The vRealize components of the vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition platform are integrated in the platform and configured to report and trigger analytical intelligence. The various configurations and extensions that follow will help the CSP to get started with the analytics-enabled reference architecture.

vRealize Operations

vRealize Operations is configured with the adapters that are necessary to start collecting data from the infrastructure. The following solutions should be considered:

  • vCenter Adapter. vSphere connects vRealize Operations Manager to one or more Resource and Management vCenter Server instances. The system collects data and metrics from those instances, monitors them, and runs actions in them.

  • End-Point Operations Management. The End-Point Operations Management solution is used to gather operating system metrics and to monitor availability of remote platforms and applications.

  • vSAN Adapter. In a production environment, operations management for vSAN can be provided by using dashboards to evaluate, manage, and optimize the performance of vSAN and vSAN-enabled objects in the vCenter Server system.

  • OpenStack and NSX Adapter – The vRealize® Operations Management Pack™ for OpenStack allows the CSP to quickly view the health of the environment, including services running within the OpenStack infrastructure. The OpenStack management pack integrates with NSX-T Data Center, which allows for easy monitoring and management of the network infrastructure. vRealize Operations Management Pack for OpenStack includes dashboards to provide visibility into OpenStack deployments, such as OpenStack Management Services, OpenStack Compute Infrastructure, OpenStack Network Infrastructure, OpenStack Tenants, and OpenStack Storage.

  • vRealize Orchestrator Solution. This management pack enables an adapter to communicate with the vRealize Orchestrator workflow automation engine.

vRealize Network Insight

vRealize Network Insight can be configured to monitor all networking-related components in the NFVI. vRealize Network Insight can connect to the VMware Integrated OpenStack NFV components that are related to networking and security and provide insights into the networking segments that are used to deploy and manage the vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition platform. The management VLANs, external VLANs, and Overlay segments are all available for monitoring and diagnostics.

vRealize Network Insight uses the following data sources:

  • vCenter Server. Both Resource and Management vCenter Server instances.

  • NSX Manager. The management plane of the NSX-T Data Center networking.

  • IPFIX. For flow analysis, which can be enabled within vCenter Server.

  • Network devices. Physical devices such as Dell switches, Cisco Nexus and Catalyst switches, Arista, Juniper Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Brocade, and Palo Alto Networks switches.

vRealize Orchestrator

vRealize Orchestrator is integrated into vRealize Operations Manager as a management pack to provide bidirectional communication with the Orchestrator workflow engine. The management pack is deployed in vRealize Operations Manager and configured to point and authenticate to the vRealize Orchestrator instance.

VMware vRealize Operations Management Pack

vRealize Operations Manager can be extended through management packs to monitor not just VNF virtual machines but even Kubernetes clusters giving visibility into the containers, pods, namespaces, replication sets, and so on, that provide the infrastructure for a tenant’s containerized network functions.

VMware vRealize Operations Manager collects structure data from various vCloud NFV OpenStack Edition components, including gathering data from adapters that are connected to external components. For this mechanism to work, vRealize Operations Manager is configured to communicate with data sources by using an authorized user account for the respective components. If the user account has limited access to objects in the source server, it sees only the data for which the account has permissions. At a minimum, the user account must have read privileges across the objects from which it will collect data. A collection of management packs is available on VMware Solution Exchange.

To minimize the traffic between vCenter Server and the vRealize Operations Manager, the vCenter Server Adapter is installed with a five-minute collection interval.

Out-of-the-box, vRealize Operations Manager does not monitor VNF service availability or VNF internal key KPIs. The VNF Manager derives this information through direct interaction with the respective VNFs. To extend the operations management functionality to the VNFs, VNF vendors can create custom management packs for vRealize Operations Manager. Management pack development requires an understanding of the vRealize Operations Manager inventory model and the management functions that management packs implement. These include auto-discovery and monitoring. More information is available at Endpoint Operations Management Agent Plugin Development Kit .

VMware vRealize Log Insight Content Pack

vRealize Log Insight gathers log events natively from multiple syslog data sources and through special content packs. Specific dashboards can be customized to perform log analytics and alerts. For additional information about vRealize Log Insight solutions, see VMware Solution Exchange.