Dell CloudIQ - VMware Visibility
A guest article by Michael Aharon
In the last several years, there has been an increased desire to have deeper visibility and insights into what is going on within customers’ data centers. Especially with wider adoption of AI/ML, demand for insight-driven outcomes has increased. Customers are looking to have a single pane of glass that has visibility into their infrastructure.
With that in mind, Dell Technologies did an incredible job with the introduction of CloudIQ several years ago. CloudIQ is a cloud-based AIOps, proactive monitoring, and predictive analytics application for Dell systems. It uses machine learning and other algorithms, notifications, and recommendations to help you optimize compute, storage, data protection and network health, performance, and capacity. CloudIQ started with core storage, specifically Unity, as one of the pilot products. Fast forward to today, over 80% of the Dell portfolio is supported within CloudIQ. For a detailed overview of CloudIQ, please review https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/t/cloudiq-a-detailed-review/.
A major benefit to customers who have invested in the Dell portfolio is that CloudIQ truly becomes the single pane of glass. It enables customers to integrate CloudIQ via WebHooks and REST API with external tools and create actionable processes. One example would be integration with ServiceNow. The other benefit is the breadth of the insights based on AI/ML algorithms and our capability to not only be descriptive in our recommendations, but also become more prescriptive.
There are many benefits to CloudIQ, but in this article I would like to focus specifically on the CloudIQ Collector. Although customers are used to using VMware vCenter to look up configuration and performance details specific to Virtual Machines and vVols, with AIOps-based tools like CloudIQ, the goal is to bring this all together in a single management pane of glass. Specifically, customers using Dell primary storage solutions can leverage the CloudIQ Collector to bring visibility at the VMware Virtual Machine level inside the CloudIQ portal. This capability can enable customers to use CloudIQ for the following use cases:
The Dell CloudIQ Collector is a VMware Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) using Open Virtualization Format (OVF) and is installed as a virtual machine that collects data from VMware environments, Dell Connectrix switches, and Dell PowerSwitch devices. The Collector retrieves information from the target objects (vCenter or switches) and sends the collected data back to CloudIQ using Secure Connect Gateway. For VMware, the Collector communicates to vCenter using the VMware API and requires a user with read-only privileges. For Connectrix and PowerSwitch devices, the Collector communicates to the individual switches using REST API and uses a nonprivileged user.
Note: A single collector can be used for VMware, Connectrix, and PowerSwitch.
The theme here is to provide overall visibility across different pieces of infrastructure to our customers. Derek Barboza does a great job in his whitepaper Dell CloudIQ Collector: An Overview, but I want to go more into the functionality and what data is presented to customers.
Viewing VMware Data within CloudIQ
Once the CloudIQ Collector is installed and fully configured, VMware data will appear in CloudIQ within 24 hours and will be accessible within the following views in CloudIQ portal.
1. On a system configuration page:
2. On a hosting storage object like a Pool, LUN/Volume or Storage Group and on a Host/Server properties page:
3. Inventory > Systems (click on an array, click on configuration tab, click on storage groups tab, click on virtual machines tab)
Traditionally, customers with Dell’s primary storage have had a certain level of visibility into their VMware environment. This is typically accomplished by linking VMware vCenter with our management tools for products like PowerMax, PowerStore and Unity XT. In order to keep things concise, I will focus on PowerStore, but as mentioned above, other Dell primary storage products have visibility into VMware environment from their respective element managers.
Jodey Hogeland discusses #PowerStore and #VMware integration in his article Dell PowerStore and VMware Integration.
The Dell PowerStore management UI is called PowerStore Manager. Integrating PowerStore Manager with VMware vCenter is very straightforward. If integration is successful, you will see status turn to green and show OK.
This integration with vCenter will populate the Virtual Machine tab in PowerStore Manager.
As you can see, we support vVol, VMFS and NFS based virtual machines. You can also expand the view by adding additional columns by clicking on ‘Show/Hide Table Columns’ on the right-hand side of this screen.
The Virtual Machine "Name" column allows users to click on each virtual machine and see additional details.
The above image is showing a detailed view of a vVol virtual machine. You can navigate through multiple tabs that show additional and deeper details, such as performance and storage related metrics, data protection policies applied etc.
