The operations management components are deployed as a centralized function that is capable of day 1 and day 2 operations spanning the CSP's deployment topology. The data collection architecture is specific to each operations management component with a centralized single pane for monitoring, reporting, troubleshooting, and closed-loop automation.
vRealize Operations Manager
The virtual environment relies on a monitoring solution that is able to collect data regarding its health, capacity, availability, and performance. vRealize Operations Manager provides a robust and integrated monitoring platform that resides at the center of the NFV environment. It monitors the virtual environment and collects data about its health, capacity, availability, and performance. vRealize Operations Manager serves as the single pane of glass to the NFV environment.
vRealize Operations Manager extends and collects information through management packs. The collected information is filtered for relevancy, analyzed, and presented in customizable dashboards. It exposes an API that retrieves performance and health data about NFVI and the virtual resources of the VNF instance.
The design of the vRealize Operations components is based on centralized management and collection, with optional remote collection for a distributed topology. vRealize Operations Manager supports HA across the various components. HA creates a primary replica for the vRealize Operations Manager primary node and protects the management functions. In smaller deployments, the primary node can also act as a data node. In larger deployments, data nodes host adapters that are responsible for collecting data and can be scaled to meet additional capacity. To enable HA, at least one more data node must be deployed in addition to the primary node. Anti-affinity rules should be used to keep nodes on specific hosts.
vRealize Operations Manager is installed in the Management Pod in both Two-Pod and Three-Pod designs. Depending on the number of metrics that are collected over time, additional storage capacity and compute capacity might be required. Adding more hosts to the management cluster or more storage is sufficient to address the growing storage needs of vRealize Operations Manager.
By default, VMware offers Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large configurations during installation. The CSP can size the environment according to the existing infrastructure to be monitored. After the vRealize Operations Manager instance outgrows the existing size, the CSP must expand the cluster to add nodes of the same size. See the vRealize Operations Manager Sizing Guidelines .
vRealize Log Insight
CSPs can use vRealize Log Insight to collect log data from ESXi hosts and data about server events, tasks, and alarms from vCenter Server systems. vRealize Log Insight integrates with vRealize Operations Manager to send notification events. Because vRealize Log Insight collects real-time unstructured data, the CSP can configure all elements in the NFV environment to send their log data to vRealize Log Insight. This log aggregation provides a single log collector for the entire NFV environment.
vRealize Log Insight ingests syslog data from the physical and virtual NFVI components to deliver monitoring, search, and log analytics. It builds an index for analytics purposes by automatically identifying structure from machine-generated log data including application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages, performance data, and system state dumps. Coupled with a dashboard for stored queries, reports, and alerts, vRealize Log Insight assists the CSP in root cause analysis and reduction in MTTR. All NSX-T Data Center Manager syslog information, distributed firewall logs, and NSX-T Data Center Edge syslog information is sent to vRealize Log Insight.
The vRealize Log Insight API provides programmatic access to vRealize Log Insight functionality and to its datastore. As a result, the OSS/BSS systems or MANO components can integrate with vRealize Log Insight to gain further insight into the system events and logs.
vRealize Log Insight is deployed by using a single cluster configuration, which consists of a minimum of three nodes leveraging the Log Insight Integrated Load Balancer (ILB). A single log message is only present in one location within the cluster at a time. The cluster remains up and available to ingest data and serve queries during a temporary unavailability of a single node.
vRealize Log Insight provides preset VM sizes that the CSP can select from to meet the ingestion requirements of their environment, Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large configurations. These presets are certified size combinations of compute and disk resources, though extra resources can be added afterward. See the VMware Documentation for sizing details.
vRealize Network Insight
vRealize Network Insight provides operations for software-defined networking and security across virtual and physical infrastructure with micro-segmentation planning that can be scaled to thousands of VNFs. vRealize Network Insight is installed in the Management Pod in both Two-Pod and Three-Pod designs.
The vRealize Network Insight architecture consists of a platform VM, a proxy VM, and data sources. The platform VM provides analytics, storage, and a user interface to the data. The proxy VM, or the collector, collects data by using various protocols such as HTTPS, SSH, CLI, and SNMP, depending on the source and the configuration. A variety of data sources are supported, including vCenter Server, NSX-T Data Center, firewalls, and various switch vendors.
The platform VM is deployed as a single cluster to provide high availability and scale. A minimum of three platform VMs are required in the cluster. The proxy VMs are used to collect data and can be deployed in a single data center or distributed across sites. Depending on the amount of data that will be collected, typically CSPs need one or more proxy VMs.
Ensure that the system meets the minimum hardware configurations to install vRealize Network Insight. See VMware Documentation for sizing details.
vRealize Orchestrator
VMware vRealize Orchestrator is a development-and process-automation platform that provides a library of extensible workflows. Orchestrator workflows run on objects that are exposed through plug-ins and custom scripting to interact with any component that is reachable through an API. By default, a VMware vCenter plug-in is provided to orchestrate tasks in the cloud infrastructure environment. The CSP can use Orchestrator workflows to define and run automated configurable processes thus creating a framework for closed-loop automation.
vRealize Orchestrator is integrated with vRealize Operations Manager through a management pack that provides workflows for automating the cloud infrastructure environment and for orchestration of third-party components as well as management functions.
The vRealize Orchestrator is highly available and configured as a single cluster of multiple virtual appliance instances. The appliance is registered with a vCenter Single Sign-On service by using the vSphere Authentication mode. The appliance also requires a shared database instance.
Ensure that the system meets the minimum hardware configurations to install vRealize Orchestrator. See the VMware Documentation for sizing details.
