When I work with a customer for a health check of their VMware environment we have a set of internal tools we can leverage in our TAM organization. What is a TAM you may ask?, check out VMware Technical Adoption Manager
If a customer has VMware Aria Operations stood up, that is one of the first places I like to start to get an understanding of what we could find to clean up the environment. Think of it as getting rid of clutter so you can obtain a better visual. When I refer to waste, I’m talking about; PoweredOff virtual machines, virtual machines provisioned, left on and were never used for an intended purpose, snapshots! and finally orphaned disks, (aka Zombie VMDKs) as referred to by RVTools.
While Aria Operations is not the only tool that can achieve these tasks, it does make for a nice integration and the ability to track and report against it.
Check out a quick YouTube tutorial on using the ‘Reclaim’ feature in Aria Operations.
In another blog I documented how to deploy a Cloud Proxy appliance so that you can monitor Services in an operating system. You can check that out here ‘VMware Aria Operations Cloud Proxy Deployment‘
For the following post I want to demonstrate monitoring a SQL Server services on a Windows Server virtual machine.
In our test today, I’m running Windows Server 2016 with SQL Server Express LIte as a VM.
From within Aria Operations, I will want to now deploy the Telegraf agent. **Please take a snapshot and take any precautionary backups**
Locate the object you want to deploy the Telegraf agent to, select and from the ‘Actions’ menu select ‘Install’
Select the Monitoring Availability and Cloud Proxy instance below, in my case, I have a single Cloud Proxy deployed. Click Done.
You have a couple of options to ensure authentication to the VMs is taking place. Selecting the top option ‘Common username & password” will allow me to define. Selecting ‘Enter virtual machine credentials‘ will allow you to download a template and populate it with username and passwords to upload back into the appliance.
I’m defining local Administrator permissions for lab and click Next.
Screenshot missing but on the final click ‘Install’ and installation should begin and you may monitor status in Aria Operations
Not too long, you should see a successful installation
With a few minutes, the agent should start reporting in new object data from the Windows Server instance and discover services. If you go to Configure>>Application Services
If you click on the ‘discovered’ in the Microsoft SQL Server service, it should take you to a list of monitoring features.
Now that we have discovered services, we can select what we want to configure and even add from ‘Custom Monitoring’. To ensure we are alarmed if a SQL service was to fail, we will select ‘Microsoft SQL Server’ and select Activate Service
We will select ‘Microsoft SQL Server’ click Confirm
The right-pane will bring up the following configuration menu, fill it out and click ‘Save’
In order to make this work I did have to enable port 1433 on my SQL instance to get the DB Instance to communicate with the collector, please work with your server and dba teams.
Monitor the configuration
Once configuration is successful you should now find the server in inventory deployed with an agent and reporting it in application data.
You can now bring up the object in Aria Operations and find additional data being pulled in from the DB Instance
You may also dive into associated Metrics for the SQL DB instance and start monitoring.
I hope this was found helpful and please ensure you follow best practices by taking snapshots, following associated documentation for your GuestOS and VMware.
In the following document I want to demonstrate the steps in deploying a Aria Operations Cloud Proxy. My reason for this deployment is to monitor services on Windows Server Guest VMs and even physical!
While there are many ways to get to Cloud Proxy deployment, all roads eventually lead to the section in Aria Ops. The following is one example.
Click on ‘Configure Cloud Proxy’ and it will take you under ‘Data Sources’ option to the left.
Click ‘Add”
Click the button indicated below to begin OVA download, this will be downloading from the Aria Operations appliance itself and should match the version of Aria Operations you are running in your datacenter.
I will jump over some steps of deploying the OVA template in vSphere assuming folks reading are familiar.
Be sure to review the following settings before you copy your registration key. The key changes if you choose to enable ‘Data Persistence’
Once the appliance has been stood, if successful, the collector should now appear in ‘Cloud Proxies’
You can also now see the 2 accounts which are included by default.
