated customers can work with physical resources, but shared custom-ers are restricted from working with the physical infrastructure.

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Figure 12-9. Setting the User’s Scope

NOTE: If you want to use custom groups to set the scope, you must create the groups first, and then assign them to the user account. For more information, see Group Management - page 186.

Report ConfigurationOperations Manager generates standard reports every day at a determined time (2:00 am). As the Operations Man-ager administrator, you can limit report generation and specify exactly which standard reports to generate. Limiting report generation reduces the processing time spent on reports, and also reduces clutter in GUI when users want to review the reports. Changes you make in report configuration take effect for the next report generation cycle.

To configure report generation, expand the categories and set the check boxes for the reports you want. When you have made your settings, click Submit.

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Figure 12-10. Specifying Standard Reports

MaintenanceThe Maintenance panel provides tools to load configuration files onto your Operations Manager installation, set up the monitoring interval, export data for technical support, and check for Operations Manager updates. These tools are for advanced users. You should verify with VMTurbo technical support before you use them:

• The configuration file controls load specific configuration files onto your Operations Manager installation. For example, a support engineer might send you fresh configuration files as part of a solution to an issue. You would then load these files as instructed by the engineer.

• With the SMTP Relay section you can enable e-mailing VMTurbo reports to subscribers through your e-mail SMTP relay -- Click to enable SMTP and enter the address of your SMTP relay.

• If you are experiencing problems with Operations Manager, your support engineer might request that you export diagnostic data. The engineer will help you specify the correct data in the text box.

• You can check to see whether VMTurbo has released updates to the Operations Manager software, and apply them when appropriate.

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Figure 12-11. General Maintenance

Extra Configuration TasksThe following configuration tasks might be useful in your virtual environment:

• P2V — Planning Migration from Physical to Virtual - page 174• Custom Branding of Operations Manager - page 177

P2V — Planning Migration from Physical to Virtual

To migrate your physical environment to a virtual environment, you will identify how many virtual machines to deploy, and what hardware you need to serve the virtual environment. You can perform your own analysis to build up such a listing, or you can use existing services and utilities to generate a listing.

Once you have a list of the devices you need in your environment, you can use Operations Manager to plan out the distribution of workload and resources that will give you optimal performance. The Planner suggests deployments that assure QoS while making sure to utilize system resources as fully and efficiently as possible.

When you execute P2V, the planner creates a planning scenario that contains only the devices in your listing. It then uses the Economic Scheduling Engine to calculate the best placement of VMs among the physical hosts and data-stores. The Planner generates a To Do list of recommended actions to achieve this target deployment. When it’s com-pleted, you can view the results:

• As an XML listing of recommended actions• As a PDF report• As a plan in the Plan view of Operations Manager

Running a P2V Plan

To run a P2V plan:

1. Generate a CSV listing of virtual and physical devicesYou can generate the listing in a number of ways. You can turn to a vendor to analyze your current physical environment and generate a listing for you. Or you can perform your own analysis to generate the listing. Once you have a list of physical and virtual devices, plus their capacities and resource requirements, you must

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convert that data into a CSV file with the appropriate fields for each device. For a listing of the required fields and field order, see CSV Field Order - page 175.

2. Load the listing and run the planTo access P2V planning, navigate your browser to the following URL:<Operations ManagerAddress>/plan.html This opens the P2V page where you can provide the following:

The login credentials you give must be for a user account with a role that has access to run the Planner. To run the plan, click Plan P2V.

3. View the resultsAfter running the plan, the web page displays two links:- View Action Plan

Display the list of recommended actions as XML.- Generate Report

Direct Operations Manager to generate a PDF report outlining the plan results.To return to the original P2V page, click the browser’s Back button.To view results in the Plan view of Operations Manager, log into Operations Manager with the same credentials you used to run the P2V plan, then navigate to the Plan view.

CSV Field Order

The following table lists the fields in the CSV file. For each type of device you will add, some fields are mandatory, while the others are optional. The table lists the mandatory fields for each device type with an X. You can provide val-ues for the unmarked fields, but they are not mandatory.

Field Description VM PM Storage

Type The type of device — Can be one of VirtualMachine, PhysicaMachine, or Storage

X X X

Instances Number of instances to create X

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DataCenter Name of the datacenter that houses the device X

Cluster Name of the cluster the device belongs to X

Network Name of the network the device runs on X

Datastore Name of the datastore that services the device X

Host For a VM, the host physical machine

System Name The name for this device. X X X

Vendor The vendor name for this device X

Model The model for this device X

Description A string describing this device X

Price The price for this hardware device X

VCPU Count The number of cores on the physical machine X

Speed (Mhz) Core speed for this physical machine X

vMem Size (MB) The memory installed on this physical machine X

Storage Size (GB) Size of the datastore X

Network Interface Count The number of networks the device is connected to

Network Speed The bandwidth of the network serving this device

Network throughput The network throughput for the interface(s) on this physical machine (KBytes/sec)

X

Speed (MB/sec) ???

I/O speed (MB/sec) I/O speed for this device (KBytes/sec)

I/O Throughput Size I/O throughput bandwidth for this physical machine X

Rack Units Number of rack slots this physical device takes up

Weight (lbs) Weight of this physical device

Power (W) Power consumption of this physical device

Thermal (BTU/hr) Heat generated by this physical device

% CPU Used Percentage of CPU capacity granted to this VM instance X

Queue/CPU Percentage of CPU wait time capacity granted to this VM

% Mem Used Percentage of memory capacity granted to this VM instance X

FileSys Cache (MB) File system cache space capacity for this device

Page File% Percentage of paging capacity granted to this device

Field Description VM PM Storage

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Custom Branding of Operations Manager

Third-party distributors and service providers might want to customize the company brand name for Operations Man-ager. You can change the logos that appear in generated reports and in the GUI, so the product will present your brand’s logo. When you re-brand Operations Manager:

• You create one or more custom Operations Manager startup pages to display custom logos• The product GUI displays your logo• Generated reports display your logo, and your copyright statement

To re-brand the product, you will upload a ZIP archive that contains custom html files, and a set of logo image files. Operations Manager then copies the files into the proper locations. In addition, the Operations Manager installation stores a copy of your re-branding files so that your brand will remain even after executing a product update.

Re-Branding Operations Manager

To re-brand Operations Manager:

1. Create image files for your logos and copyright statement.Create the following files:- logo-<Brand_Name>.jpg logo.jpg (where <BrandName> is a custom name you use to identify your

brand) Used in the top-left of the application window. This image file must be 29 pixels high by 150 pixels wide. User interface display will have unpredictable results if you use a different sized image.

- VMTurbo.jpg Used in the Reports web page. The recommended size for this image is 31 pixels high by 250 pixels wide.

- vmt_logo.jpg Used in the Reports web page. The recommended size for this image is 31 pixels high by 250 pixels wide.

- logo.jpg Used in the headers of generated report pages. This image file must be 29 pixels high by 150 pixels wide.

- copyright.jpg Used to declare your copyright for generated reports. The recommended size for this image is 18 pixels high by 15 pixels wide. The image appears at the bottom-right of report pages.

2. Download the default re-branding package.You will use this package as a template for creating your own re-branding package. Navigate to HTTP://<appliance_IP>/update.html.

Paging (Pg/sec) Storage access speed X

I/O (Trans/sec) Percentage of IOps capacity granted to this VM instance X

I/O (MB/sec) I/O speed for this VM instance

% IO Percentage of I/O capacity granted to this VM instance X

% Storage Percentage of storage capacity granted to this VM instance X

Traffic (MB/sec) Network speed for this VM instance

% Network Percentage of network capacity granted to this VM instance X

Field Description VM PM Storage

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Provide a username/password for an administrator account, choose Download Existing Branding, then click Download. This downloads the file branding.zip. Save this file in your working directory. You should change the file name — for example, save it as branding_default.zip.NOTE: You get the default package only from an Operations Manager instance that has not already been re-branded. Be sure to save this default package for future reference.

