The screenshot belows show vCenter Operations 5 managing a large environment. It has >2000 powered on VM and >7000 powered off VM, total almost 9500 VM. It spans 4 vCenters, so each of them is averaging 2500 VM. vCenter Operations makes it easy for you to see the health, workload, faults etc at a glance across all these objects. Visually, you can tell which ESXi host is not healthy, or unable to cope, or having faults.
I needed to internalise the above, so I made this diagram. The actual process is certainly more comprehensive than this. I need to keep the chart simpler so I can remember it.
The main lesson for me is Isolation is no longer a big deal in 5.0, because of datastore heartbeating.
Below is the process for a single Slave host. The process starts with the slave not getting the heartbeat from its master, which it should get every second.
Below is the process from the Master point of view. There are 2 processes here, as a master carries 2 roles. Besides being a master, it also runs VM just like any other Slave. A master receives heartbeat from all its slaves, so if any of the heartbeat is received, that means the master is not isolated. It might be partitioned, but definitely not isolated.
The bottom process above is for Failure of a slave. If a master does not receive heartbeat from a slave, it will check for datastore heartbeat file. It will also ping the host IP address. The ping and the heartbeat go through the same network. A situation where ping might work but no network heartbeat is the FDM agent failure itself.
If the datastore heartbeat file is not updated by the slave, then the slave is assumed dead.
As part of annual planning, you normally need to project for next year. vCenter Operations 5 lets you see next year projection.
To do that, you need to change the timeline in Configuration dialog box. The default setting is Weekly. In the screenshot below, I’ve changed the “Summary trend intervals” to Yearly.
In the report internal, you can also set it to Yearly, so the Report show next year too.
So in the above screenshot, I’ve set it to Yearly. As a result, the Summary page changed. Instead of seeing “Next Half Year” column, you will see “Next Year”. I’ve highlighted
The above screenshot shows from “Remaining” perspective. What if you want to see the other side, which is from deployed perspective? You can do that by selecting Deployed from the perspective field.
You will notice that the columns show “Last 2 years” instead. If I set the configuration to be Daily, then this column would be “Last 2 days” instead.
