After implementing the vPAC Ready Infrastructure validated solution, there are some common operations that must be performed to the environment, such as examining the operational state of the components added along with changing default passwords for all and updating any certificates.
Operational guidance on the components deployed automatically in the vSphere configuration can be found in the VMware Cloud Foundation Operations and Administration Guide in the VMware Cloud Foundation documentation.
System Monitoring
The parameters of individual components in the environment can be monitored by other validated solutions for operations management and business continuity. There are options for creating alerts and notifications, logging, backup and restore, disaster recovery, and life cycle management of private cloud solutions.
For validated monitoring solutions, see the VMware Cloud Foundation Validated Solutions.
Upgrades and Patching
Best practices for upgrades and patching are explained in Appendix A: Security Capabilities within Software-Defined Infrastructure for Utilities. vSphere Lifecycle Manager can securely facilitate upgrade for all ESXi hosts within a vSphere environment, including vCenter Server and vSAN elements. vCenter Server performs hash checking on all software downloaded and does automatic checksum verification for any software that is manually imported.
Failover and Remediation Techniques
Appendix A: Security Capabilities within Software-Defined Infrastructure for Utilities also includes VMware recommendations for how to plan an environment for data protection through backups and fallback methods such as redundancy or replication.
Virtual machines networked through PCI-passthrough or SR-IOV methods are not fully data protected. However, the virtual machines can be configured for high availability (HA) with the assignable hardware feature found in vSphere versions 7 and later.
Due to the strict real-time requirements for certain power system applications, neither high availability nor fault tolerance are acceptable mechanisms for redundancy rules requiring (n-1) availability, or better, typical of power system protection functions. In these cases, active-active installations are typically implemented, ideally constructed with equivalent hardware, in sets of two (or more).
Active-active refers to two functionally equivalent applications operating in parallel with each other.