3. Unzip the re-branding package and add your images to the file tree.You should see the following directory structure — add your files as indicated below in bold text:...\MyWorkingDir\srv...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps\persistence...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps\persistence\public...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps\persistence\public\images...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps\persistence\public\images\vmt_logo.jpg...\MyWorkingDir\srv\rails\webapps\persistence\public\images\VMTurbo.jpg...\MyWorkingDir\srv\reports...\MyWorkingDir\srv\reports\images...\MyWorkingDir\srv\reports\images\copyright.jpg...\MyWorkingDir\srv\reports\images\logo.jpg...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI\assets...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI\assets\images...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI\assets\images\logo-<BrandName>.jpg...\MyWorkingDir\srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI\UIMain.html

4. Rename the UIMain.html fileThis file presents the Operations Manager user interface, along with the branding logo. When your users launch your GUI, the URL they execute will terminate in this filename. For that reason, you should give a filename that represents your brand. For example, if you rename the file to UIMain_MyCompany.html, the URL customers

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execute will be HTTP://<Appliance_Address>/com.vmturbo.UI/UIMain_MyCompany.html. Note that you can make several copies of this file, each with a different name, and each that will use a different logo. In that case, you would:- Create different versions of logo-<BrandName>.jpg, and store them all in ...srv\www\htdocs\com.vmturbo.UI\assets\images\

- Give different customers the appropriate URLs, depending on which of these UIMain.html files you want them to open

5. Edit the UIMain.html title elementEdit this file to set the text that displays in the browser window’s title bar. Search for the <title> element, and make your changes. For example, change <title>VMTurbo - Converge,Control, Prevent</title> to<title>MyCompany - Converge,Control, Prevent </title>

6. Specify the logo for this UIMain.html fileThe logo is specified as a Flash variable. Search the file for the following statement:var flashvars = {}; Immediately after this line, specify the path to your custom logo as follows:flashvars.appImageFileName = "assets/images/logo-<BrandName>.jpg"; Assuming a logo file named logo-MyCompany.jpg, the resulting edit should appear as follows:var flashvars = {}; flashvars.appImageFileName = "assets/images/logo-MyCompany.jpg";

7. Save the file tree as a re-branding packageThe re-branding file tree that you have modified begins at the srv directory. Save this directory and all of its contents as a ZIP file named branding.zip.

8. Upload your custom re-branding package- Navigate to HTTP://<appliance_IP>/update.html and choose Upload New Branding- Provide a username/password for an administrator account- Click Browse and select the ZIP file you just created

Note: The file must be named branding.zip.- Click Upload

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This uploads the package to the installation. Operations Manager deploys these files so it can use the logos and copyright image that you provided. In addition, it stores the package so your brand will persist after you update to later versions of Operations Manager.

9. Save your branding packages for later reference.You should save the default branding package and your custom branding package, in case you need either of the sets of files at a later date.

Delivering the Re-Branded GUI

To deliver your branded GUI to your customers, have them execute the URL that calls your custom version of UIM-ain.html. For example, have your customers navigate to:HTTP://<Appliance_Address>/com.vmturbo.UI/UIMain_MyCompany.html

Updating Operations Manager

When you update Operations Manager, the updated version will still use your custom branding.

In some cases, an update includes changes to the UIMain.html file. In this case, your customized file will not include these changes. For your custom brand to use the latest changes in UIMain.html, you must recreate your custom UIM-ain.html files, based on the new version.

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The Policy ViewThe Policy view provides settings to control how the Operations Manager analyzes resource allocation, how it displays resource status, and how it recommends or performs actions. This view opens the Policy Editor that you can use to:

• Navigate to policy categories• Specify the scope of your settings

You can make global settings, or make settings for groups of machines or applications.• Enter setting values and apply your changes

To set a policy, you first select a category, and then navigate the Scope tree to set the scope of the policy change. The editor then displays the settings you can make. To edit a field you click in it and enter a value. When you have made the settings you want, be sure to click Apply Setting Changes.

For example, you can direct Operations Manager to automatically resize all VMs on a specific datastore. To do this, you would make a selection similar to the following figure, set the Resize value, and apply the change.

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Figure 13-1. Policy Scope Set to VMs on a Specific Datastore

Before you make policy settings, you should understand the scope of these settings, and how Operations Manager chooses among competing settings. For more information, see Policy Scope - page 182.

For information about policy categories, and the effects of their individual settings, see Policy Categories - page 186.

Policy ScopePolicy scope determines which resources will be affected by the settings you make. Scope can be either:

• Global Settings - page 182: Base settings for each category that apply by default to all resources• Group Overrides - page 183: Settings you apply to specific groups of resources

Global Settings

To make global settings, select a category, and if necessary select a resource type. The following image shows global settings for actions on Hosts.

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Figure 13-2. Global Policy Settings

These are the base settings for all the resources in your inventory. The settings you make on groups and individual resources will override these global settings.

Group Overrides

You can make settings to groups of resources that override the global settings for the resource type. (For information about defining custom groups, see Group Management - page 186.) As you make these settings, you should be aware of issues that can arise with:

• Conflicting Settings - page 183• Top-level Groups - page 185

Conflicting Settings

You can set overrides on any groups listed in the Profiles view. However, it’s possible that individual machines or appli-cations are in more than one group (see the following illustration).

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Figure 13-3. Same VM in Two Groups

In this case, you could set different overrides for the two groups, which can then conflict with each other in the same resource instance. For example, assume the following settings for VM Resizing:

• The Global setting is Manual • The override for VMs_Beta\Cluster-1 (in Virtual Machines by Cluster) is Automated • The override for VMs_dv VM Network (in Virtual Machines by Network) is Recommend

In this case, two different settings will be associated with the VM named Fedora 12. In all such conflicts, Operations Manager uses a tie-breaker to resolves the conflict. In the case of actions, the tie-breaker uses the most conservative setting. Following this example, any Resize actions for Fedora 12 will be of type Recommend, because that is the most conservative of the settings for this VM.

The documentation for each policy category describes the tie-breaker for that category.

NOTE: Tie-breakers only apply among override settings. For example, even if a global action setting is more conservative than its override, the override takes precedence. But among two or more overrides for the same setting, the tie-breaker comes into effect.

You can navigate to any instance in the scope tree, see its effective setting, and also see where that has been set. For example, the following figure shows that the action mode for Resize on Fedora 12 is Recommend, and it was set in the VMs_dv VM Network group.

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Figure 13-4. Viewing the Effective Setting for a VM

Top-level Groups

Within each policy category, the editor displays resources in groups. The following figure shows groups for actions on VMs.

Figure 13-5. Top-level Groups for Actions

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Notice that each category has top-level groups. For example, the Action category sets policies for actions on VMs, hosts, datastores, and virtual datacenters. For VM actions the scope tree shows:

• Virtual Machines• Virtual Machines by Cluster• Virtual Machines by Network• Virtual Machines by Storage

Each of these is a top-level group. Beneath each top level you can see the individual groups that contain the resources. It’s likely that most individual resources belong to all of the top-level groups. For example, it’s likely that a single VM belongs to Virtual Machines by Cluster and to Virtual Machines by Datacenter

You should not make settings to the top-level groups. You could make a top-level setting that always wins a tie-breaker, and so all the lower-level settings would never take effect. If you set overrides to a top-level group after lower-level settings were already made, you could inadvertently make all the lower-level settings ineffective.

NOTE: If you want to make settings to all resources (all PMs or all VMs, for example), then you should make global settings (see Global Settings - page 182). You should not make settings in a top-level group.

Policy CategoriesYou can specify the following categories of policies on this installation of Operations Manager:

• Group Management - page 186: Custom groups you define to manage resources—You can use groups to manage how Operations Manager uses policy settings

• Workload Placement - page 191: Imported and user-created workload placement policies that restrict how Operations Manager calculates workload distribution

• Analysis - page 193 — Constraints that Operations Manager can use to determine whether a resource is operating optimally

• Action Modes - page 200 — How Operations Manager handles the execution of actions in the To Do list (automatic, manual, recommend, or disable)

• Application Priority - page 205 — Mission critical or normal• Discovery Policies - page 207 — How to discover Windows applications, and how to recognize vCenter tags• Infrastructure Cost - page 214 — Group hardware devices by cost so you can use those criteria for placement

policies• Email and Trap Notification - page 216 — Notification policies for Operations Manager events• Retention Configuration - page 219 — Policies to retain historical data

Group Management

Groups assemble collections of resources for Operations Manager to monitor and manage. When using the Naviga-tion Panel, or when or setting scope, you can select groups to focus on those specific resources. For example, if you have a number of VMs devoted to a single customer, you can create a group of just those VMs. When running a Plan-ner scenario you can set the scope to work with just that group.

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Operations Manager ships with some groups already defined. With Group Management you can also create your own groups. Operations Manager supports two custom-grouping methods:

• By criteria — You create dynamic groups that are defined by specific search criteria. You can group services according to naming conventions (all VM names that start with “ny”), resource characteristics (all physical machines with four CPUs), or other criteria such as time zone or number of CPUs. These groups are dynamic because Operations Manager updates the group as conditions changes.

• By manual selection — You create static groups by selecting the specific group members.

