Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcenter operations

Win a free VMworld ticket by sharing your vC Ops story update…

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A few weeks back I wrote a blog entry on a “Cool Contest: Tell your vC Ops Story”, and since then we have had some really great submissions but of course we can always use more. As a member of the judging panel I thought I’d share a few thoughts on those who may be interested in entering, but may be hesitant for other reasons.

  1. “What if my story is not good enough”? Don’t let this deter you from entering, you’d be surprised at how success stories can actually seem routine in your own day to day, but in the grander scheme of things prove invaluable to others that may not have the same insight as you.
  2. “I want the ticket to VMworld, but I am not a seasoned presenter”, This is your opportunity to shine!  That is why the panelists (me included) and the VMware team will both help you both prepare (slideware, visuals and dry runs) and present side by side with you – making the experience all the more enjoyable and fruitful!

There is also a good blog on the VMware blog site that provides more guidance on how to enter and advice to what the judges will be looking for.  One last piece of advice, do not put off your entry any longer – the contest runs until July 11th, and the anticipated “mad rush” at the end will only lump your entry with those trying to make the deadline, so just enter now!

Creating an IP-Pool for VC Ops

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I was importing the VC Ops virtual appliance and during the import I got a question around IP addresses. So I figured I would enter two IP addresses and that would be it. As soon as I powered on the VM I received the following error:

Cannot initialize property ‘vami.netmask0.VM_1’ since network ‘VM Network’ has no associated IP Pools configuration.

I figured this would be simple so I jumped back to “home” and went to the network section… Nothing around IP Pools. Even on a host or cluster layer there was nothing. Luckily my colleague Cormac jumped in and said check the “Datacenter” object, there should be an IP Pool tab there. He was right. Weird place and definitely something that needs to be improved. Anyway, configuring an IP Pool itself, now that I found it, was easy:

  1. Click your Datacenter object
  2. Go to the “IP Pools” tab
  3. Click “Add”
  4. Fill out the details:
    1. Subnet: which network will be used and what is the mask? (You can use a subnet calculator if you don’t know…)
    2. Enter the details of the gateway
    3. Specify a range, the format is “10.1.1.10#10”, this would result in a range from 10.1.1.10 until 10.1.1.19 (10 addresses counting from .10)
    4. Don’t forget to tick the “Enable IP Pool” check box
    5. Click on the “Associations” Tab and associate it to a network!
    6. Also, fill out the DNS and proxy details if and when required.
  5. This is what it should look like:

It is as simple as that, but indeed not easy to find hence the reason I figured a short article was in place.

PS: Creating a range and enabling the “IP Pool” is not required. “Enable IP Pool” enables the use of the Range. In this example I had to use a range as I could only use a specific range of this subnet.

 

vCenter Operations Enterprise 1.0.1

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I just noticed  VC Ops Enterprise had an update, version 1.0.1 was just released. Although it is just a minor release and I more or less promised myself not to do articles about minor release or upgrades I do feel it is worth checking out. VC Ops is one of those tools that can make your life a lot easier when it comes to monitoring and pinpointing bottlenecks. Especially the new resource detail page (see screenshot below) is very useful. You can find the release notes here and you can download it here.

  • A new widget to display relationship and performance of objects in vSphere environment.
  • Introduction of resource detail page to show vSphere performance characteristics, Key Metrics, and Events.
  • Introduction of Analysis page to view performance of vSphere objects for a given metric via Heat map widget.
  • Enforcement of unique remote collector names.