Eric Sloof

This release introduces new performance report pack. By default, reports now include operations status report for line of business virtual machines, alert and performance trend, cluster utilization trend, average and peak virtual machine storage latency. With these reports you can get a consolidated operational status for a group of virtual machines and identify the clusters, datastores, or virtual machines have had performance problems. You can assess any impact to performance in terms of performance or health degradation, as well as determine which datastores had performance problems for the given time and identify the impacted virtual machines from a given datastore. For more information about the new performance reports, see the topic "Reporting Tools in vCenter Operations Manager" in the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Online Help.

vCenter Operations Manager is enhanced to offer in-context application launch capability. Using this feature, you can configure a button or menu item to launch an external application using a URL in a specific context defined by the active UI element and selected object. For example, you can add an "Open in" drop-down menu that launches the vCenter Web user interface, navigating to the details of a selected virtual machine. In the same menu, there might be other items that launch into Hyperic or Log Insight for the same virtual machine.

This release introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and vCenter Operations Manager. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

The vSphere group in the Dashboards menu contains several default dashboards for managing virtual objects in a vSphere environment. These default dashboards are available to all members of the Administrators, Operators, and Users user groups. This release introduces the following default vSphere dashboards:

• Troubleshooting Dashboard
• VM Utilization Dashboard
• VM Performance Dashboard
• Host Utilization Dashboard
• Cluster Utilization Dashboard
• Datastore Performance Dashboard
• Datastore Space Dashboard
• Heatmaps Dashboard
• Alerts Dashboard
• Host Memory Dashboard

This video will show you some of the new features and how to upgrade to version 5.7.1. This procedure is applicable when updating to vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 vApp from the following product versions. vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 5.6, and 5.7.1, including any Hotfix versions.

This training course (three days of instructor-led classroom) focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vCloud Automation Center. This course covers the configuration and use of vCloud Automation Center as a platform for self-service provisioning of virtual, cloud, and physical machines to create and manage on-demand multivendor cloud infrastructures. 

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Understand the vCloud Automation Center architecture and use case in multivendor cloud environments 
• Install and configure vCloud Automation Center 5.2 
• Manage vCloud Automation Center 5.2 entities on VMware and third-party hardware and cloud infrastructures
• Configure and manage provisioning groups and blueprints 
• Configure and manage enterprise groups and reservations for compute resources on VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and more 
• Use the Self-Service portal to request and manage machines according to vCloud Automation Center approval policies 
• Use the Report portal to monitor vCloud Automation Center configuration and managed resources 
• Understand and configure vCloud Automation Center workflows 
• Manage and monitor machines and resource reclamation

VMware vCenter Log Insight addresses these challenges and enables improved quality of service, operational efficiency and continuous compliance.

• Collects and analyzes all types of machine-generated log data, e.g. application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages, performance data, system state dumps, and more.
• Enables administrators to connect it to everything in their environment, e.g. operating systems, applications, storage arrays, firewalls, network devices etc., providing a single location to collect, store, and analyze logs at scale.
• Features an intuitive GUI-based interface that makes it easy to run simple interactive searches as well as deep analytical queries for quick, actionable insights.
• Automatically chooses the best visualization for your data, saving you valuable time.
• Adds structure to all types of unstructured log data, enabling administrators to troubleshoot quickly, without needing to know the data beforehand.
• Delivers real-time monitoring, search, and analytics, coupled with a dashboard for stored queries, reports, and alerts, enabling correlation of events across multiple tiers of a hybrid cloud environment.
• Comes with built-in knowledge and native support for vSphere.
• Integrates with the VMware vCenter Operations Management platform to bring unstructured data (e.g. log files) together with structured data (e.g. metrics and KPIs), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.

We've received some great news today. Our session proposal "vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics" has been accepted for both VMworld US and Europe 2013. 

This session will teach you how to customize vCenter Operations to provide you the information you really need for your business. We do this by giving you some real life examples from the field where we use Custom Dashboards, Super Metrics, Adapters and Alerts in order to give you the best possible view in to the well-being of your environment. You’ll also see a live demo and hear how a VMware customer identified nearly significant savings and has streamlined the capacity management process with vCenter Operations Management.

The session will be presented by Duco Jaspars and Eric Sloof.

In the version 1.0 release of VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, a brand-new, unmodified installation of vSphere 5.x infrastructure, also known as a greenfield infrastructure, was required for deployment. This requirement was identified as a significant constraint to the usability of the solution.

The latest release of vSphere Storage Appliance, version 5.1.x, addresses this limitation in deployment options. vSphere Storage Appliance version 5.1.x can be deployed into a VMware vSphere 5.x infrastructure that is already in production, with configured virtual networks and operating virtual machines.

This type of vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x deployment is known as a brownfield deployment. This white paper will discuss the procedure and requirements for vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x deployments into existing vSphere infrastructures.

New Technical White Papers: vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x Brownfield Deployments

All VMware Certification exams, including advanced professional certifications, will be 75% off the regular price, when taken on-site at VMworld San Francisco! This is a unique opportunity to validate your cloud and virtualization skills – at a significant discount. Space is limited, reserve your seat today!

This course focuses on the organization administrator’s role in VMware vCloud Director in managing cloud resources. This course provides hands-on training for operators who are charged with administering their corporate resources in a public cloud or a private cloud.

This course assumes that a vCloud Director organization administrator is technically proficient in working at a department or customer level to support cloud operations. The vCloud Director organization administrator is responsible for assisting coworkers in the daily management and use of cloud resources provided to the organization from the vCloud Director cloud provider.