Figure 13-6. Editing Groups

When working with groups you can:

• Create new groups — click the PLUS icon• Edit an existing group — select a group and make changes to its properties• Delete an existing group — select a group and click the X icon

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Creating a Group

When you click the PLUS icon, the Group Builder dialog box appears. To create a group:

1. Name the group.

Figure 13-7. Naming a New Group

2. To specify the grouping criteria, display the Members tab.

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Figure 13-8. Specifying Group Content

3. Choose a grouping method.If you group by criteria, the group will contain all the items that match your search criteria. As Operations Manager discovers new entities that match your criteria, it will add the entities to the group. To manually select entities, you search for items and add specific matches to the Custom group content list.

4. Define the group members You set up searches to find the group items. For search criteria, you choose the type of entity to search for. When you choose an item in the Search criteria list, the search field updates to accept the appropriate input. The search field accepts regular expressions. For help on regular expression syntax, click the QUESTION MARK button.When you have entered your search criteria, click Find matches to see what entities your search specifies. If you enabled the Group By Criteria grouping method, these items will be the members of your group. If you enabled the Manually Select grouping method, you can drag items from the match list to the Custom group content list.

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5. Click Create Group.Before you create the group, you can make settings for that group, including whether to enable or disable reports for that group (see Group Settings - page 190, below). You can always return to a group and edit it to change these settings at any time. Also, you can specify these settings directly, choosing groups to limit the scope of your changes. For more information, see Policy Scope - page 182. You can also use the Segment tab to see a listing of workload placement policies that include this group in their definitions (see Workload Placement - page 191).

Group Settings

As you create a group, you can specify the settings that apply to that group. You can also edit these settings at any time. The settings for a group depend on the type of resource in the group. For example, in a group of PMs you cannot set constraints that apply to storage devices. For a listing of the settings you can apply to a group, see:

• Analysis - page 193• Action Modes - page 200• Application Priority - page 205• Discovery Policies - page 207

For each group, you can also enable or disable reports. Reports are enabled by default — if you want to exclude a group from reports, make the setting in the group definition.

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Figure 13-9. Disabling Reports for a Group

Workload Placement

For planning and optimization, Operations Manager makes recommendations to move VMs, and can execute these moves automatically. When calculating VM moves, Operations Manager respects cluster boundaries, networks, and provisioned data stores. For planning, you can also specify the explicit scope of a scenario as you create it (see The Plan View - page 97).

Workload placement policies provide you with finer control over how Operations Manager calculates these moves. From this tab you can:

• Enable/disable imported placement policies that are specified in your VCenter environment• Create segment policies that restrict workload placement according to specific rules

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Importing Workload Placement Policies

The hypervisors that you set as targets can include placement policies of their own. Operations Manager imports these placement policies, and you can choose to enable or disable them. By default, Operations Manager enables imported placement policies. (For information about target hypervisors, see Target Configuration - page 163.)

For example, VCenter servers can include Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) rules that determine placement of VMs among physical hosts. For each DRS rule, you can specify whether to enable or disable it in Operations Manager.

To see the list of imported placement policies for your environment, expand the Imported Placement Policies folder.

To enable or disable a policy, select it in the list and modify its settings.

Figure 13-10. Enabling an Imported Placement Policy

Creating Workload Placement Policies

You can create Operations Manager Segment policies to further control how Operations Manager calculates the placement of VMs among your physical hosts and data stores. You can create policies that have these and other effects:

• Restrict the number of VMs that can use a given data store• Limit VM mobility by restricting a collection of VMs to a specified cluster or group of hosts• Implement system redundancy by specifying that certain VMs always run on different hosts

For the VMs in a selected group, you can create rules of the following types:

• VMs must not run on the same HostNo more than the specified number of VMs can run on the same host.

• VMs must not run on the same Host, out of the given PM groupFor hosts from a specified PM group, no more than the specified number of VMs can run on the same host.

• VMs must not be connected to the same Storage deviceNo more than the specified number of VMs can use the same storage device.

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• VMs must not be connected to the same Storage, out of the given group of Storage devicesFor storage devices from a specified group, no more than the specified number of VMs can use the same device.

To create a segment rule, click the Plus icon (+) to display the Policy Builder. In the Policy Builder:

• Name the segment rule• Choose the workload - select a VM group to determine the placement of these group members

Click the PLUS icon to open a group browser, and double-click the group you want to choose.• Choose the placement - select a group of physical devices to determine how the VMs can be placed on these

membersClick the PLUS icon to open a group browser, and double-click the group you want to choose.

• Turn on the Limit workload check box to enable the rule and limit the workload to the target placement group• Optionally limit the number of VMs to place on each physical device• Click Create Rule

For example, the following figure shows a policy for placing VMs devoted to databases. For all the VMs in the cluster set in the Choose Workload list, the policy limits placement to one VM per physical host in the custom group, DB_Hosts.

Figure 13-11. Workload Policy Builder

Analysis

As Operations Manager gathers metrics, it compares the metric values against specified constraint and capacity set-tings to determine whether a metric exhibits a problem, how to recommend a problem resolution, and so on. Opera-tions Manager maintains analysis settings for Host and Storage devices.

The following figure shows override settings for all NAS storage devices. To make settings for all storage devices in the environment, you should make global settings for Analysis > Host or Analysis > Storage (see Global Settings - page 182).

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Figure 13-12. Making Settings for a Storage Group

Tie-break Results

When the same resource instance has conflicting settings, the most conservative setting wins:

How Operations Manager Responds to Analysis Settings

Operations Manager compares utilization metrics in your environment to the operational constraints you specify. It uses that comparison to trigger problem notifications and to classify the problems. The values you set here specify maximum values for each metric. Based on those settings, Operations Manager classifies these metrics as follows:

Setting type: Most conservative is:

Utilization, throughput, and upper bounds Lowest value

Latency and lower bounds Highest value

If the value is: The classification is:

More than 80% of the constraint setting Critically overutilized

More than 60% and less than 80% of setting Overutilized

Less than 10% and more than 5% of setting Under utilized

Less than 5% of analysis setting Critically under utilized

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Load Balancer Settings

To manage load balancers, Operations Manager tracks transactions that occur on the virtual applications (vservers) each load balancer manages. You can set the capacity of transactions per second as a policy for virtual applications. Operations Manager will list transaction utilization as a percentage of the capacity you set.:

Operational Settings

Hardware Costs

For planning and reporting, Operations Manager uses these values to estimate the cost of changes to your hardware inventory. The following table shows the default settings for hardware cost:

Heatmap Critical Utilization

Operations Manager compares utilization metrics in your environment to the operational constraints you specify (see Utilization Thresholds - page 198 and Storage Settings - page 199). It uses that comparison to set colored notifications in heatmaps, trigger problem notifications, and to classify the problems it finds. The values you set here define what Operations Manager considers critical violations for different metrics.

For example, assume you define critical as 80% for a metric. Based on the settings you make for the monitored met-rics, Operations Manager then classifies these metrics as follows:

For under utilization, assume you define critical as 10% for a metric. Based on the settings you make for the monitored metrics, Operations Manager then classifies these metrics as follows:

Attribute Default Value

Virtual Application Transaction Capacity 1000

Attribute Default Value

Host Hardware Cost 9000

Cost of CPU per unit 200

Cost of memory per GB 50

Cost of storage per TB 50

If the value is: The classification is:

More than 80% of the constraint setting Critically overutilized

More than 60% and less than 80% of setting Overutilized

If the value is: The classification is:

Less than 10% and more than 5% of setting Under utilized

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The following table shows the default settings for critical utilization:

Reporting Upper and Lower Bounds

The following table shows the default settings for operational constraints on virtual machines.

Upper bounds limit the amount of a physical resource that will be devoted to a VM consumer. For example, with a VMem upper bound of 85 Operations Manager will never devote more than 85% of physical memory to VMs running on a host. This ensures the host machine has enough physical memory to perform core operations.

Lower bounds identify the percentage utilization that Operations Manager will consider under utilized. For example, with a VMem lower bound of 10, if utilization falls below 10% Operations Manager will consider migrating consumers to another host and suspending the under utilized physical machine.

Aggressivenes Factor

This setting determines how aggressively the appliance will be in recommending changes to your environment. The lower the value, the more aggressive it will be.

The default value for this setting is 0 (zero).

Less than 5% of analysis setting Critically under utilized

Attribute Default Value

Critical Utilization Percent for IOPS 80

Critical Utilization Percent for CPU 80

Critical Utilization Percent for Memory 80

Critical Utilization Percent for IO Throughput 80

Critical Utilization Percent for Net Throughput 80

Critical Utilization Percent for Swapping 80

Critical Utilization Percent for Latency 80

Critical Utilization Percent for Storage Amount 80

Attribute Default Value

VMem Utilization Upper Bound 85

VCPU Utilization Upper Bound 85

VMem Utilization Lower Bound 10

VCPU Utilization Lower Bound 10

VStorage Utilization Upper Bound 85

If the value is: The classification is:

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Resize Recommendation Settings

When Operations Manager recommends changes to virtual resources, it uses increments as it calculates how much to raise or lower the given value, and a Rate of Resize to specify how many increments to apply in a single resize action.

