Sizing

While there is a reasonable amount of information about how HA works in vROps I have found there is still some confusion as to how HA actually works with vROps or rather what are the benefits and perhaps more importantly the cost for enabling the feature.

HA is a great feature and in my opinion should be considered seriously with any deployment (where possible).

Not only does HA protect your Master node (which essentially behaves as an index for your vROps cluster and if lost will render your cluster dead unless you have a working backup of your cluster) it will also allow your cluster to tolerate a data node failure. So in short what is not to like!

So vROps 6.5 has been out for around a month now and I finally have a little while to write a post on what I personally really like.

There is a lot of great new enhancements and improvements added in 6.5 but for the sake of brevity I shall highlight two that I really liked.

Flexibility to increase RAM in between node sizes

So if you are familiar with vROps you will know that when you deploy it you have “T-Shirt” sizes to choose from, Small, Medium, Large and now Extra Large (6.5). However an additional extra in 6.5 is support to increase the memory allocation of your vROps nodes, you will not require additional CPU for the node until you hit the next node size bracket. If in doubt check the sizing guide spreadsheet VMware has provided so you can be sure on what you can and cannot do.

As promised, I am posting the recording for the 5th Session of vROps Webinar Series 2016. Both Sunny and I successfully delivered the session on Design and Deployment considerations.

Session Details:- In this instalment of the series, we discussed the steps and thought processes that should be used before and during the design and deployment of vRealize Operations Manager. During the session among other things we will cover the planning, core components, correct sizing, HA, clustering, DR and future growth**.**

Time to announce the next part of the year long webinar series on vRealize Operations Manager. This time around, Sunny  and I thought about discussing Architecture of vROps. To some, it might sound strange as for smaller deployments you might not have to worry about Sizing and Architecture much since it is pretty simple to install and configure a small or a medium node for a small shop. However as your monitoring needs grow and you start adding solutions for monitoring data sources beyond vSphere, you would need to think about scaling up or scaling out. As your monitoring environment weaves into your incident ticketing system, you would start to see the need to HA of vROps and as you have a DR strategy for your workloads, you will start thinking about DR for your operations tools as well.