The vRealize Automation 8.x integration with vRealize Operations , extends operational management capabilities of the vRealize Operations platform to provide cloud aware operational visibility of the cloud infrastructure. The vRealize Automation 8.x enables you to monitor the health, efficiency, and capacity risks associated with the imported cloud accounts.
- Gain visibility into the performance and health of cloud zones integrated with vRealize Operations .
- Import and synchronize existing cloud accounts from vRealize Automation 8.x to vRealize Operations .
- Manage the workload placement of VMs that are part of the clusters managed by vRealize Automation 8.x.
- Integrate and troubleshoot vSphere endpoint issues associated with vRealize Automation 8.x using the vRealize Operations dashboard.
How Does vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations Integration Work
vRealize Automation can work with vRealize Operations to perform advanced workload placement, provide deployment health and virtual machine metrics, and display pricing.
Integration between the two products must be on-premises to on-premises, not a mix of on-premises and cloud.
To integrate with vRealize Operations , look under Infrastructure > Connections > Integrations. To add the integration, you need thevRealize Operations URL and its login user name and password. In addition, vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations need to manage the same endpoint.
Workload Placement
When you deploy a blueprint, workload placement uses collected data to recommend where to deploy the blueprint based on available resources. vRealize Automation and vRealize Operations work together to provide placement recommendations for workloads in the deployment of new blueprints.
While vRealize Automation manages organizational policies, such as business groups, reservations, and quotas, it integrates with the capacity analytics of vRealize Operations to place machines. Workload placement is only available for vSphere endpoints.
Workload Placement Terms Used
- Clusters in vSphere map to compute resources in vRealize Automation.
- Reservations include compute and storage, where the storage can consist of individual datastores or datastore clusters. A reservation can include multiple datastores, datastore clusters, or both.
- Multiple reservations can refer to the same cluster.
- Virtual machines can move to multiple clusters.
- When workload placement is enabled, the provisioning workflow uses the placement policy to recommend where to deploy the blueprint.
Provisioning Blueprints with Workload Placement
- vRealize Operations provides placement optimization recommendations according to analytics data.
- vRealize Automation continues the provisioning process according to the placement recommendations from vRealize Operations .
If vRealize Operations cannot provide a recommendation, or the recommendation cannot be used, then vRealize Automation falls back to its default placement logic.
Workload Placement Goals
The goal of Workload Placement is to make sure that no cluster is overloaded by more than 80% of the potential workload. Workload placement is done in the following three stages.
Stress-free clusters
Ensures that the memory, CPU, or disk space workload is less than 80% for the cluster.
Workload Placement based on Business Intent
Distribution of virtual machines between Clusters is based on tags. When a cluster and VM have the same tag, VM will be recommended to move from this cluster or VM will be recommended to move to this cluster. When host-based tagging is enabled, VM will be recommended to optimize the workload for cluster based on a rule.
- Balanced distribution: Distribution is based on the green zone, with maximum 20% difference workload between the two clusters.
- Moderate distribution: Ensures that no cluster is at stress level.
- Consolidated distribution: Keeps the hosts free while maintaining the workload at green level. In some cases, one of the clusters has resources free for backup purposes.
Workload Placement Recommendation
vRealize Automation Workload Placement Day 1 Recommendation
The distribution of VMs is done based on blueprint configurations. WLP calculates and evaluates the impact of potential deployment based on the workload or cluster utilization. The objective of WLP is to make sure that the least loaded cluster gets to provision highest number of VMs.
Workload Placement Automation
Automation
The Automation calculates and evaluates the move of virtual machines every 5 minutes. If you find a VM that is not optimized, the optimization is triggered automatically. Note, the time slot between two automated optimizations is limited to 6 hours.
Schedule
Schedule automation calculates and evaluates the move only during the scheduled time slots. The available options are Once, Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.
Impact on Cloud Zones and Non vRealize Automation-Managed VMs
Whenever there is a vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation integration for a data center,the cloud zones that have virtual machines which are not managed by vRealize Automation or not created by vRealize Automation, Workload Placement ignores them.