Review: VMware's vCenter Operations Manager lightens the load
Monitoring virtual servers for availability, performance, health, and workload capacity has never been easy, but Operations Manager goes a long way toward that goal
By Paul Venezia
Senior Contributing Editor, InfoWorld |
The reports are well designed and attractive, but there is no capacity for custom report generation in the UI. VMware states that they can create custom reports from XML files via the command-line interface, but there's no UI control over this function.
Further, if a cluster, host, VM, or other object is removed from vCenter, the historical data for that object becomes inaccessible from within Operations Manager. VMware states that the data is actually present, but cannot currently be viewed through the UI.
The bottom line
VMware vCenter Operations Manager is a very useful and well-designed tool. It condenses the vast number of monitored data points for a vSphere implementation into a concise and easily digested format, and it provides analysis features that make it very easy to get a sense of the performance and capacity of the virtual infrastructure. Further, it's very simple to drill down into the data and determine where problems might be, whether they are affecting hosts, VMs, storage, or network operations.
Operations Manager might be overkill for smaller implementations, but for anything larger than two clusters, it provides a wealth of information that can be called up quickly. Also, the behavior-aware alerting is much more useful than the standard vCenter alerting/notification system, and the planning and analysis features are extremely useful for managing future growth. Overall, Operations Manager is a handy tool to have in your virtualization arsenal.
This article, "Review: VMware's vCenter Operations Manager lightens the load," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization, data center, and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.
Copyright © 2013 IDG Communications, Inc.