If we go back to review our Telegraft Agents, you can now see there are VMs being recognized which we can push agents out to.
Next article will be deploying the agent onto Windows Server VM or physical servers.
Shipping logs off to a repository for the benefit of troubleshooting, root cause analysis, post mortem reporting and today with AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, particular findings and trendings in logs can be proactively shared to an operator.
For the following article will demonstrate integrating vSphere with Aria Operations for Logs and ensuring your hosts get updated to point to your instance. Keep in mind that my instance is deployed as a ‘Small’ which is primarily targeted for POC environments, in an enterprise you should have a minimum of 3 appliance nodes and should have a VIP assigned. I do have ESXi 8.0 installed and have configured vSAN ESA.
From the vSphere console the following advanced setting for a host will shows Syslog.global.logHost is configured with a blank entry. After we are done, this will be populated.
Access your Aria Operations for Logs instance via Virtual IP or single instance name, if you receive the following prompt, this is generally an indication your instance has never been configured.
Click ‘Configure vSphere Integration’
You will be taken to where you can integrate a vCenter instance, (Do not use a local SSO account, create a service account separately)
If we leave the checkbox highlighted in yellow, this is what will be pushed out to configure ESXi hosts send logs to Aria Logs.
When clicking ‘Advanced option’ it will display and allow you to select specific hosts and even a syslog protocol. Just note, you must click ‘Test Connection’ and Accept thumbprint from the vCenter before it can poll hosts.
For our write up, I will only select esxi01 with UDP. Click ‘Save’ and ESXi hosts will be configured in addition to any vCenter logs. Once completed your vSphere Integration will like this. You can click next vSphere for refresh, VC Collection status is healthy and if you click ‘View Details’ it will show hosts configured and not configured in vCenter.
When you go back to the host and check the Advanced Setting, you will now see it populated with Aria Logs instance
If you want to go back and makes changes to what ESXi hosts and collections, you can go back into the vSphere Integration and then have options, in our case, I will come back and configure my 2 other hosts.
By now you should have logs from hosts and vCenter shipped to Aria Operations for Logs.
During this Greenfield deployment of my home lab, I’m going to be rolling with the latest Aria Easy Installer, like its predecessor (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager) this too includes initial deployment of the Aria LCM appliance, Aria Automation & VMware Identity Manager.
I’ve performed some pre-requisite work such as reserving IP’s, Forward and Reverse DNS entries, and will be deploying this on a 3-node vSAN ESA cluster. The steps below will be using the Windows UI interface of the installer.
These are the products that are part of the initial deployment of the Aria Suite
The next screen will be to Accept EULA or CEIP (optional)
For the ‘Appliance Deployment Target’ you will want to connect to a vCenter Server, if you want to take additional security measures and avoid using default @vsphere.local accounts, you may create one in vCenter and use that for the association. The following document provides the details on the permissions; VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle: Assign a user role in Center
I will be using an AD account I’ve created and because my LDAP is the default Identity Source, I just have to put the user account and not append domain.
On the next screen select ‘Compute Resource’ and click Next.
For our install we will be installing it on our vSAN datastore
Next screen will be ‘Network Configuration’
For the ‘Password’ Configuration ensure you document everything this password is used for. This is critical for future troubleshooting, lifecycle and if you are doing any kind of password rotation.
Populate information regarding initial appliance deployment for Aria LCM
The next step is the Identity Manager Configuration, there is an option to import a version deployed outside of Easy Installer and there are additional options below regarding syncing Active Directory.
The final configuration is for Aria Automation Part 1
Aria Automation Part 2
The final part will be to kick-off and monitor the installation. You should notice your vCenter will begin deploying VMs.
The status now shows it completed successfully, I had 3 VMs deployed (your results may vary if you configured clustered options for your appliances.
Once completed you can verify accessibility to all the appliances, below is the splash page when logging on to Aria LCM