NOTE: For CloudStack environments, resize is determined by templates. Resize Increments have no effect. However, Rate of Resize can affect which template Operations Manager will use for a resize operation. Assume an environment with small, medium, and large templates, and a VM that is set to small needs to be resized to large. If the Rate of Resize is set to Low, Operations Manager might try the medium template first. However, if the setting is High, then Operations Manager will probably use the large template for the initial resize operation.

Resize Increments

The increments specify how many units to add or subtract when resizing the given resource allocation for a VM. For example, it makes sense to change VMEM by steps of 1024 MB at a time, but for VStorage it’s better to make changes by 0.5 GB steps.

The following table shows the default settings for the Resize increments:

NOTE: For VMem, you should not set the increment value below 1024. Virtual machines rely on VMem to start up and run. For a VM that is under utilized, Operations Manager will reduce VMem allocation by the increment amount, but it will not leave a VM with zero VMem. For example, if you set this to 512, then Operations Manager could reduce the memory for a VM to 512 Kb. It’s possible that If the increment is too low, then Operations Manager might allocate insufficient VMem for the machine to operate.

Rate of Resize

When resizing resources for a VM, Operations Manager calculates the optimal values for VMEM, VCPU and VStorage. But it does not necessarily make a change to that value in one action. Operations Manager uses the Rate of Resize set-ting to determine how to make the change in a single action, as follows:

• Low Change the value by one increment, only. For example, if the resize action calls for increasing VMEM, and the increment is set at 1024, Operations Manager increases VMEM by 1024 MB.

• Medium Change the value to be halfway between the current value, and the optimal value. For example, if the current VMEM is 2 GB and the optimal VMEM is 8 GB, then Operations Manager will raise VMEM to 5 GB (or as close to that as the increment constant will allow).

• High Change the value to be the optimal value. For example, if the current VMEM is 2 GB and the optimal VMEM is 8 GB, then Operations Manager will raise VMEM to 8 GB (or as close to that as the increment constant will allow).

The default setting for Rate of Resize is Medium.

Attribute Default Value

Increment constant for VMem used value [MB] 1024

Increment constant for VCPU used value [MHz] 1024

Increment constant for VStorage used value [GB] 100000

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Utilization Thresholds

Operations Manager uses the thresholds you set for specific metrics when it analyzes your environment and recom-mends changes that will achieve the optimal targets.

The following table shows the default settings for operational constraints on physical machines.

Advanced

The advanced settings adjust the overall analysis performed by the economic scheduling engine. You can adjust how Operations Manager calculates recommended actions, as well as the optimal utilization Operations Manager will try to achieve for physical devices.

Calculation Adjustments

The Time Range Constant sets the number of days Operations Manager will look into the past when making recom-mendations to decrease the resources available to a VM or application. Operations Manager makes suggestions to reduce resources on a daily basis. (Note that Operations Manager can make recommendations to increase resources every 10-minute cycle. For these recommendations it looks back 24 hours.)

Weights for peaks and averages specify how much peak and average metric values will affect calculations. For exam-ple, a high weight for peaks means that peak metric values are highly significant when calculating over utilization. However, you might have an application that uses 100% CPU for very short transient events. To suppress the way Operations Manager responds to these transient events, you can set a lower value for Weight for Peaks.

The following table shows the default settings for overall Operations Manager settings.

Attribute Default Value

Max Storage IOPS Utilization 100

Max Storage Latency Utilization 100

Max Host CPU Utilization 100

Max Host Memory Utilization 100

Max Host IO Throughput 20

Max Host Net Throughput 20

Max Host Swapping Utilization 100

Max Storage Latency Utilization 100

Attribute Default Value

Time Range Constant 100

Weight for Peaks 99

Weight for Averages 50

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Target Utilization

When you provide values, these settings specify the optimal target you want for utilization of system resources. Oper-ations Manager will analyze current utilization and recommend or perform changes that seek to achieve the target you set here. Use these settings to specify the balance you want between performance (quality of service) and effi-ciency.

If you set the balance in favor of efficiency, Operations Manager tends to place more VMs on fewer physical hosts, and to give storage capacity from fewer data stores. As a result, high utilization can have more impact on QoS. With a bal-ance in favor of performance, Operations Manager tends to spread virtual loads across more physical devices.

NOTE: The setting for Target Utilization can have an effect on plans that you run. If you restrict planning to the current hardware inventory (don’t add new hardware), then you should always set a value of zero for Target Utilization.

The default value for Target Utilization is 70, with a range of 10. When you provide a Target Utilization value, Opera-tions Manager varies market calculations in an attempt to arrive at the zone you specify. Note that as you move the sliders, a tooltip displays the numerical value of the setting you make.

For example, assume you want utilization of your resources to center on 75%, with a tolerance of plus/minus 10%. In other words, you consider 65% to be under-utilization, 85% to be over-utilization, and 75% to be optimal utilization. To achieve that, you would specify:

• Target Utilization = 75• Range for Target Utilization = 20

The following table shows the default settings for target utilization:

Storage Settings

Storage settings are measured against the storage capacity. For capacity, you specify the IOPS (input operations per second) and latency in ms that your storage devices can support. Then the constraint settings identify what percent-age of this capacity Operations Manager should consider when triggering problems. For example, assume IOPS Capac-ity of 500, and Latency of 1000 ms. If a storage device has 250 IOPS, then it is at 50% of capacity for that metric. Likewise, if the storage latency is 750 milliseconds, then the latency is at 75% of capacity.

The setting for Directories to Ignore specifies directories that Operations Manager will not consider when looking for wasted data storage space. For information about how Operations Manager shows wasted storage, see Wasted Stor-age - page 59 in the Home view.

Attribute Default Value

Target Utilization 70

Range for Target Utilization 10

Attribute Default Value

IOPS Capacity 500

Storage Latency

1000

Directories to Ignore

\.dvsData.*|\.snapshots.*|\.vSphere-HA.*|\.naa.*|\.etc.*|lost\+found.*

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Action Modes

When Operations Manager uncovers potential bottlenecks, over provisioning, or other issues, it can then identify and perform actions that will prevent those issues from occurring, and keep the environment in the Optimal Operating Zone. You can specify action modes that determine how Operations Manager handles the actions it identifies for datastores, hosts, and VMs.

Supported Actions

Operations Manager doesn’t automate the same actions equally for all hypervisors. For example, assume you set the Suspend action to be automated for all VMs. In that case, Operations Manager can automate suspension for VMs managed by vCenter and XenServer, but it cannot automatically suspend VMs managed by Hyper-V. Note that Opera-tions Manager will perform automation for the VMs that it can, and recommend suspension for Hyper-V VMs.

The following table lists actions Operations Manager supports on each hypervisor, showing whether it can automate the actions, or only recommend them.

indicates full automation support

indicates recommended-only actions

Host

Action vCenter XenServer Hyper-V VCD

Start

Suspend

Remove (Terminate)

Provision

VM

Action vCenter XenServer Hyper-V VCD

Start

Move

Suspend

Remove (Terminate)

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Note that for VCloud Director datacenters Operations Manager only supports resize actions. However, it can automate actions for the underlying VMs and hosts because they are managed by vCenter.

Action Mode Settings

For each action Operations Manager can perform you can specify the action mode, or how it will handle the action. Operations Manager supports the following action modes:

• Disabled — Do not recommend or perform the action• Recommended — Recommend the action so a user can perform it using the given hypervisor or by other means • Manual — Recommend the action, and provide the option to perform that action through the VMTurbo

Operations Manager user interface• Automated — Operations Manager performs the action automatically

The following figure shows override settings for a group of Development hosts. In this case, suspend actions for hosts are set to manual — Operations Manager will recommend suspending in the To Do list, and you can apply that action (direct Operations Manager to execute the action on your command). To set modes for all hosts in the environment, you should make global host settings for the given actions (see Global Settings - page 182).

Change (Move toDifferent Storage)

Add Storage

Remove Storage

Reconfigure(Change network and storage configurations)

Resize(Change VCPU and memory capacities)

Storage

Action vCenter XenServer Hyper-V VCD

Remove (Terminate)

Provision

VM

Action vCenter XenServer Hyper-V VCD

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Figure 13-13. Setting Action Modes for a Group

To get the best results from Operations Manager’s Intelligent Workload Management, you should set as many actions as possible to Automated. In that case, you should set the actions to Automated at the global level. If some clusters run applications that are highly critical, you can override the global setting for those clusters, and set them to Manual.

Scheduling Action Restriction Windows

For some clusters or groups of devices, you might want to automate actions, but only during off-peak hours. Opera-tions Manager includes a scheduling utility that you can use to specify time windows when you can restrict the action mode for a given scope of devices. You can use this to allow or disallow automation for a given window of time.

