During a recent project, we needed to deal with the vast requirement to create a monitoring tooling platform that allowed for extensive monitoring of the entire virtual infrastructure and its related components. All while aiming for a single pane of glass approach. VMware vRealize Operations (vRops) is a perfect solution to facilitate in these areas to meet the requirements.
In this specific case, we needed the storage backend metrics to be listed in vRops. Obviously, you’ll have several datastore metrics to your exposal by default when using the default vRops metric sources. However, the storage backend was used for other systems next to the VMware environment as well. That was one of multiple reasons why we were required to include the metrics directly from the storage arrays. That way the ops team is able to investigate both the storage backend systems from a VMware and external workload perspective.
IBM V7000 arrays were being used. Now, to integrate a external component like storage arrays directly with vRops, you should first have a look at marketplace.vmware.com. Be sure to filter for vRops content management packs. As you can see, a lot of additional packs are available to gain even more insight in your infrastructure!
For vRops to be able to ingest IBM V7000 metrics, we firstly needed the storage array metrics to be consolidated in a piece of software called IBM Spectrum. The important part is that you can use the free license of the Spectrum software to be able to use the metrics in vRops.
Steps
First you’ll need to deploy IBM Spectrum and include the IBM V7000 storage arrays to it.
Next, you can configure the VMware vRops server in the IBM Spectrum tooling. That allows you to create and download the PAK file: (more…)