A new, common platform design
In vRealize Operations Manager 6.0, a new platform design was required to meet some of the required goals that VMware envisaged for the product. These included:
- The ability to treat all solutions equally and to be able to offer management of performance, capacity, configuration, and compliance of both VMware and third-party solutions
- The ability to provide a single platform that can scale up to tens of thousands of objects and millions of metrics by scaling out with little reconfiguration or redesign required
- The ability to support a monitoring solution that can be highly available and to support the loss of a node without impacting the ability to store or query information
To meet these goals, vCenter Operations Manager 5.x (vCOps) went through a major architectural overhaul to provide a common platform that uses the same components no matter what deployment architecture is chosen. These changes are shown in the following figure:
When comparing the deployment architecture of vROps 6.0 with vCOps 5.x, you will notice that the footprint has changed dramatically. Listed in the following table are some of the major differences in the deployment of vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 compared to vRealize Operations Manager 5.x:
|
Deployment considerations |
vCenter Operations Manager 5.x |
vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 |
|---|---|---|
|
vApp deployment |
vApp consists of two VMs:
There is no supported way to add additional VMs to vApp and therefore no way to scale out. |
This deploys a single virtual appliance (VA), that is, the entire solution is provided in each VA. As many as up to 8 VAs can be deployed with this type of deployment. |
|
Scaling |
This deployment could only be scaled up to a certain extent. If it is scaled beyond this, separate instances are needed to be deployed, which do not share the UI or data. |
This deployment is built on the GemFire federated cluster that supports sharing of data and the UI. Data resiliency is done through GemFire partitioning. |
|
Remote collector |
Remote collectors are supported in vCOps 5.x, but with the installable version only. These remote collectors require a Windows or Linux base OS. |
The same VA is used for the remote collector simply by specifying the role during the configuration. |
|
Installable/standalone option |
It is required that customers own MSSQL or Oracle database. No capacity planning or vSphere UI is provided with this type of deployment. |
This deployment leverages built-in databases. It uses the same code base as used in the VA. |
Many of these major differences will be discussed in detail in later chapters. However, the ability to support new scaled out and highly available architectures will require an administrator to consider which model is right for their environment before a vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 migration or rollout begins.
