vRops 6.1 – Installation, configuration and licensing tips #updated

Lately I’ve been working on various vRealize Operations projects, involving vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Infrastructure Navigator. In this article I’ve gathered some general installation tips for the different products, I hope you will find them helpful.

• vRealize Operations (vROPS) comes as a (single) virtual appliance, but supports a high available architecture by deploying more than one appliance in a vROPS cluster. By deploying a vROPS replica node, all data is replicated to the second vROPS node.
• It’s also an option to deploy a vROPS as a collector node, such a node will only collect data and will not store any data.
• Determine the size of vROPS appliance (small, medium, large) based on the number of objects you’re planning to monitor.
• Since vROPS 6.1, the hyperic service is an integral part of the vRealize Operations virtual appliance. A separate Hyperic server (VM) for OS/application level monitoring is not required anymore.
• Check this article by Johan van Amersfoort for some information on required ports in a vROPS environment.
• The “Operating Systems/Remote Service Monitoring” solutions (or adapter) is pre-installed in vROPS 6.1 and required for the Hyperic functionality. You will need the advanced or enterprise license to use this solution.
• For OS monitoring the End Point Operations Management Agent (EPOMA) is required and has to be installed in the Guest Operating System.
• Both virtual- and physical machines are supported (from a technical perspective) for monitoring using the EPOMA. Also verify which scenarios are allowed from licensing perspective. vRealize Operations Insight- and vCloud Suite licenses don’t allow you to monitor physical servers. However, with these licenses you’re allowed to monitor physical devices (network, storage) that support your virtual infrastructure.
• You can license vRealize Operations per cpu or per Operating System Instance (OSI). The latter is specifically used for licensing public cloud- and physical resources. More info here.
• By default the EPOMA will only monitor OS level counters, however you can extend monitoring options by adding extra management packs or solutions to vRealize Operations. These management pack and solution will automatically enable counters for specific applications on the EPOMA, no additional installation/configuration steps in the guest OS are required.
• EPOMA requires port 443 on the vROPS server for communication. Read this article by VM Ignite, which explains the installation procedure for the End Point Agent. The article explains how to retrieve the certificate thumbprint required for secure communication with the vRops server.
• Management packs and solutions are available through VMware’s Solution Exchange. Some management packs/solutions are paid, some are available for free. Depending on what you want to monitor you will need an advanced or enterprise license.
• The free Microsoft SQL Server solution will enable SQL counters on vRealize Operations Manager. EPOMA is required in the guest OS of physical- or virtual machine that’s running SQL server. There’s also a paid MS SQL management pack available by Blue Medora. This management pack offers more extensive monitoring options. Application level monitoring requires an enterprise vROPS license.
• Blue Medora offers Management Packs for (a.o.) Cisco Nexus/UCS, NetApp, SAP HANA and F5 BIG-IP. More information on the Blue Medora website.
• The MS Active Directory solution will enable AD counters on vRealize Operations Manager, again the EPOMA is used for retrieving the counters.
• The Management Pack for vRealize Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) is required when you want to connect VIN to vROPS.
• According to the documentation VIN requires ports 80 and 10109 for accessing vCenter Server and the Inventory Service. This is incorrect, the inventory service is running on port 10443. Access to ports 443 and 902 on each ESXi server is also required.
• HP StoreFront Analytics Management Pack for vRealize Operations requires ports 22/tcp (SSH) en 5989/tcp (SMIs) to be open from vRealize Operations to the 3PAR.
• The VMware Horizon adapter requires communication between the vRops server, desktop agent and broker agent. The desktop agent is running on each View desktop and is included in the View agent. The broker agent should be installed on one of the connection servers within a View pod.
• Access to port 3091-3094 from the Desktop Agent and Connection Server to the vROPS server is required. Exact details in this KB article.
• Notice that a direct migration from vCops 5.8 to vRops 6.1 is not possible. First step is to run a migration from vCops 5.8 to 6.0. Next step is to upgrade vRops 6.0 to 6.1.
• An upgrade to 6.1 from 6.0 involves an OS upgrade (first step) and an application upgrade (second step). These are two separate downloads, both available at my.vmware.com.