vCommunity Management Pack for VCF Operations

Broadcom Technical Account Manager Onur Yuzseven has been leading the development effort of a Management Pack for VCF Operations called the VCF Operations vCommunity Management Pack. You can find his blog here.

The goal here is to augment what comes out of the box with Operations, providing additional Metrics, Properties, Dashboards, and more. It was developed with the Operations Integrations SDK as opposed to the Management Pack Builder. You can get the vCommunity Management Pack here.

The vCommunity Management Pack provides a bunch of new Content, all of which was developed by Iwan Rahabok:

• 44 Dashboards

• 169 Views

• 16 Reports

• 37 Super Metrics

One thing to note, the vCommunity Management Pack requires Operations 9.0 and a Cloud Proxy.

Over the years, we've had many customers looking for visibility into more advanced ESXi Host and VM properties (beyond those already being captured by VCF Operations), so we started there. The first four use cases addressed were the following:

• ESXi Host Advanced System Settings

• ESXi Host Software Packages

• VM Advanced Parameters

• VM Options

Each of these has a corresponding configuration file (among others) found in Infrastructure Operations - Configurations - Management Packs Configuration.

They are mapped by name and should be cloned before editing as they will be overwritten at Management Pack upgrade time. Here you can see I've cloned vm_advanced_parameters.xml to vm_advanced_parameters_v2.xml and uncommented everything.

You will then point to this newly cloned configuration file in your vCommunity Adapter Instance, like this. Do this same thing for the other configuration files.

Now, let's look into each use case in detail. First, ESXi Host Advanced System Settings as seen in vCenter, can now be captured! Say for example, you wanted to capture the ESXi Host Advanced System Setting called Syslog.global.loghost

To start capturing this Advanced System Setting just uncomment the Key in the cloned configuration file.

The esxi_advanced_system_settings.xml file will have all available options by default, clone this and uncomment the ones you want to start collecting. Be sure to use this newly cloned configuration file in your Adapter Instance/s. Once configured, these ESXi Advanced System Settings will show on your ESXi Host objects.

You can now use these Properties in Dashboards, Reports, View, Alerts, and more.

The second use case was to start capturing ESXi Software Packages, as seen in vCenter here.

To start capturing any of these Software Packages, adjust the cloned configuration file. By default all Software Packages are included, comment in/out the ones you'd like to start capturing. Here I've uncommented all of them.

On an ESXi Host they will show like this.

You'll get the Software Package Name, Type, Vendor, Version, and more. All of which you can now use in Dashboards, Reports, Views, and Alerts.

The third use case addressed by the vCommunity Management Pack is VM Advanced Parameters as seen in vCenter here.

We can now capture any VM Advanced Parameter by uncommenting them from the cloned configuration file, like this.

Once added, they will show as Properties on VMs like this.

Again, they are now available to be used in Dashboards, Reports, Views, Alerts, and more.

The fourth use case was to start capturing VM Options as seen in vCenter here.

This is a bit more complicated as they don't have neatly provided Keys/Names, but you can use the vCenter MOB UI to find them. Note: the vCenter MOB is disabled is vCenter 9.0, to enable it follow this KB.

If you want to capture the VMware Tools : Tools Upgrade value you can find it in the config section of the vCenter MOB UI, which is https://vcenterfqdn/mob/?moid=vmoid. In my case it looks like this.

Clicking the config link takes me here.

Scrolling down to tools click the link which will take you here.

You can map these NAMES to the VM Options shown in vCenter, the one I wanted was toolsUpgradePolicy. I uncommented all of them in my cloned configuration file.

VMs will now show this as a Property (along with the others listed).

You can now use these Properties in Dashboards, Reports, Views, Alerts, and more.

As a note, you can have multiple vCommunity Adapter Instances with their own configuration files. I have one and it looks like this.

The latest version of the vCommunity Management Pack can be found here. Onur has done a great job with version control, documentation, and more. The .pak file as well as the Source code is available for exploration.

Download the .pak file. Once downloaded install it via Administration - Integrations - Repository - ADD.

Click UPLOAD and you'll be given some more details.

Click NEXT and follow the prompts. Once complete, you'll see it here.

Selecting it will give you more details around what's included, Metrics, and Content. To configure an Adapter Instance, click ADD ACCOUNT, which will prompt you for a vCenter target.

Details for configuration can be found here. Once configured it will look like this.

You will next want to enable all the Super Metrics in your Policy/s, these are used in the vCommunity Dashboards found here.

You are now up and running with the vCommunity Management Pack! This is just the first in what will be a series of blogs on this topic.

Finally, we are taking feature requests here, please log anything you'd like to see. Much more to come here, enjoy!