Using vROps to Understand Your HPE Server Landscapes

When you begin your out-of-the-box deployment of VMware’s vRealize Operations Manager (vROps), you might find that getting detailed hardware and health information about your server compute environment is more difficult than you expected.

Today, I would like to share with you a new wealth of custom dashboards that Blue Medora’s newest release of VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack for HPE Servers provides, full of detailed views and reports for your HP chassis and rack servers. We’ll start by creating three new views. After that, I’ll show you how to combine two of the views into a single report and the third view into its own report. Let’s go ahead and get started!

After you’ve installed and configured the Management Pack, navigate to the Content–>Views section. For the first view, I’m going to create a new distribution view. I’ve chosen a pie chart, which will give us a nice graphical representation of all the different HP blade flavors we have in our lab.

• Click the green plus sign to open the Create New dialog
• Give your new view the name HP Compute Inventory Distribution and an optional description
• Select Distribution as your view type with Discrete as your configuration
• Select HP Chassis as your subject
• In the data section, we’re going to select the General|Model property as our data point

To test this view, give it a valid preview source, and click OK. You should end up with something that looks like Figure 1 below.

Figure 1 – HP Compute Inventory Distribution

For View #2, we’re going to create a list view that displays some inventory data about our HP Chassis.

• Click the green plus sign to open the Create New dialog
• Give your new view the name HP Compute Inventory List and an optional description
• Select List as your view type
• Select HP Chassis as your subject
• In the data section, we’re going to select the following data points:
  • General|Serial Number
  • General|Manufacture
  • General|U Position
  • General|Model
  • General|SKU

To test our HP Compute Inventory List view, give it a valid preview source, and click OK. You should end up with something that looks like Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 – HP Compute Inventory List

For the final view, we’re going to create another list view that give us some inventory data about our HP Rack servers.

• Click the green plus sign to open the Create New dialog
• Give your new view the name HP Compute Server Rack List and an optional description
• Select List as your view type
• Select HP Rack as your subject
• In the data section, we’re going to select the following data points:
  • General|Model
  • Processor|Processor Count
  • Processor|Processor Model
  • Memory|Total Memory
  • Firmware|BIOS Version
  • Firmware|Platform Definition Firmware Version
  • Firmware|Power Management Controller Boot Loader Firmware
  • Firmware|Power Management Controller Firmware
  • Firmware|SAS PLD Firmware Version
  • Firmware|SPS Firmware Version
  • Firmware|System PLD Firmware Version

To test this view, give it a valid preview source, and click OK. You should end up with something that looks like Figure 3.

Figure 3 – HP Compute Server Rack List

Lastly, we’ll need to add these newly created views to a report framework. Our first report will contain the HP Compute Inventory Distributionview and the HP Compute Inventory List view. The other report will contain the HP Compute Server Rack List view.

HP Chassis Compute report provides you a pie chart with accompanying data from your HP Chassis, seen in Figure 4 below.

Figure 4 – The HP Chassis Compute report containing data collected by our custom views

The second report, HP Compute Server Rack report, provides you data points about your HP Rack servers with firmware versions as well, seen in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5 – HP Compute Server Rack

These custom reports offer greater visibility into your HP compute infrastructure from a health perspective as well as from a metric/property/reporting facet.

For more information on VMware vRealize Operations, visit the product page on the VMware website. Find out more about Blue Medora’s newest solution, vRealize Operations Management Pack for HPE Servers by visiting the product page on their website.

This blog post first appeared on VMware Cloud Management Blog. Read the full blog post here.