Daniel

Knoxville, TN

Deployment of VMware vRealize Operations Manager

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vRealize Operations Manager (vROM/vROPS) gives you visibility into the performance and health of your virtual infrastructure. The bad thing about virtualization is how easy it is to accumulate over-provisioned virtual machines. When your environment grows the numbers can really be staggering. With vROM you can find these VMs and really tweak your environment making it more lean and resource efficient. vROM also has the ability to ensure compliance with IT policies, regulatory requirements, and smart alerting. Basically vRealize Operations Manager will take your structure data like performance metrics and give you a unified interface of analytics. Here is my documented deployment of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0.1 in my lab environment.

vRealize Operations Manager Logo

Planning and Reading:

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Upgrading Windows based vCenter 5.x to 6

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For this post I will go through upgrading my Windows based vCenter from 5.5 to vCenter 6. VMware has really made the installer process lean. I would even go out on a limb and say “easy”! vCenter 6 introduces the Platform Services Controller which changes the architecture of vCenter down to two components. The graphic below shows my environment before the upgrade and after:

Upgraded Embedded Architecture

My setup is very simple as I have all vCenter 5.5 components on a single Server 2012 virtual machine. I have ran through the upgrade multiple times and have yet to run into anything major. To find what your environment will look like check out the VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Deployment Guide.

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vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade from 5.x to 6.0

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The upgrade process of vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) version 5.x to 6.0 isn’t truly a upgrade but more of a migration. You are basically deploying a second vCSA that will migrate the hosts/inventory/IP address from the old to the new. You can only upgrade vCSA versions 5.1U3 and 5.5. The 6.0 vCSA is still based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 and now has the the same mins/max as the Windows installed version.

vCenter 6 Appliance vs Windows

Before You Start:

There is some prep work you need to perform before doing the migration:

  • Pick a host and ensure it has a standard switch with a vmnic uplink. Because Distributed Switches is a vCenter function it wants to perform the upgrade on a standard switch.
  • Rename your current vCenter VM in the inventory so the new VM can be created as the same name. Otherwise the vCSA folders on the LUNs will not match.
  • Have at least two available LUNs, one for your current vCSA and one for the new vCSA. Since you will want to deploy the new one with the same name they have to be on different LUNs
  • The installation media is a .ISO instead of a .OVA. You will need to burn it to a disc, extract it, or mount it.

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