The service layer is referred to as cloud management. Cloud, or services and resources delivered through networking, for utilities, is typically private (owned and operated internal to the organization). It holds true for the central data and operations centers, and out to the edges of their service areas.
Wide Area Orchestration
The enterprise management and orchestration layer for geographically dispersed vSphere edge nodes is vCenter. It can be advantageous for separate Informational Technology and Operational Technology groups to have individual vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) instances. Therefore, it might result in one or more vCSAs in the data center or operations center and one or more for edge or field compute clusters (grouped by substation). The following table shows the configuration maximums for vCSA 7.0.
| vCenter Server Maximums |
vCSA 8.0 |
|---|---|
| Hosts per vCenter Server |
2500 |
| Powered on virtual machines |
40000 |
| Registered virtual machines |
45000 |
| Linked vCenter Servers |
15 |
| Hosts in linked vCenter Servers |
15000 |
| Powered on virtual machines in linked vCenter |
135000 |
| Registered virtual machines in linked vCenter |
150000 |
| MAC addresses per vCenter Server |
65536 |
You can link separate vCenters together (up to the maximum listed in vCenter Server Appliance Limits) through vSphere enhanced linked mode. Logging into any one of the single instances provides a management interface and inventories for all vCenters. Optionally, you can exclude certain vCenters if desired, or use embedded role-based access controls to restrict permissions and access for individual organizational groups.
The sizing of the vCenter server appliance must be considered initially. Hardware requirements include the total number of vCPUs, RAM, and storage. These are pre-sized in a convenient selection that is made at the time of installation (tiny through x-large environments). For more details, see the vSphere documentation at docs.vmware.com.
Service and Operations
After the installation and commissioning, software-defined architecture must be maintained and managed throughout its lifecycle. VMware has a full suite of tools to perform day-to-day service functions for the infrastructure portrayed in Enterprise Architecture Overview. This suite includes operations administration, which is the monitoring and logging of individual physical and virtual components, along with the workloads being hosted. A resultant of this continuous, live data acquisition are notifications, alerts, or alarms.
vSphere offers basic functionality to manage enterprise topology, as it retrieves the system topology, down to the discrete compute, networking, storage, and other available resources, through vCSA.
Performance Charts – view performance data for the system resources.
Performance Monitoring using CLI - access detailed information through command line interface.
Host Health – quickly identify which hosts are healthy and which are experiencing problems.
Events, Alerts, and Alarms – user-configurable alerts and alarms and system actions to be triggered as a result.
System Log Files - system logs contain additional information about activities in the vSphere environment.
Events, notifications, alerts, and alarms can be forwarded from individual vSphere hosts, or as aggregated information from a vCSA. It can be done through SNMP messages for individual entries, sent as traps, or by streaming system logs using syslog protocol, to external servers. Either of these formats are typical for utilities to possess or to have devices with compatible capabilities.
VMware Aria Suite is categorically broken into several offerings, allowing an organization to evaluate and choose the products that best fit their requirements. Details of each Aria service recommended for use with edge environments is provided in the ECS Overview. For more information about the Aria Suite, go to vmware.com.
