VMware Intelligent Assist in VCF Operations 9.1.1

While not formally listed in the VCF Operations 9.1.1 Release Notes, there is a pretty cool new feature called VMware Intelligent Assist available in 9.1.1. There is a blog available here discussing it, but I thought it would be worthwhile to explore it in a bit more detail here. Let's go.

I've logged into Operations as the local admin and gone to the Extensions tab at the top.

Note: if you log into Operations as non-admin user you won't see the Extensions tab. It's not visible to any other users until it's made available in that usres corresponding Role. Here I've turned it on for the Administrator Role.

Back on the Extensions tab click the ACTIVATE button on VMware Intelligent Assistant tab.

Once done it will look like this. Now if you were to go to the VMware Intelligent Assist tab at left you'd see this.

Note: the LEARN MORE link doesn't work at this point.

Back on the Extensions - Extension Management tab let's activate the Advanced Configuration tile by clicking ACTIVATE.

Once done it will look like this and you'll notice a new tab on the left called Advanced Configuration. This is where we will configure the LLM VMware Intelligent Assist will use. Note: Log Management is required here as well (it's already running in this lab).

Click ENABLE SERVICES.

It'll take a few minutes, but eventually you'll have this.

Click ADD PROVIDER top right.

Today we have two options: Google Gemini or VCF Private AI. In this blog we'll select Google Gemini.

I've entered my Google Gemini API key and it connects.

Once done go to the Models tab and select a Model.

We are now ready to use VMware Intelligent Assist.

I've selected the "Show all infrastructure issues" prompt which provided this.

Giving me visibility into Alert counts, Alerts by Resource Type, a quick Summary, and a pointer where to find more details in product.

You can also just ask a question like this one: "show me all the important metrics and properties for all vms that start with vcf-m02-vmsp". Which genereated a table of the VMs I asked for with relevant metrics and properties.

I expect this to get better with support for more Models in the future. I was this was helpful, enjoy!