NOTE: The Operations Manager Economic Scheduling Engine continually calculates actions that cause your environment to converge on the Optimal Operating Zone. These actions are in response to the environment at a given point in time. When you restrict the automation of a given action to a certain time window, Operations Manager will only calculate and perform actions that are appropriate for the environment during that scheduled window. You should review manual actions during time periods when automation is restricted, so you can manually adjust the environment in response to peak states.

By default, the global settings for all actions have no restriction windows set for them. If you globally set the VM Move action to Automated, then VMTurbo Operations Manager will automatically execute any recommended VM move actions whenever they arise — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Action restriction widows modify this, for global policies or as overrides to global policies scoped to specific groups. (For information about policy scope, see Global Settings - page 182.)

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For example, assume you want to always automate Resize for all but the most critical VMs. You would set Resize VMs to Automated at a global level. Then for a critical cluster, you could set a restriction window that overrides the auto-mation (sets Resize to Manual) during peak hours (9:00 to 5:00 m-f).

You can also restrict action modes in reverse fashion. For example, if you want to automate only one set of VMs, you can set Resize to Manual at the global level, and for one cluster you can schedule it to be Automated for a given time window.

Creating a Simple Action Restriction Window

To schedule a time window for an automated action:

1. Set the scope for this action.You can set global scope, or scope for a given cluster.

2. Open the restrictions windows panel and click Create New Policy.You can select the window start date beforehand in the calendar, or set it as you create the policy.

3. Specify the settings for this restriction window.The date range determines how many days the window will “open”, or in be in effect. You should keep the following points in mind:- A non-recurring window has a start date, and no end date. The window will open for the day you specify as the

start date.- For recurring windows you specify a date range. The window will open during times within that range. - For monthly recurrence, the window will open one day each month — on the day you set for the Start Date. But

the window recurrence remains in effect until the End Date. For example, if you specify the 1January 1st 20123 for the start date, and the December 31st 2013 for the end date, the window will open on the first day of each month for that year.

For any given day, the window can be in effect from 00:00 through 24:00. If you want an action mode to span two days, you must specify two restriction windows. For example, to enable automation from 22:00 to 06:00, you must create two windows — On from 22:00 to 24:00, and another from 0:00 to 06:00.Note that you can set different label colors for your restriction windows. This is a good way to track windows of a similar type. For example, you could use red for windows on critical clusters, and green for windows on prototyping clusters.

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4. When you have the settings you want, click Create.The restriction window appears in the calendar. When you select a day in the calendar, the Action Restriction Windows list shows all the items for that day. Hover over an item to display details in a tooltip.

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Tie-break Results

It’s possible that different restriction windows will affect the same resource instance. In that case the most conserva-tive setting wins. The following list is from most conservative to most aggressive:

• Disabled• Recommended• Manual• Automated

Application Priority

Application priority determines the conditions under which Operations Manager recommends to suspend or termi-nate a VM. Suspending a VM means powering it down, but leaving it in the in the hypervisor’s list of managed VMs. Terminating a VM means removing it from the hypervisor. When Operations Manager recommends that you termi-nate a VM, this indicates that the VM is dormant, and no applications are running on it.

NOTE: Your environment may include some VMs that you never want to terminate. You might think that you can set all applications to Mission Critical as a way to direct that Operations Manager never recommends termination. In fact, Operations Manager can recommend that you terminate a dormant VM that has Mission Critical applications on it. If you want to never terminate, then you can disable the Terminate action for all VMs or for a group of VMs. For more information, see Action Modes - page 200.

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Operations Manager monitors resource consumption, and works to keep Mission Critical applications running. If a Mission Critical application needs resources and none are immediately available, Operations Manager may recom-mend suspending non-critical VMs to free up resources and make them available to the critical application.

You can specify the priority for applications to be:

• Mission CriticalThe focus of Operations Manager is to keep the applications running. For example, it will never suggest suspending the VM that hosts a mission critical application.

• NormalOperations Manager may suggest suspending a VM that hosts normal applications to free up resources that a mission critical application might need.

• LowOperations Manager does not consider the needs of low priority applications when calculating the optimal operating zone for your environment.

You specify application priority to groups. The most important groups for application priority are:

• ApplicationsEach group is named for a discovered application, and contains all the instances of that named application.

• Physical MachinesFor each physical machines, all the applications running on that machine.

If a VM has any Mission Critical applications on it, Operations Manager will always try to find resources for that VM, and will never recommend suspending it in order to free up resources. Operations Manager can recommend termi-nating a VM with Mission Critical applications, if the VM is truly dormant.

For a VM with all Normal applications, if the VM uses resources that are needed elsewhere, then Operations Manager may recommend suspending this VM. For a VM with Low-priority applications, it can recommend to terminate the VM to free up resources.

By default, all applications are Mission Critical (see the Global Setting for Application Priority).

NOTE: For each VM Operations Manager defines a Guest Load application. The Guest Load represents all consumption that Operations Manager cannot assign to a specific application. This includes processes for the VM’s operating system. Operations Manager ignores Guest Load priority when deciding how to free up resources. However, if a VM has only the Guest Load application on it, and that application is set to Low, then Operations Manager may recommend terminating that VM.

The following figure shows override settings for the applications hosted by use a specific physical machine. To set pri-ority for all applications in the environment, you should make global settings for Application Priority (see Global Set-tings - page 182).

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Figure 13-14. Setting Priority for the Applications on a Specific Host

Tie-break Results

When the same resource instance has conflicting settings, the most conservative setting wins. The following list is from most conservative to most aggressive:

• Mission Critical• Normal• Low

Discovery Policies

Operations Manager sweeps through your environment to discover the inventory items (applications, VMs, hosts, data stores, etc.) in your environment. It performs initial discovery when you first start it and add target hypervisors, and events that can change the inventory trigger subsequent discovery. You can set policies to direct:

• Application Discovery - page 207 - Application Signatures (how Operations Manager recognizes application processes), and credentials to access the VMs that host the applications

• Load Balancer Discovery - page 211 - Mapping application signatures to virtual applications• vCenter Annotation Grouping - page 212 - The vCenter tags to use for grouping

Application Discovery

Operations Manager discovers applications via WMI (for applications on Windows VMs) and SNMP or JMX (for appli-cations on other VMs).

NOTE: For SNMP monitoring, Operations Manager receives trap messages via port 162.

For Operations Manager to perform application discovery, it requires:

• The appropriate agent running on the given VM- For VMs running Windows, the VM must have a WMI agent running on it- For SNMP discovery, VMs must have a running SNMP agent- For JMX discovery, the JVM on the virtual machine must be started with a jmxremote port

• VM Access Credentials - page 209 for the given protocol (WMI, SNMP, or JMX)

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• Application Signatures - page 208 to identify the applications you want to discover and manageApplication signatures identify running processes that belong to a specific application. Operations Manager ships with a default set of application signatures — you can add others to the list.

Default Application Discovery

By default, Operations Manager discovers the following applications:

Application Signatures

An application signature is a search string that matches process names. A single application may launch a number of processes to perform its job. Rather than tracking each process as a separate application, Operations Manager can group these processes and monitor the group as a single application.

Each process must have a unique name, but each process name typically includes part of the name of the main appli-cation, or some other text that identifies it as part of the overall application. This name that’s shared in all the process names is the application signature.

Note that the same application signature is valid for WMI and SNMP application discovery. When you make the list of signatures, you do not need to identify what protocol will be used to monitor them. As Operations Manager scans a VM for application processes, it uses the full list of signatures, no matter what the operating system is for that VM.

To specify an application signature:

1. Select Application Discovery to display the editor. 2. Create a new application signature.3. Provide an application name.

Application names should be unique. If you provide a name that is identical to a default application name (as described in Default Application Discovery - page 208), then Operations Manager will use your custom application signature when grouping application processes.

4. Enter regular expressions to identify the characters that must be in a Windows process name. You can also specify characters that must not be in the process name. Any process name that satisfies the application signature identifies a member of the given application. For example, assume the following strings:- Match: s.* - No-match: sq.* In this case, the signature would match all process names that begin with 's', except those that begin with 'sq'.

Application Name Description

LSASS Microsoft Active Directory services

IIS Microsoft Internet Information Services

XenDesktop Citrix XenDesktop

VMView VMWare View

MSSQL Microsoft SQL Server

SharePoint Microsoft Sharepoint Server

Guest Load The resources that Operations Manager has not assigned to any specific application (for more information, see Guest Load - page 78)

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Figure 13-15. Creating Application Signatures

VM Access Credentials

To discover and monitor applications, Operations Manager uses WMI on VMs running Windows, and SNMP or JMX on other VMs. You must provide valid credentials for any of the VMs that host applications you want to monitor.

