VMware Cloud Director can collect metrics that provide current and historic information about virtual machine performance and resource consumption for the virtual machines that are in your cloud. Data for historic metrics is stored in a Cassandra cluster.

Cassandra is an open-source database that you can use to provide the backing store for a scalable, high-performance solution for collecting time series data like virtual machine metrics. If you want VMware Cloud Director to support retrieval of historic metrics from virtual machines, you must install and configure a Cassandra cluster, and use the cell-management-tool to connect the cluster to VMware Cloud Director. Retrieval of current metrics does not require optional database software.

Prerequisites

Procedure

  1. Use the cell-management-tool utility to configure a connection between VMware Cloud Director and the nodes in the Cassandra cluster.
    In the following example command, node1-ip, node2-ip, node3-ip, and node4-ip are the IP address of the members of the Cassandra cluster. The default port (9042) is used. Metrics data is retained for 15 days.
    [root@cell1 /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin]# ./cell-management-tool cassandra --configure --create-schema \
    --cluster-nodes node1-ip,node2-ip,node3-ip, node4-ip \
    --username admin --password 'P@55w0rd' --ttl 15
    For information about using the cell management tool, see VMware Cloud Director Cell Management Tool Reference.
  2. (Optional) If you are upgrading VMware Cloud Director from version 9.1, use the cell-management-tool to configure the metrics database to store rolled-up metrics.
    Run a command similar to the following example:
    [root@cell1 /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin]# ./cell-management-tool cassandra --add-rollup \
    --username admin --password 'P@55w0rd'
  3. Restart each VMware Cloud Director cell.