VMware Aria Operations Manager design
The VMware Aria® Operations™ Manager (formerly known as VMware vRealize® Operations Manager™) Analytics Cluster contains the nodes that analyze and store data from the monitored components. In this deployment, four nodes are deployed and two VMware NSX® Load Balancers. This size allows monitoring of up to 30,000 VMs and 9,000,000 metrics to be collected.
The 4-node analytics cluster consists of the following components:
- Primary node – The primary node is the initial node in a VMware Aria Operations cluster. In a large environment, this node manages all the other nodes.
- Primary node replica – This node enables high availability (HA) of the primary node.
- Data nodes – The data node enables scale out of VMware Aria Operations in larger environments, two are deployed in this design.
Additionally, the design uses Remote Collector nodes, which act as a proxy or relay server to collect data only and forward collected data to the primary and data nodes. Data nodes and Remote Collectors can be added to scale up depending on environment size. The placement of VMware Aria Operations components onto VLANs or VXLANs is shown in the following diagram.
- Primary node, primary node replica, and data nodes are deployed on the tools subnet by using IBM Cloud® Portable IP addresses. This deployment facilitate communication to all components that are addressed out of the IBM Cloud RFC1918 address space. These components include vSphere hosts, vCenter, Platform Services Controller (PSC), NSX Manager, and NSX Controllers™. An NSX Load Balancer is used along with a VIP for HA.
- Customer workloads use IP addressing from the BYOIP address space so this design uses Remote Collectors that are hosted in a VXLAN. These remote collectors are not configured as part of the IBM Cloud® for VMware Solutions automation and must be manually implemented by the client.
The VMware Aria Operations Analytics Cluster is accessed by using a management user interface or by using an API and it integrates with the following components:
- vCenter
- VMware Aria Operations™ for Logs
The client can manually integrate into the following products if they are deployed.
- VMware Aria® Automation™
- VMware Aria Business
VMware Aria Operations collects data from the following items.
- vSphere - vCenter, PSC, vSphere hosts
- NSX - NSX Manager, NSX Controllers, and NSX Edges
- VMware Aria Operations for Logs
The client can configure VMware Aria Operations manually to collect data from VMware Aria Automation and VMware Aria Business for Cloud.
System requirements
The analytics cluster consists of one primary node, one primary replica node, and two data nodes to enable scaling out and HA. More data nodes are added to scale up. The analytics cluster can scale to a maximum of eight medium-sized nodes.
| Attribute | Specification |
|---|---|
| vCPU | 8 |
| Memory | 32 GB |
| Disk (thick provisioned) | 254 GB |
| Attribute | Specification |
|---|---|
| vCPU | 8 |
| Memory | 32 GB |
| Disk (thick provisioned) | 254 GB |
When the compute VM monitoring is required, the client installs two remote collector nodes on a VXLAN. The size of a Standard Remote Collector Virtual Appliance is 2 vCPU with 4 GB of RAM and the default appliance VMDK size is sufficient. The remote collector nodes are deployed with thin-provisioned disks as the remote collectors do not run analytics operations or store data.
| Setting | Load balancer 1 | Load balancer 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Name | vrops-ui |
vrops-data |
| Interval | 30 | 5 |
| Timeout | 5 | 15 |
| Max Retries | 3 | |
| Type | HTTPS | TCP |
| Method | Get | |
| URL | /suite-api/api/deployment/node/status | |
| Receive | online | |
| Algorithm | ROUND-ROBIN | LEASTCONN |
| Pool | Four nodes of VMware Aria Operations | Four nodes of VMware Aria Operations |
Networking
Deployment of the VMware Aria Operations appliance requires six IP addresses from the Tooling private portable subnet. Network connectivity VMware Aria Operations requires access to the following items.
- vCenter Appliance
- VMware Aria Operations for Logs Appliance
- VMware NSX-T™ or NSX-V Appliances
- Tools Expansion VXLAN
- Customer Networks
- NTP server (
time.services.softlayer.com) - IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions Active Directory, DNS
- The Remote Collectors require NAT rules on the NSX ESG to enable connectivity to the primary node, primary node replica, and data nodes
Ports
| Component | Protocol | Port |
|---|---|---|
| VMware vCenter® | TCP | 443 |
| DNS | TCP/UDP | 53 |
| LDAP/LDAPS | TCP | 389/636 |
| LDAP GC | TCP | 3268/3269 |
| NTP | UDP | 123 |
| SMTP | TCP | 25 |
| SNMP | UDP | 161 |
Authentication
User Management for VMware Aria Operations requires VMware Identity Manager (vIDM), which integrates with Active Directory. Service accounts are used for application-to-application communication from VMware Aria Operations Manager™ to the following adapters with the minimum set of permissions that are required for metric collection and topology mapping:
- NSX Manager
- vCenter
- vSAN™
Management Packs
Management Packs for VMware Aria Operations extend the operational management capabilities of the VMware Aria Operations platform to provide product-specific alerts and dashboards.