The other integration point you can explore is the datastore a virtual machine resides in. This comes in handy when customers need to troubleshoot a specific issue, or simply map out the components. A PowerStore administrator can trace the virtual machine directly to either a Storage Container, VMFS block LUN or an NFS based datastore, without leaving the virtual machines view of the PowerStore Manager.
In the above image, I selected a Storage Container that holds one of the vVols. Once again, you see a very consistent view, with multiple tabs allowing you to easily navigate and look up additional details.
VMware vVols provides very granular details that can be viewed within PowerStore Manager, as seen above. When it comes to VMFS or NFS based virtual machines we can also get detailed information by using the CloudIQ Collector as a supplement.
Viewing VMware within CloudIQ
Although CloudIQ is provided to customers as Software-as-a-Service, the CloudIQ Collector is one of the elements that will need to be installed inside the customers’ data center.
Also, you need to ensure that PowerStore is configured to communicate with CloudIQ. Jodey Hogeland has a detailed article on PowerStore + CloudIQ that demonstrates how to enable CloudIQ on PowerStore in a single click.
Logging in to CloudIQ is based on customers’ accounts registered with Dell support contract. In addition to this, customers can leverage Role Based Access Control (RBAC) implemented within the CloudIQ portal.
Once logged in, customers can explore the categories shown on the left-hand side of the CloudIQ portal. The categories that we will be focusing on in this blog are under the ‘Monitor’ category.
The "Virtualization" view enables you to view and manage components such as the vCenter, data center, and clusters using the tree view and the table view. It also displays information about each VMware vCenter server in the system. For those customers who use Dell HCI solutions like VxRail, as well as Dell primary storage products, like PowerStore, or simply a VMware ESXi environment managed by a vCenter, this view will have a consolidated view of all these environments.?
Across the top, customers can see a quick snapshot of overall status of the environment.
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The navigation panel on the left shows you all vCenters with their respective clusters and data centers. Customers can browse through the list and select a particular cluster. As the image below is showing, you can start zooming in on each virtual machine listed under the VMs tab. The areas highlighted below are hyperlinks and allow customers to get additional details for each virtual machines.
As an example, let's click on the Backup_VM1 virtual machine and this will lead to the next view.
This is where it starts to get very interesting. For example, customers can see our AI/ML algorithms in action in the form of anomaly detection. CloudIQ collects telemetry data and compares metrics against historical seasonality. We can flag issues, like increased latency, as we compare data against what we saw in the past for the same period.
Toward the bottom of the view, you can see a section called “Configuration Changes”. We display hourly aggregated configuration changes that have been made to this Virtual Machine.
The right side of this view is showing:
The "End to End Map" displays an interactive topology map representing the components in an end-to-end map, including inventory and basic performance. Selecting a cluster, host, datastore, storage entity, or array displays more object details underneath the topology map.
Storage Paths provides information for Storage Paths.
Configuration Changes displays configuration changes for the last 24 hours for the virtual machine.
If customers use other solutions from the Dell Technologies portfolio, such as PowerEdge servers for your VMware ESXi clusters, there is yet another option/view you can explore.
To round off the discussion, customers also have reporting level capabilities that can be leveraged from the "Reports" section.
Customers can generate several types of reports:
If you simply would like to report on the inventory of Virtual Machines, the Table Chart would be sufficient.
When adding which columns, you would like to display in the report, we have the default columns, but you can also customize and add additional columns from the available columns list.
The second option is to generate a Line Chart type of report, which will show performance data. As I am demonstrating below, you can select ‘VMware’ as the product category and ‘Virtual Machine’ as the sub-category. This selection will show you all the virtual machines available in the inventory. Feel free to select one or more virtual machines and proceed to the next screen.
This is where you select the metric you would like to report on.
The resultant report will show you by default performance data for the last 24 hours. Since CloudIQ keeps 2 years of historical data, you can define a larger window by clicking on the drop down menu.
As you can see above, you can correlate performance for virtual machines that might have dependencies, but you can also click on either virtual machine on the right-hand side and dim down the graph, so it doesn’t interfere or crowd the screen.
Once you are happy with the data on the screen, you may save / export it into a PDF format.
?Conclusion
As you can see, there is a plethora of information available to customers regarding VMware level information and reporting. In CloudIQ, there are many other views that can show additional details about virtual machines and volumes, for example when browsing a server or a datastore. I encourage you to connect with the Dell representative and schedule a full demo of this product.
Great article explaining CloudIQ and VMware integration.