The Operations Management domain represents the day 1 and day 2 functions to ensure that the infrastructure and service components are operating in a healthy state and SLAs are met.

The operations management solution includes four components that together provide a holistic approach to the operations management for the NFVI of a CSP. Together VMware vRealize® Operations™, VMware vRealize® Log Insight™, and VMware vRealize® Network Insight™ monitor the health of the virtual environment, collect logs and alarms, correlate events across multiple data sources and components to predict future issues. These components and VMware vRealize® Orchestrator™ use policy-based automation framework to conduct remediation and analyze data to help the operator with health prediction and issue avoidance.

The key tasks of the operations management components are:

  • Topology and discovery: NFVI visibility is achieved by collecting essential performance and fault metrics from the virtualization layer, the physical devices, and the VIM components. The elastic and dynamic nature of the NFVI layer requires tracking of objects and maintaining correlations to help with decision tree accuracy and intelligence for infrastructure assurance.

  • Monitoring: The components of the Operations domain continuously collect and analyze health, SLA, and planning metrics to ensure that services are meeting stringent QoS and to help avoiding issues in a predictable and prescriptive cadence.

  • Issue isolation: The components of the NFV environment in the physical infrastructure, the virtualization layer, or even the VNFs themselves, generate various log messages and alarms. vCloud NFV includes an integrated log collection system that correlates between alerts and log messages to quickly troubleshoot issues.

  • Remediation: Ongoing management of performance and capacity across the NFVI is required for optimal and economic use of the platform. The performance management capability helps identify degraded performance before VNFs are affected. Issues pertaining to performance, capacity, congestion, and so on, can be proactively avoided, increasing the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF).

  • Closed-loop optimization: The operations management components analyze the system usage and proactively provide optimization recommendations, including network topology modifications. Actions can be tied to orchestrated workflows and automation to trigger Virtual Network Function Manager (VNFM), service orchestrators, and others to ensure continuous optimization, balancing, and recover in the event of failures.

VMware vRealize Operations Manager

VMware vRealize® Operations Manager™ delivers operations management with full stack visibility across the physical and virtual infrastructure. Through performance and health monitoring functions, vRealize Operations Manager improves the system performance, avoids service disruption, and helps the CSP to provide proactive management of the NFVI. The key capabilities include predictive analytics, smart and configurable alerts, and guided remediation.

vRealize Operations Manager exposes the information it gathers through an API that MANO and other components can use.

With this release, vRealize Operations Manager enables intent-based business and operational policies for dynamic optimization and capacity targets. Cost analysis is embedded into the solution, as with improved capacity planning and forecasting engines.

VMware vRealize Log Insight

VMware vRealize Log Insight delivers heterogeneous log management with dashboards, analytics, and third-party extensibility. It provides deep operational visibility and troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Its indexing and machine learning based grouping provides log searches that help with troubleshooting issues.

VMware vRealize Network Insight

vRealize Network Insight collects metrics, flow, network topology, and event data to provide a detailed view of the network configuration and its health. Information is collected on all NSX-T managed networks including East-West traffic between VNF components, and North-South traffic in and out of the NFV infrastructure. Broad layer 2 to layer 3 support means that vRealize Network Insight can visualize both the underlay and the overlay networks, providing operator with a holistic view of all relevant network layers. By using this information for visibility and analytics across all virtual and physical elements, the operator can optimize network performance and increase its availability.

On the security aspects, vRealize Network Insight offers intelligence operations for SDN and security across the virtual and physical infrastructure by using micro-segmentation planning and policy distribution into NSX-T. The solution can be scaled, providing early warning on security policy violations.

VMware vRealize Orchestrator

The vCloud NFV platform provides closed-loop automation workflows to enable self-healing across VMs, hosts, and datastores at the infrastructure level. It also allows the CSP to create VNF-specific custom workflows for the faster time to resolution. vRealize Operations Manager integrates with vRealize Orchestrator through a management pack that provides access to the Orchestrator workflow engine for more remediation actions and the ability to run Orchestrator workflows directly from the vRealize Operations Manager user interface.