Operational Model
This section describes the operational aspects of the sample solution architecture in a technology- and product-focused manner.
VMware vRealize® Operations Manager™ provides a unified view and deep insights into the health, risk, and efficiency of the infrastructure and applications to help provide quality of service and early detection of performance, capacity, and configuration issues. For the solution architecture presented in this paper, visibility into the Microsoft Exchange 2013 business critical application is possible with the “out-of-the-box” adapter for Microsoft Exchange. With endpoint agents, vRealize Operations Manager can provide a performance management solution that can extract counters from the guest operating systems, applications, and mailbox databases.
vRealize Operations Manager ships as a single virtual appliance (with multiple HA options) that can be quickly installed and used to improve the performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure. vRealize Operations Manager functionality includes:
• Operations dashboard – Provides at-a-glance views into the health, risk, and efficiency of the virtual infrastructure.
• Health and workload views – Helps identify anomalies, faults, and stressed workloads that can impact the performance and health of the infrastructure.
• Workload details view – Provides in-depth analysis on what is impacting the performance and health of virtual machines, hosts, data stores, and vSphere clusters.
• Visibility into other application products through adapters.
• Uses adapters to collect data from a variety of data sources, including third-party products such as Microsoft Exchange. Adapters work with the vRealize Operations Manager collector to collect and process data. The collector acts as a gateway between vRealize Operations Manager and the adapters. The adapters connect to and collect data from data sources, transform the data into a format that vRealize Operations Manager can consume, and pass the data to the collector for final processing. Depending on the data source and adapter implementation, an adapter might collect data by making API calls, using a command-line interface, or sending database queries. The VMware vCenter® adapter collects metrics and events from VMware vCenter Server®. This is part of the base vRealize Operations Manager installation.
The following two options provide this design with metrics to formulate custom Microsoft Exchange dashboards in vRealize Operations Manager:
• End Point Operations Management Solutions – Directly collects data from the operating system.
• The Microsoft SCOM adapter – Collects resource metrics such as time series, resource availability, and resource relationship data from Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) databases.
The architecture of a vRealize Operations Manager solution for this specific design depends on a number of design factors, and specifically on the demarcation line and access to the cloud data center resources provided to the customer by the VMware Cloud Provider. The following figure shows one high-level design option for the integration of vRealize Operations Manager in this sample solution architecture.
Figure 9. Sample Operational Management Design
As shown, VMware vRealize Log Insight™ provides a monitoring and operational role in this solution. In addition to infrastructure monitoring, the design can also forward logs from Windows Servers or Windows-based applications such as Active Directory or Microsoft Exchange. The vRealize Log Insight Windows agent must be installed on each source operating system, allowing messages from Windows event channels and log files to be forwarded to the vRealize Log Insight server. vRealize Log Insight can be configured to provide a comprehensive monitoring of operating systems and applications, allowing application owners and operating systems operational teams to query, analyze, and audit log data.
