Tag Archives: vCOps

Working with maintenance mode in vROPs via PowerCLI

A while back I was contacted by someone who knew that PowerCLI now worked with vRealize Operations (vROPS) and knew it covered the entire API but was unsure how to get to the point where they could achieve what they wanted.

Before I go into what they were doing I highly recommend that if you are interested in learning what is available via VROPs and PowerCLI you check out the following awesome posts by John Dias

And specifically check out this post which tells you the more advanced feature of being able to access the entire API and create your own functions.

So, the story around this script was that this person was heavily using vROPs in their environment to monitor and troubleshoot their VMware infrastructure, they had it highly tuned but also used PowerCLI to automate some maintenance and updates of the infrastructure, the problem was that every time they performed these tasks they would get automated alerts from vROPs to tell them that things were down or not behaving correctly.

This while expected was clearly a pain as we all know that unwanted email from a monitoring system can get tedious and eventually ignored to the detriment of something important being missed.

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Installing vCloud Adapter for vCenter Operations Manager

I had to go through the installation of the vCloud Adapter into vCenter Operations Manager today and although the steps are in the doc I couldn’t get it to work, I ended up following Kendrick Coleman’s post here, although this worked I was later informed there was a much easier way to do this.

Randy Keener who works for DevOps at VMware showed me how to do it the correct (and easier) way, as I was going through this again so I thought I would take some screen shots to make things easier for anyone else who is unable to follow documentation like me !

What’s needed

  • vCloud Director 1.5.0 or later
  • vCloud Director administrator account credentials of the System organization
  • vCloud Adapter – Download the adapter installation TGZ file anonymously from ftp://ftp.integrien.com/

 

Installing the adapter

Go to the vCOps admin page:  http://vcopsip/admin and go to the update tab

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Click the browse button and navigate to the folder where you have extracted the adapter files from the original TGZ, select the .pak file.

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Click the Update button and click OK to confirm the update

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The adapter file will be uploaded to your vCOps setup.

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Read (yeah ok then) and accept the EULA and click OK.

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Confirm the update by clicking OK.

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The installation will begin…

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Once completed you will see the update status on the screen.

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Now go to the custom web page: https://vcopsip/vcops-custom/

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Once logged in click the Admin menu and then support

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You will be presented with the Support page

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Click the Info tab and press the smallest button in the world, I missed this button so many times !

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Click yes to start the describe process.

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A confirmation box will appear.

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After a couple of seconds you should see our adapter in the list of adapters available.

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Configuring the adapter

You should now be able to follow along with the vCOps adapter PDF which was part of the TGZ file from page 17, setting up the adapter is fairly straight forward.

Creating a custom Dashboard

As the installation doesn’t create any dashboards for you I highly recommend visiting Clint’s site and reading his great post which shows how to setup a custom Dashboard here: http://velemental.com/2012/04/12/tutorial-building-custom-dashboards-in-vcops/