Oracle EM Plug-in for VMware FP1 Deep-Dive Part 1

Over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting new functionality found in the latest release of the Blue Medora EM Plug-in for VMware.  There is a lot of territory to cover on FP1 ranging from several new EM dashboards all the way down to specific new VMware-focused  individual metrics and everything in-between.  Today I want to provide a general overview of the revised VMware vSphere main EM page.

The VMware vSphere target represents a composite rolled-up view of the entire managed vSphere environment that the vCenter server is connected to manages including Hypervisors (ESX Hosts), Clusters, Datastores, and VMs.

In Figure 1 (below), you can see this “birds-eye” view of a managed vSphere environment from with Oracle EM12c.  The primary purpose of this page is to provide EM administrators  In the rest of this post, we’ll discuss a number of most interesting “regions” found within this page and what the purpose of them is.

Summary Region of vSphere Target Main Page

The 1st region of this page we’ll examine is Summary.   The purpose of this region is to provide an EM administrator a high level understanding of which components exist in the VMware environment as well as any VMware generated Alarms currently existing within the environment.

In this example you’ll notice the VMware environment is composed of  1 Datacenter, 0 Clusters, 3 Hypervisors, 271 Virual Machines, and 19 Datastores.  Any one of these VMware components can be clicked and you’ll be linked over to a dedicated set of EM pages for those object types where you have the ability to drill in deeper.   In a later set of blog posts, we’ll be examining each of those dedicated EM pages in more detail.

You will see that the are 9 “Critical” Alarms and 3 “Warning” Alarms.  Note:  These Alarms are not native EM threshold-based incidents — they are the native Alarms you would see if you were inside the actual VMware vSphere Console.

Alarms Region of vSphere Target Main Page

The “Alarms” region of the page is focused on providing an EM-based “window” into the open VMware Alarms

These are exact same Alarms you would see across the entire VMware environment that you would see if you were logged into the VMware vSphere web console or thick client.  In the screenshot below you’ll see the same Alarms as viewed in the VMware web console.

Memory Region of vSphere Target Main Page

The Memory region of the page that displays a graph of a synthetic metric that computes the percentage of available memory available across all of the hypervisors (ESX Servers) that are powered on and not in maintenance mode.  This particular metric is not something that is available natively via the VMware vSphere Console.

CPU Region of vSphere Target Main Page

The CPU region of the page that displays a graph of a synthetic metric that computes the percentage of available CPU available across all of the hypervisors (ESX Servers) that are powered on and not in maintenance mode.  This particular metric is also not something that is available natively in the VMware vSphere Console.

Incidents and Region of VMware vSphere Target Main Page

The last region of interest in the standard EM Incidents and Problems panel — in this case filtered to ‘Local Targets Only’.   This is where you’ll see native EM incidents for thresholds that are being exceeded with the VMware environment.  In this example you can see three different Datastores have exceeded their critical threshold of 90% utilized and three Virtual Machines have exceeded 90% memory utilization… Clearly this is an environment that requires a closer inspection.