Operational procedures introduction

Many IT organizations document their operational procedures in a runbook. A runbook is a set of standardized documents, references and procedures that explain common recurring IT tasks. IT staff refers to the runbook for an optimal way to get their work done. Runbooks improve organizational efficiency through standardization and they assist with onboarding employees more effectively.

The following examples are the two typical types of runbooks:

• General documentation used to capture procedures, guides, and tasks. They tend to be general in nature, and refer to existing documentation provided by vendors.
• Specialized documentation written for the enterprise. This documentation is specific to a system, an application, or suite of applications and is not covered by vendor documentation. When you document your specialized documentation, the following structure is recommended:
  • Overview - An overview of the service with sections that describes:
    • What is the service and why is the service needed by the enterprise?
    • Who are the primary contacts for the service?
    • How to report issues with the service.
  • Build - Focused on the development teams and the main software components of the service and how the service is constructed. Information on software products, locations of OVAs, distribution media, or the location of the source code. The required steps for packaging or distributing the release. It includes any required instructions for how a new developer can get started.
  • Deployment - Focused on the operations team and how to deploy the software. It includes details of the hardware and virtualized infrastructure and how to build the virtual machines (VMs) including vCPU, RAM and disk requirements, OS version and configuration, what middleware or packages to install.
  • Procedures - Step-by-step instructions for common tasks like add, change and delete, common issues and their solutions, troubleshooting advice.
  • Troubleshooting - A list of common alerts from the monitoring system that include step-by-step tasks for these alerts, and generic guidance on troubleshooting the service.
  • Disaster recovery plans and procedures - Details on how to recover the service at another location due to a disaster at the primary location.
  • Service level agreement - The agreed service parameters such as operational level agreements, key point indicators, availability goals, recovery point objectives, recovery time objective.

Most IT organizations have multiple runbooks that act as their reference manuals. This series of documentation is designed for use as a general runbook for your organization by using VCF for Classic - Automated instances. While every runbook's content is specific to the organization's needs, the methodology of runbook creation is fairly standard and uses the following two stages.

• The first stage is to decide which procedures need to be documented, and when listed, document each one with sufficient detail.
• The second stage is ongoing and consists of maintaining, updating, and correcting these procedures, adding new procedures and retiring procedures that are no longer needed.

With IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions, you can use you team's existing skills, toolsets, and runbooks you have on-premises to manage your instances in IBM Cloud.

The following list contains the most common procedures, guides, and tasks:

• Configuration tasks - These tasks are common activities that systems administrators need to perform to tailor the environment to suit the enterprise's needs and respond to service requests such as: add new VMs and increase capacity. These tasks are grouped into the following structure:
  • Generic guidance
  • VM procedures
  • vCenter procedures
  • vSphere ESXi™ host procedures
  • Storage procedures
  • Network procedures
• Alarms - VMware vSphere® includes an events and alarms subsystem, which tracks events that occur in the vSphere environment and makes this information available in vCenter. This section describes this subsystem and how to enable and use the alarms in your enterprise.
• Proactive daily checks - These checks enable system administrators to keep the environment healthy. When carried out daily, it prevents many common issues that are related to capacity and performance from impacting your workloads.
• Troubleshooting - Even when you carry out proactive daily checks, issues occur that impact your workloads. Therefore, you need to fix the underlying issue as quickly as possible. These troubleshooting guides and some common troubleshooting scenarios assist system administrators with identifying and fixing these issues quickly.
• Compliance - The compliance guide provides some insights on maintaining compliance of the environment against a regulatory compliance regime or industry best practice. The focus of this guide is on the VMware hardening guide, which is a number of documented lists of best practice for a VMware environment.

Many of the previous tasks are automated in Operations Management on IBM Cloud, and for those tasks that are not, these tools make the manual processes easier for your systems administrators. It is imperative that the core components of the VMware environment are monitored.

In operations management on IBM Cloud, this is achieved as described in the following sections:

Operations management on IBM Cloud

You can have enterprise tools in place that you can use to monitor and manage your VCF for Classic - Automated instance. Table 1 describes the core components of the VCF for Classic - Automated instance, why they need to be monitored and how they are monitored by using Operations Management on IBM Cloud. For more information, see the reference architecture documentation.

In addition to monitoring, Operations Management on IBM Cloud, helps with configuration, compliance, and many of the proactive tasks detailed in this documentation.

Related links

• vSphere Monitoring and Performance
• VMware security hardening guides
• Operations management introduction
• Considerations about changing VCF for Classic - Automated artifacts