VMWare vCenter Operations allows IT teams to monitor their virtualized infrastructure from a single interface. It identifies VMs experiencing problems based on parameters like CPU and memory usage. Administrators can drill down on alerts to determine the root cause of issues, such as resource contention or storage performance problems. The tool helps VM administrators troubleshoot more efficiently and prove where issues lie within the infrastructure or workload.

1. VMWare vCenter Operations Prepared by: Cristian Calin – October 2011 http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/overview.html

2. What Is It ? A VMWare appliance VM

3. Derrived from the Alive Enterprise product

4. Allows you to have an overview of the whole infrastructure

5. Helps an IT team to have a “helpdesk” like interface to quickly identify problems in a virtualized infrastructure

6. Is licensed per VM on a 50VM pack basis

7. Welcome to the Main Screen You first open the interface and are presented with an interface that looks a lot like the following

8. Identify a VM that is causing problems A VM which is out of parameters is singled out and collored differently. red, orange ore yellow depending on the severity

9. Double Click to Drill Down From first glance you can see that there is a problem with the CPU

10. This VM has been like this for some time You can view a zoom on the graphics to see if it is an isolated incident or a continuous problem

11. Let's Drill Down and See Usage contention seems to be low, this is good, it means that it is not affecting other workloads and is not itself affected by another workload

12. Let's Look at Another Example Here we se a VM having memory issues, we can see that it's memory is fully allocated

13. Let's Drill Down It's been like this for a while seems to oscilate between a wide set of values

14. No Memory Contention from the Hypervisor Layer We look at the active memory, Balooning and compression This seems to be a soly guest issue

15. User Reposts an Eratic Issue From the looks of it, this VM is running an eratic workload, best to look at the windows task manager this is nolonger a VM-Admin issue

16. Clusters Overview Generally looks OK, If we had any issues, We would see yelow or red Good to show your manager This :)