NOTE: For WMI application discovery and management, the given target hypervisor requires specific permissions that allow WMI access. For more information, see Adding Hyper-V Servers as Targets - page 165.

You select VM groups and set specific credentials for those VMs. You can select a top-level group to provide one set of credentials for all the VMs in the inventory, and then select lower-level groups to override the more general settings (for more about settings overrides, see Policy Scope - page 182).

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Note that you set credentials to groups of VMs, not to individual VMs. To discover applications on all the VMs in a group, all those VMs must honor the same credentials. If the VMs in default groupings don’t all have the same cre-dentials, you can create custom groups to keep the same credentials together. For information about creating custom groups, see Group Management - page 186.

You can specify WMI, SNMP, and JMX access credentials for the same group. For example, if the group includes VMs running Windows and Linux, you should specify both a valid windows admin account, and a valid SNMP community. For all VMs in the group, if they are running Windows then they must honor the provided admin credentials; for other operating systems, they must honor the provided SNMP community.

The settings to make are:

• Username: A user with admin rights on the machine• Password: That user’s password• SNMP Community: A community string that is valid on the machine• JMX Protocol: Can be RMI or JMXMP• JMX Port: The port number of the jmxremote port for the VM’s JVM• JMX URL: The URL that Operations Manager uses to establish a client connection with the VM’s JVM• Retry Interval: The minimum amount of time to wait before trying to log into a machine again

It’s common to configure machines so they will lock out any login attempts after a certain number of unsuccessful attempts. The lockout typically stays in effect for a given time (15 or 30 minutes, for example). Operations Manager logs in to poll for applications every 20 minutes. You should set the retry interval to a value larger than the lockout time that is specified for the machine. This will avoid unnecessary lockouts in case the credentials you provide here are incorrect. The default retry interval value is 60 minutes.

The following figure shows settings for the applications that run on VMs in a specific cluster. To set credentials for all VMs in the environment, you would select a top-level item in the Scope list.

Figure 13-16. Setting Discovery Credentials for Applications in a Cluster

Credentials are inherited. For example, you can select the top-level group Virtual Machines and provide one set of credentials. Then you can select lower-level groups and provide override credentials. The lowest-level credential spec-ification wins.

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The following image shows settings for all VMs (the top-level group). This means that by default Operations Manager will use these credentials when it performs application discovery on a VM:

The next image shows settings for a specific VM. You cannot make settings on individual VMs, but you can see the username, and you can also see which group setting is in effect. In this case, Operations Manager will use these cre-dentials for application discovery on that VM.

Note that the Application Discovery table shows where this VM’s credentials are set. In this case, they are set in the top-level group (Virtual Machines). It’s possible for one VM to belong to many groups. If you need to change the cre-dentials for this machine, you know where they are currently set. You can create another group to set different cre-dentials for this VM.

Load Balancer Discovery

Load balancers use virtual applications (sometimes called vServers) to manage requests to a defined set of running applications. Virtual applications are divided by service type. Operations Manager discovers the service types that are defined for the load balancers in your environment.

To define which applications Operations Manager associates with load balancer service types, you assign an applica-tion signature to each service type. The application signatures should identify applications that are currently bound to specific load balancers. (Application binding to load balancers is part of the load balancer configuration.)

To assign signatures to a load balancer service type, you must first have defined appropriate signatures for the specific applications running in your environment. For information about defining application signatures, see Application Dis-covery - page 207. When you have the appropriate application signatures, you can then assign signatures to load bal-ancer service types.

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1. Choose Discovery > Load Balancer in the Category list.A list of load balancers appears. These are the load balancers you set up as targets in the Admin view (see Adding Load Balancers as Targets - page 168).

2. Assign application signatures to a load balancer’s service types.Expand the load balancer you want and select a service type. Click in the right column to choose from the currently defined application signatures.

Figure 13-17. Assigning Application Signatures to Load Balancer Service Types

vCenter Annotation Grouping

vCenter Server annotations are a way for users to classify their VMs according to custom names. For example, the vCenter administrator may use tags for Department, Owner, and Team. Each one of these tags is a way to classify the VMs. The administrator can then assign values to each tag, which further classifies the VMs. For example, the VMs can be grouped into two departments as a way to distinguish VMs for Sales from VMs for Development.

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Operations Manager can use these annotations to manage vCenter VMs in groups. The following figure shows two departmental groups. This corresponds to the VMs in vCenter that have been given either Demo or Engineering values for their Department annotations. Note that Operations Manager fully recognizes these groups. You can set scope (for user accounts or plans), generate reports, and use other group-related features.

Figure 13-18. Groups Created for VC Annotations

To specify how Operations Manager discovers annotations, display VC Annotations and enter a string. The string names each annotation, separated by an OR bar. Do not include spaces at either side of the separator.

Figure 13-19. Specifying Annotation Names

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Infrastructure Cost

Often you will have different classes of hardware to host your environment, where you wish to reserve more expen-sive hardware for critical use. For example, you might reserve more expensive hosts to run business-critical applica-tions, and reserve lower-cost hardware for your development environment. In that case, you would want Operations Manager to place applications accordingly — critical applications on these higher-priced hosts, and development applications on the lower-cost machines.

Figure 13-20. Assigning a Host Template to the Infrastructure Cost Policy

With Infrastructure Cost policies, you create templates that approximate your different classes of machines, and then assign those templates to the policies. Operations Manager then discovers which machines best match these tem-plates, and assigns the machines to associated groups. For example, if you create a Small, a Medium, and a Large host template, Operations Manager creates three groups — PMs_Small, PMs_Medium, and PMs_Large. It then assigns all the hosts in your environment to these groups, according to which template most closely describes each host.

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Creating an Infrastructure Cost Policy

To create an Infrastructure Cost policy:

1. Choose the device type you want — Host or Storage.2. Choose the templates you want to add to the policy.

You can choose an existing template from the template catalog, or create a new one.3. Edit the template.

Specify the following:- Template name and description- Price

You should specify a price that approximates your hardware cost as well as possible. Currently, this price displays in generated reports. In future versions of Operations Manager the price might be used for other calculations.

- CapacityDo your best to approximate the capacity for the class of hardware you’re describing. Operations Manager uses these values to decide which group to put each device into. If a machine doesn’t exactly match any templates in the policy, Operations Manager assigns the machine to the closest match possible.

- Add to Infrastructure Cost Policy Turn on this check box to add the template to the policy. For each template that you enable, Operations Manager creates an associated group. (Note: If no machines match the given template, then the group will not appear in the GUI.)

4. Apply the changes.Click Apply to assign the template to the policy.

Using the Infrastructure Cost Policy

These policies assign hardware to groups. The groups appear in the By Cost folder. When you set scope to a dashboard or a Workload Placement policy, you can select these or other groups.

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Figure 13-21. Setting Scope to a Group by Cost

You can use these groups with the following Operations Manager features:

• Dashboards in The Home View - page 51You can use Infrastructure Cost groups to set the scope of dashboards on the Home view. In this way, you can save custom dashboards that only show information about a specific class of hardware. For more information, see Viewing Standard Dashboards - page 52.

• Workload Placement - page 191 With Workload Placement policies, you can ensure that certain VMs will always be placed on hardware of a certain class, or else you can specify that certain VMs never get placed on a class of hardware.

Email and Trap Notification

You can set up email and SNMP trap notifications for problems that arise on VMs, hosts, or data stores. Operations Manager can send notifications when problems occur and when they’re cleared. For example, you can set up a notifi-cation to your email address whenever there’s a Discovery problem, or an SNMP trap to your network management application whenever there’s a monitoring problem.

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Message Format

You can define the content of Email notification messages, as well as the From address for each message. To make these settings, select the Email / Trap Notifications category and make Global settings.

The From address identifies the sender, and will be used for any replies to an email notification. If you leave this field blank, the From address will be the email address that is associated with the Operations Manager license installation.

NOTE: The From address also identifies the sender for report subscriptions. For more information about report subscriptions, see Manage Subscriptions - page 159.

When you define message content, you enter format variables and line breaks to determine what the massage will include. For example, the following message format:{6}: {5} \nDatastores: {9}\nTarget: {7}\nEvent: {0} - {4}\nCategory: {1}\nSeverity: {2}

Results in the following email message:PhysicalMachine: myMachine.corp.mydomain.com Datastores: No valueTarget: 10.10.172.203Event: WorkloadBalance - Improve Physical Machine workload distribution for hp-esx28.corp.vmturbo.comCategory: Workload PlacementSeverity: MINORState: NOTIFY

The message format variables for a message are:

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Notification Setup

You can set up notification for all the devices in your environment, or you can select defined groups and set specific priorities for those devices. (For information about defining custom groups, see Group Management - page 186.)

