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.

You can use the vRealize Automation 8.x to perform some of the following key tasks:
  • 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

Several terms are used with workload placement.
  • 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

When you use workload placement to provision blueprints, the provisioning workflow uses the reservations in vRealize Automation, and the placement optimization from vRealize Operations .
  1. vRealize Operations provides placement optimization recommendations according to analytics data.
  2. 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.

Distribution Strategy
  • 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

Workload Placement is recommended to run on a cluster (with existing VMs) or for the new deployment in vRealize Automation for Day 0 integration. After the deployment or move of the virtual machine, the cluster hosting that VM does not have workload greater that 80% for CPU and/or Memory and/or Disk Space. The recommendation starts only if the Memory or CPU workload is not optimized.
Note: We do not recommend Disk Space Optimization for Workload Placement, as we always ensure that the workload for Disk Space is within the green zone.

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.

We have cluster A which has 100 GB memory capacity of which 20 GB is free, so this means 80 GB is used. We have another cluster B which has 1 TB memory of which 700 GB is free, so this means that 300 GB is used. If you look at this percentage wise, we see that cluster A has 80% free space and cluster B has 70% free space, however in terms of actual available space, we see that the 700 GB free space of cluster B is more than 20 GB free space available in cluster A.
Note: If the workload placement results in having more than 80% workload on the cluster, then vRealize Operations cannot provide a recommendation, or the recommendation cannot be used, then vRealize Automation falls back to its default placement logic.

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.