This is part 1 of a series of articles about the integration of vCenter Operations Manager and vCloud Director. Do you want to get an update after the next part is published? Subscribe to my twitter feed, or leave your e-mail address in the box on the right and click subscribe!
Most of you will know the default interface of vCenter Operations Manager (vCops) which shows you health, risk and efficiency of all the various objects available in vSphere.
If you’re running vCloud Director (vCD) in conjunction with vSphere, the inventory of your vSphere infrastructure is determined by the configured vCD organizations, provider & organization virtual datacenter. E.g: creating an organization- or provider virtual datacenter in vCD, results in the creation of one or more resource pools in the vSphere environment. vCops isn’t vCloud Director aware by default, and will just show the vCD virtual machines without showing the vCD hierarchy. Because vCenter Operations Manager doesn’t know resource pools either (at least the vSphere interface of vCops), you will also not see any (vCD created) resource pools.
You can change this behaviour, by installing and configuring the vCloud Director adapter for vCenter Operations Manager. This adapter is available for download, but you will need at least vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 Advanced or vCenter Operations Enterprise 5.0 to use it. The adapter is using the vCops customizable dashboards option to work. This option is available in vCops 5.0 Enterprise or higher and in vCops 5.6 Advanced edition or higher. VMware changed the license model between version 5.0 & 5.6, that’s the reason of the different versions in this case. More information about this difference here.
The procedure to install the adapter is not too complicated:
- Download the vCloud Director adapter from ftp://ftp.integrien.com (Integrien was the original company behind vCops and was acquired by VMware in 2010) via anonymous FTP. I am using the vCenter Operations Manager vApp (there’s a windows installable version available as well), so I choose to download the .pak file. For vCops as Windows installable, you will need the tgz package and you to follow another procedure.
- Log on to the vCops admin inteface: https://<vcops>/admin, and choose the update tab to upload the .pak file to vCops. Always first backup your vCops vApp, because uploading the adapter will change the config of your vApp. You cannot rollback this change.
To configure and use the vCD adapter, log out en then log in again using https://<vcops>/vcops-custom/. This URL will give you access to the custom dashboards and will allow you to configure the vCD adapter. After logging in, choose Environment->Configuration->Adapter Instances. 
Choose the “vCenter Operations Server Standard” collector, and the “vCloud Adapter” adapter. Choose the new adapter instance and configure the vCloud Director adapter parameters:
- Adapter Instance Name – Just choose a descriptive name;
- vCloud Director Host – Just the hostname, no http or https;
- Autodiscover, to discover available entities automatically;
- Filter – You can use to filter Provider vDC’s and/or organization vDC’s;
The last step is to configure the credentials to connect to vCD. The adapter needs administrator access to the vCloud Director environment, so I suggest to create a service account for the adapter in vCloud Director (or use AD service account if you’ve created an LDAP connection). Use these credentials to connect to vCD from vCops. The instance name is the same as the Adapter Instance. Use the test button to verify everything is working!
After the connection to vCD was verified, you can access vCloud Director objects from the vCenter Operations Manager custom interface. Because the objects are available now, you can use them to build your own dashboards. More of that in part 2 of this article, to be published soon.
This article has some overlap with this article by Tom Stephens; check his article as well. Tom dealt in his article with earlier versions of vCenter Operations and vCloud Director.
This is part 1 of a series of articles about the integration of vCenter Operations Manager and vCloud Director. Do you want to get an update after the next part is published? Subscribe to my twitter feed, or leave your e-mail address in the box on the right and click subscribe!