For each notification, can specify the Type, and specify the recipient in the Address field:

• Email — Provide the email address that will receive the notification • SNMP Trap — Provide the IP address of the device that will receive the notification — Operations Manager sends

these notifications to port 162

Variable Description

{0} Event type - The problem name. For example, “WorkloadBalance”.

{1} Sub category - One of:• Performance Bottlenecks• Storage Management• Workload Placement• Green IT• Configuration Management• Over Provisioning• Capacity Management

{2} Severity - One of:• Critical• Major• Minor

{3} State - Can be NOTIFY or CLEAR.

{4} Description - A full description of the problem.

{5} Affected entity - The name of the VM, host, or datastore associated with the problem.

{6} Class name - The type of device that registers this problem. Can be one of:• VirtualMachine• PhysicalMachine• DataStore

{7} Target - The IP address or name of the hypervisor that manages the affected devices.

{8} Host name - The name of the physical machine that hosts the affected VM. This variable only applies to VM problem notifications.

{9} Datastore names - The names of the data stores that server the affected Host or VM. This variable only applies to VM and Host problem notifications.

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Figure 13-22. Setting Up Email Notifications for a Group

When you set up notifications, you can choose from the following categories of events (click the cell in the Category column to make your choice):

• Problem - Issues Operations Manager identifies within your virtual environment• Discovery - Issues that occur as Operations Manager performs discovery• Monitoring - Issues that affect Operations Manager as it monitors your environment• Control - Issues that affect Operations Manager as it performs recommended actions

The Severity field determines which events of the given category should trigger a notification.

In the Notify State field you choose to notify when the event occurs (NOTIFY) when it is cleared, or both.

Retention Configuration

Operations Manager gathers metrics from your environment, and stores them to provide historical reports. To opti-mize data storage, it consolidates the data into three groups — Hourly, Daily, and Monthly. Daily statistics consolidate Hourly data, and Monthly statistics consolidate Daily data.

Operations Manager also saves audit log entries, and it starts new server logs at regular periods.

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Figure 13-23. Specifying Retention of Historical Records

The more time you specify to retain these data, the more storage Operations Manager requires. As you modify the time to retain data, Operations Manager estimates the storage you will need for the resulting database.

To change retention settings, edit the Value fields. When you’re satisfied with the settings, click Apply.

To return to the default settings, click Reset Defaults.

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Aggregated Operations Manager InstallationsFor large virtual environments, you can use more than one Operations Manager instance to manage your workload. This can offer two advantages:

• Scaling up to manage larger inventories• Separation by region, line of business, customer, or other criteria

NOTE: For separation of data, you can also use a single instance of Operations Manager and assign scope to user accounts. For example, this is a way to achieve separation by customer within a single instance of Operations Manager. For more information, see Setting Scope for a User Account - page 171.

By aggregating multiple instances in this way, you can view the entire environment through a single GUI. One special installation of Operations Manager serves as the aggregating instance, and it displays the combined data of each underlying target instance. This brings together the recommended actions, dashboards and summary displays, reporting, and other data in one application view.

In this architecture, each target instance has its own set of target hypervisors, and manages its associated workload. Users can log onto these instances “locally” as they normally would, and use their GUIs to perform administration tasks, review and perform recommended actions, run plans, or perform any other task a user can perform with Oper-ations Manager. But aggregation offers more.

The aggregation instance treats the underlying instances as its target servers. Users can log onto the aggregation instance and use the GUI to manage the aggregated environment by executing recommended actions, viewing aggre-gated dashboards and summary panels, and performing other tasks. You perform these tasks through the aggregating GUI, but you can effect changes on the inventory managed by the underlying Operations Manager instances.

NOTE: An aggregating instance cannot manage hypervisors and aggregated target instances at the same time. All the targets of an aggregating instance must be target instances of Operations Manager.

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Versions and Licensing for AggregationThe aggregating instance of Operations Manager must have a Cloud Edition license. The underlying target instances can run with either a Cloud Edition or Enterprise Edition license.

Note that all instances of Operations Manager in the aggregation architecture must be running the same version. If you update the version, you should update all instances in the architecture. The earliest version of Operations Man-ager that supports aggregation is 3.2-19954.

Aggregated User Accounts and LoginWhen you create a user account on the aggregating instance, the same account gets pushed to all the target instances. In this way, a user with an account on the aggregating instance can then log onto any of the underlying tar-get instances. For example, a user can open target instances from the aggregating instance GUI, and then set policies for those targets.

Even though you can create an account from an aggregating instance, and then push it to the target instances, user accounts are stored locally on each instance. As a result, accounts can get out of sync. If a target was added to your aggregating instance after your account was already created, then you won’t necessarily have an account on the new target. To remedy this situation, ask the administrator of the target to create an account for you with identical settings (username, password, role, etc.) to your current aggregating account.

Aggregation DetailsThe aggregation instance provides a view of the whole environment that is being managed by the target instances. The aggregating instance requests data from the target instances as its GUI needs the data.

The following list provides details of how the aggregation instance manages data from the target instances.

• System-defined GroupsOperations Manager automatically groups devices in your environment into clusters and other groups. For example, it lists datastores by storage type, or VMs by storage. The aggregating instance adds the aggregated devices to these groups as appropriate. For example, if the different target instances all include iSCSI disks, then the aggregating instance shows all of these disks in the same iSCSI group. You can select these groups or items in these groups to set the scope of the aggregating instance.

• Custom GroupsThe aggregating instance displays all the custom groups that are defined in the target instances. You can select these groups or items in these groups to set the scope of the aggregating instance. You can create groups on the aggregating instance that include devices from different target instances. Groups you create on the aggregating instance do not have any effect on groups that are defined on target instances.

• To Do ListOn the aggregating instance, the To Do list shows recommended actions for all the target instances. If manual execution for the action is enabled on the target instance, then you can select that action and execute it from the aggregating instance. This sends a message to the corresponding target instance, which executes then the action.

• Home ViewThe Project Cluster Resources dashboard is not aggregated. This dashboard displays a list of target instances — You can log into these instances to project cluster resources.For the other dashboards, the data you see shows a combination of the target instances. For example, the Assure Service Performance dashboard shows information for the total of all hosts in your environment. As you set the scope of the dashboard, you can choose from all the groups and clusters in the environment.

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• Inventory ViewThe data you see in the summary panels shows a combination of the target instances. For example if your target instances each manage a number of LSASS applications, the navigation list will show the total of all these applications under the heading for LSASS. You can select groups to set the scope of this view.

• Plan ViewPlans are not aggregated. The Plan view displays a list of target instances. You can log into these instances to run plans on them.

• Deploy ViewThe Deploy view displays a list of target instances. You can log into these instances to deploy VMs on them.

• Optimize ViewThe data you see in this view shows a combination of the target instances. You can select groups to set the scope of this view.

• Admin ViewOn the aggregating instance, this view supports the following tasks:- License Configuration

License configuration for the aggregating instance gets pushed down to the target instances. For information about applying licenses, see License Configuration - page 161.

- User Authentication ConfigurationYou can manage user accounts for the aggregating instance. These accounts get pushed down to the target instances as well. For more information, see Aggregated User Accounts and Login - page 222 and User Authentication Configuration - page 169.

- MaintenanceMaintenance actions such as software updates and diagnostics are for the aggregation instance, only. The target instances must perform their own maintenance activities. For more information, see Maintenance - page 173.

• Policy ViewThe Policy view displays a list of target instances. You can log into these instances to specify policies on them.

• ReportsThe Reporting button displays a list of target instances. You can log into these instances to run their reports. Individual devices in the navigation tree include buttons to generate reports on demand. When you click this icon, the aggregating instance passes the request to the appropriate target instance, which generates the report.

Configuring AggregationBy default, each instance of Operations Manager is configured to run stand-alone. To set up aggregation, you sepa-rately configure each target instance and the aggregating instance. The basic steps you will follow to configure aggre-gation are:

• Install the Operations Manager instances that you want for this environment• Gather the information about each installation that you will need for configuration

You should take note of the following information:- The IP address or DNS name of the planned aggregating instance- The IP address or DNS name of each planned target instance- A unique ID for the aggregating instance

This can be any string that you use to identify the instance. However, you should use a name that is both unique and meaningful to you.

- A unique ID for each target instanceThis can be any string that you use to identify the instance. However, you should use a name that is both unique and meaningful to you.

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• For each instance, edit the appliance’s configuration file• Restart the instances• For each target instance, assign the hypervisors or other target servers that it will monitor. For more information

about assigning these targets, see Target Configuration - page 163.

NOTE: The aggregating instance requires the Cloud Edition license, and target instances require either Enterprise Edition or Cloud Edition licenses. It is also very important that you provide static IP addresses for target instances. The aggregating configuration file uses IP addresses to identify the target instances of Operations Manager. Dynamic IPs might change, which would render the configuration invalid.

