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vRA – vRealize Automation and ServiceNow Integration

Some of you may have attended the vRA and ServiceNow presentation at VMworld 2017 yesterday.  I regret not being able to attend and present it myself, however I’m certain that Chris Smith and Ian Smith did a fantastic job.  Here I want to recap some of what was presented during that session.

It’s important to understand what options are available and what features they offer in order to understand what you really need when integrating with ServiceNow.  To start do you need what is referred to as North/South integration, East/West Integration, or both.  Below is a list of what capabilities fall under each classification.

North/SouthEast/West
ServiceNow used as CatalogvRA used as Catalog
VMware vRealize Automation handles automation and orchestration.VMware vRealize Automation handles automation and orchestration.
Create or update CI recordsCreate or update CI records
Available via VMware ITSM plugin, AVNet Plugin, or Custom REST API integration.Available via VMware ITSM plugin, SovLabs plugin, Avnet Plugin, or custom vRealize Orchestrator workflows.

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VMware vSphere Predictive DRS

It’s no secret that this is a feature that I’m very excited about.  This feature although very useful on it’s own is going to open up the door for many new exciting capabilities with out VMware products in the future.

Predictive DRS

Resource contention is one of the most critical issues in any virtualized environment.  When contention occurs, applications slow down and your users are affected.  Up until now two different methodologies have been employed to mitigate the risk of contention, with varied results.  But now I want to introduce you to the new “game changing” method available from VMware: Predictive DRS!  But first a bit of a history lesson on the original two methods.

REACTIVE METHOD

The first of these is the Reactive Method which focuses on resolving unexpected resource demand.  The most widely used example of a reactive solution is VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler, or DRS. As the day progresses, workloads may need more resources, which can lead to contention on the host.  The reactive method moves VMs around to ensure all workloads get the resources they need and applications remain healthy. Note this method needs only a minimal amount of VMs to be moved in order to be effective, which means minimal overhead. The reactive method only moves VMs when contention approaches, so it’s possible (however remote) for users to feel some effects of the contention before it’s resolved.

Learn more about the other methods available with predictive DRS in the original article on VMware Cloud Management blog site.




 

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Release Announcement – vRealize Operations 6.4

Today November 15, 2016 Vmware announced the GA release of vRealize Operations 6.4.  The release features the following new features and improvements:

  • Faster Root Cause Analysis
    • 1 click Alert Grouping – Sift through alerts to quickly identify noisy ones or the critical ones
    • Business context – Map VMs to vCenter folders (Application groups) to prioritize troubleshooting by impacted applications
  • Improved Workflows
    • KPI-driven Object Detail Page – Consolidated view: known issues + key metrics of self & infra
    • 1 click KPI Graphing – Correlated in seconds, Reduce the need to know complex metrics
  • Collaborate Better via ready to share OOTB dashboards for NOC, Storage, Network teams
    • Operations & Capacity Overview, VM Usage, Troubleshooting dashboards

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vRealize Operations Manger – vROM – 6.0 Released

The much anticipated vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 released today.  This new release is a milestone further tying together components of the vRealize Suite.  With the release of vRealize Operations 6.0 and vRealize Automation 6.2 comes the integration of the two products.  However that is not all vRealize Operations 6.0 has some very exciting new features of it’s own.The release introduces the following new enhancements and features:

Scale-Out Deployment Architecture
This release provides distributed deployment with elastic scale and higher scalability.

Unified User Interface
This release introduces a single user interface to manage vSphere as well as non vSphere domains. You can create powerful, flexible custom dashboards enabling you to bring any information you want into the management console.

Licensing Management in 6.0
vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 has an independent license-management GUI that provides enhanced administration of license keys specific to vRealize Operations. Customers can now deploy mixed editions in a single vRealize Operations 6.0 instance.

Smart Alerts
Smart alerts combine multiple symptoms to generate a single alert that focuses on the underlying issue with clear recommendations and option to take action for remediation.

Enhanced Reporting
Enhanced reporting provides several out-of-the-box reports with the ability to generate fully customizable reports.

Capacity Planning and Project Management Capabilities
New capacity planning and project management capabilities extend beyond vSphere and across physical and application level metrics. Flexible capacity models can be adjusted to meet different business needs.

Custom Policies
Custom policies can applied for specific workload types, applications or clusters enabling more advanced monitoring of performance, capacity and configuration standards.

Automated Remediation of Problems
Integrated action and remediation capabilities with the ability to apply actions according to the recommendation for the alerts.

User Access Control Management
Improved user access control, including granular role-based access control.

Unified Storage Visibility
New storage visibility shows the correlation between the application group and the storage infrastructure supporting it, including HBA’s, Fabric and Arrays, along with the ability to trace operational issues all the way to storage.

You can download vRealize Operations here.

You can view the release notes here.