The following Management Packs are installed in VMware Aria Operations by default:
- Management Pack for VMware vCenter Server®
- Management Pack for VMware Aria Operations for Logs
- Management Pack for vSAN
- Management Pack for VMware Aria Automation
- Management Pack for VMware Aria Business for Cloud
The following components are installed by IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions:
- VMware SDDC Health Management Pack
- Management Pack for NSX for vSphere
- VMware Aria Operations Federation Management pack
- Management Pack for Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX™)
Other management packs can be installed by the client. For more information, see VMware Marketplace.
Management Pack for VMware vCenter Server
This default Management Pack extends the functions of VMware Aria Operations to vCenter to enable the collection of objects, metrics, and alerts.
Management Pack for VMware Aria Operations for Logs
This default Management Pack extends the functions of VMware Aria Operations to VMware Aria Operations for Logs to enable the monitoring of the VMware Aria Operations for Logs environment and the integration of events and alerts from VMware Aria Operations for logs in to VMware Aria Operations.
Management Pack for vSAN
VMware Aria Operations Management Pack for vSAN enables vSAN specific dashboards to evaluate, manage, and optimize the performance of vSAN objects and vSAN-enabled objects.
VMware SDDC Health Management Pack
The VMware SDDC Health Management Pack for VMware Aria Operations monitors the SDDC management stack. Color-coded metrics are provided for health and efficiency of different components present as part of the SDDC management stack. With the dashboards in the VMware SDDC Health Management Pack, you can monitor the following components of the VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic - Automated instance and management tools:
- VMware Aria Operations Manager
- NSX for vSphere and VMware NSX-T
- VMware vSAN
- VMware Aria Operations for Logs
- vCenter
If the client installed the following, you can monitor them.
- VMware Aria Automation
- VMware Aria Orchestrator
- VMware Aria Business for Cloud
- VMware Site Recovery Manager
The VMware SDDC Health Management Pack provides the following dashboards:
- SDDC Management Health Overview Dashboard - You can use SDDC Management Health overview dashboard to view and analyze the application-specific problems in the SDDC components.
- SDDC Health Historic Trend Dashboard - The VMware SDDC Health Management Pack consists of SDDC health historic trend dashboard, which displays the health trends for each component in the SDDC stack.
- SDDC VMware Aria Operations Manager Sizing Dashboard - The SDDC VMware Aria Operations Manager Sizing Dashboard provides VMware Aria Operations Manager cluster capacity to process objects and metrics.
The plug-ins in the VMware SDDC Health Management Pack collect metrics for object types that are contained in the plug-ins. The Management Pack collects health metrics for the following components:
- vCenter
- Management Pack for NSX for vSphere
- VMware Aria Automation
- VMware Aria Operations Manager
- VMware Aria Business
- VMware Aria Operations for Logs
- VMware Site Recovery Manager
- vCenter HA
- vMware vSAN Health
- Services in vCenter
- VMware Aria Operations Manager Sizing
- VMware Aria Orchestrator
Management Pack for NSX-T
The NSX-T management pack extends VMware Aria Operations core analytics, correlation, predictive capacity, and visualization capabilities to virtual networks. The pack includes the following items.
- Configuration assurance
- Health
- Performance
- Capacity
- Troubleshooting for NSX-T objects
Management Pack for NSX for vSphere
The NSX for vSphere management pack offers operations management coverage for deployments of VMware's NSX virtual networking technologies. This management pack extends VMware Aria Operations core analytics, correlation, predictive capacity, and visualization capabilities to virtual networks. Coverage includes configuration assurance, health, performance, capacity, and troubleshooting for NSX logical switches, logical routers, edge services, distributed firewall, and load balancers.
The NSX for vSphere management pack is tightly integrated with VMware Aria Operations and vSphere host data is correlated with the NSX services that run with these hosts. With log integration by VMware Aria Operations for Logs, error and outage conditions, triggered by log messages, are alerted within the management pack object and problem windows.
VMware Aria Operations Federation Management Pack
VMware Aria Operations Federation Management Pack enables a multisite VMware Aria Operations deployment into a single pane of glass. It allows a deployment of VMware Aria Operations with the capability of receiving key metrics for specified objects from VMware Aria Operations deployments.
Management Pack for Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX)
VMware Aria Operations Management Pack for HCX extends the Operations Management capabilities of VMware Aria Operations to hybrid capabilities presented by HCX. With the management pack, you can collect metrics, change events, and resource topology information from HCX. It enables the monitoring, isolation, and resolution of performance bottlenecks in the HCX Interconnects, Migrations, or Protected workloads.