Login and Config File Access

To configure the aggregating instance and each target instance, use SSH or the console to log into the Operations Manager appliance with the following credentials:

• User: root• Password (default): vmturbo

After you log onto an Operations Manager appliance, edit the following file:srv/tomcat6/data/config/appliances.config.topology

As you configure each instance, you will comment out certain sections, then uncomment and edit others.

When you first open it, the file should be similar to the following:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ASCII"?>

<PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager xmi:version="2.0" xmlns:xmi="http://www.omg.org/XMI" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:Foundation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Foundation" xmlns:Mediation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Mediation" xmlns:PresentationLayer="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/PresentationLayer" numThreads="5" id="StandAlone"><!-- NOTE: Provide a unique id value above when configuring an aggregator or an aggregation target appliance -->

<!-- DEFAULT LOCAL APPLIANCE: Comment this out to configure this appliance as an aggregator --> <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTLocalAppliance" nameOrAddress="localhost"/> <!-- TARGET APPLIANCE: Declares the aggregator for this target. Uncomment and edit this for each target. --> <!-- <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" role="AGGREGATOR" nameOrAddress="AggregatorIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueAggregatorApplianceIdentifier"/> --> <!-- AGGREGATING APPLIANCE: Declares targets managed by this aggregator. You can declare multiple targets. Uncomment and edit this for an aggregator. --> <!-- <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="TargetIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueTargetApplianceIdentifier"/>

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<appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="TargetIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueTargetApplianceIdentifier"/> --> </PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager>

Target Instance Configuration

You must configure every instance that will be an aggregated target. Before configuring a target instance, be sure it is running with the Enterprise Edition or Cloud Edition license. You cannot configure a Community Edition version of Operations Manager as an aggregation target.

Log into the appliance and access the configuration file (see Login and Config File Access - page 224).

To configure a target:

1. Open the appliance configuration file in a text editor.Open the file, srv/tomcat6/data/config/appliances.config.topology.

2. Provide a unique ID for the target instance.Find the string id="StandAlone">, and change it to be the ID you want for this target. The result should be similar to id="MyTarget1">. (You should have already decided on the ID to use. See the first steps in Configuring Aggregation - page 223 for a list of information you should already have.) Note that it is often helpful to provide the IP address or DNS name in the ID — For example id="MyTarget_10.10.123.45".

3. Ensure the Local Appliance declaration is not commented out.- Find the line that begins <!-- DEFAULT LOCAL APPLIANCE: - If necessary, uncomment the <appliances .../> element beneath this line (delete the <!-- and -->

characters surrounding the element)4. OPTIONAL: Define the aggregating instance that will be a master to this target.

This step is optional because Operations Manager doesn’t currently use this information. However, future versions might require this step. - Find the line that begins <!-- TARGET APPLIANCE: - Uncomment the <appliances .../> element beneath this line (delete the <!-- and --> characters

surrounding the element)- In this element, provide the aggregating instance’s IP or DNS for the nameOrAddress attribute- Provide the aggregation instance unique ID for the id attribute

5. Comment out the Aggregating Appliance declaration.Ensure this section is commented out.- Find the line that begins <!-- AGGREGATING APPLIANCE: - Comment out the <appliances .../> element beneath this line (add <!-- and --> characters to

surround the element)6. Save the configuration file and restart the instance.

At the command line for this appliance, issue the following command:service tomcat6 restart

You can now proceed to configure this Operations Manager instance with target servers (hypervisors, load balancers, etc.).For more information about assigning these targets, see Target Configuration - page 163.

NOTE: Each target instance of Operations Manager must be configured to manage unique target servers. For example, assume a hypervisor at 123.123.456.789. You must assign this hypervisor as a target to only one Operations Manager instance in your group of aggregated Operations Manager appliances. This is to ensure the aggregating appliance does not display duplicate information.

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Aggregating Instance Configuration

Before configuring an aggregating instance, be sure it is running with the Cloud Edition license. You cannot configure a Community Edition or Enterprise Edition version of Operations Manager as an aggregating instance. Log onto the appliance and access the configuration file (see Login and Config File Access - page 224).

NOTE: When setting up an aggregating instance of Operations Manager, you should always use a new installation. Do not re-use an existing Operations Manager installation that has been set up as a standalone or target appliance.

To configure the aggregating instance:

1. Open the appliance configuration file in a text editor.Open the file, srv/tomcat6/data/config/appliances.config.topology.

2. Provide a unique ID for the aggregating instance.Find the string id="StandAlone">, and change it to be the ID you want for this target. The result should be similar to id-"MyAggregator">. Note that it is often helpful to provide the IP address or DNS name in the ID — For example id="MyAggregator 10.10.123.456".

3. Comment out the Local Appliance declaration.Ensure this section is commented out.- Find the line that begins <!-- DEFAULT LOCAL APPLIANCE: - Comment out the <appliances .../> element beneath this line (add <!-- and --> characters to

surround the element)4. Comment out the Target Appliance declaration.

Ensure this section is commented out.- Find the line that begins <!-- TARGET APPLIANCE: - Comment out the <appliances .../> element beneath this line (add <!-- and --> characters to

surround the element)5. Define the instances that will be targets for this aggregating instance.

Note that you can specify any number of target instances. You must have one appliances declaration for each target instance in your architecture.- Find the line that begins <!-- AGGREGATING APPLIANCE: - Uncomment the <appliances .../> elements beneath this line (delete the <!-- and --> characters

surrounding the elements)- In each appliances element, provide the target instance’s IP or DNS for the nameOrAddress attribute- Provide the target instance unique ID for the id attribute- Be sure to properly close each new <appliances> element with a matching </appliances> close tag

6. Save the configuration file and restart the instance.At the command line for this appliance, issue the following command:service tomcat6 restartAfter you restart the instance, the GUI should display combined data from the target instances.

Example Configuration Files

The following examples illustrate edits you would make to configure target and aggregating instances of Operations Manager. The bold entries illustrate the changes you would make.

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Example Target Instance Configuration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ASCII"?>

<PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager xmi:version="2.0" xmlns:xmi="http://www.omg.org/XMI" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:Foundation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Foundation" xmlns:Mediation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Mediation" xmlns:PresentationLayer="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/PresentationLayer" numThreads="5" id="MyTarget_Number_One_123.123.456.002"><!-- NOTE: Provide a unique id value above when configuring an aggregator or an aggregation target appliance -->

<!-- DEFAULT LOCAL APPLIANCE: Comment this out to configure this appliance as an aggregator --><!-- Uncommented --> <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTLocalAppliance" nameOrAddress="localhost"/> <!-- TARGET APPLIANCE: Declares the aggregator for this target. Uncomment and edit this for each target. --> <!-- OPTIONAL: Uncommented --> <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" role="AGGREGATOR" nameOrAddress="123.123.456.001" id="MyAggregator_123.123.456.001"/> <!-- AGGREGATING APPLIANCE: Declares targets managed by this aggregator. You can declare multiple targets. Uncomment and edit this for an aggregator. --> <!-- <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="TargetIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueTargetApplianceIdentifier"/> <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="TargetIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueTargetApplianceIdentifier"/> --> </PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager>

Example Aggregating Instance Configuration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ASCII"?>

<PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager xmi:version="2.0" xmlns:xmi="http://www.omg.org/XMI" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:Foundation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Foundation" xmlns:Mediation="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/Mediation" xmlns:PresentationLayer="http:///com/vmturbo/platform/VMTRoot.ecore/OperationalEntities/PresentationLayer" numThreads="5" id="MyAggregator_123.123.456.001">

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<!-- NOTE: Provide a unique id value above when configuring an aggregator or an aggregation target appliance -->

<!-- DEFAULT LOCAL APPLIANCE: Comment this out to configure this appliance as an aggregator --><!-- Commented Out <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTLocalAppliance" nameOrAddress="localhost"/>--> <!-- TARGET APPLIANCE: Declares the aggregator for this target. Uncomment and edit this for each target. --> <!-- <appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" role="AGGREGATOR" nameOrAddress="AggregatorIP_or_DNS_Name" id="UniqueAggregatorApplianceIdentifier"/> --> <!-- AGGREGATING APPLIANCE: Declares targets managed by this aggregator. You can declare multiple targets. Uncomment and edit this for an aggregator. --> <!-- Uncommented --><appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="123.123.456.002" id="MyTarget_Number_One_123.123.456.00"/><appliances xsi:type="Foundation:VMTRemoteAppliance" nameOrAddress="123.123.456.003" id="MyTarget_Number_Two_123.123.456.003"/>

</PresentationLayer:ServiceProxyManager>