vRealize Operations Manager 6 - Part V - Create Custom Groups with vSphere Tags

One of the best vROps (old vCOps) features is the option to create custom groups where you can define the criteria membership and apply a policy rule to them.

There is a lot of environments where the Virtual Machines are not properly configured and defined, with the vSphere Folders or inventory VM names, no naming convention, etc.... 

Is here where the "vSphere Tags" win the game! You can easily tag your VMs!  ..use PowerCLI!!!! (next post incoming)

Imagine that you need to create a policy rule and a Custom Group but your VMs in vSphere are not organized...  Are you thinking in add one-by-one to a Custom Group? and what if tomorrow you add new VMs? ...manually adding Vms is not a good idea, so try to tag your VMs when you create it on the vSphere environment and keep it updated with your CMDB database.

But, how to tag your environment properly?  First of all, you "must" have clear the tags you want to add and how to categorize it.  Just an example, filter you DDBB Vms  (SQL, Oracle, MongoDB, etc) or filter by App Vms, or Bckp environment, or AV environment... and so on.....

Once you have your VMs tagged, you can create a custom group as shown below:

See previous Part I    -vRealize Operations Manager 6 - Part I - OVA deployment

See previous Part II   - vRealize Operations Manager 6 - Part II - Express Installation

See previous Part III  - vRealize Operations Manager 6 - Part III - Manage Solution

See previous Part IV  - vRealize Operations Manager 6 - Part IV -  How import LDAP users

Related with:  VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part I

http://virtualshocks.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/vmware-vsphere-how-to-create-tags-part-i.html

VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part II with PowerCLI

On the Part I post we learn how to add a Tag and a Category trough the GUI interface with vSphere Web Client, now, let´s take a look about how to do it with PowerCLI.

Remember that Tags are a new feature available from vSphere 5.1 and the cmdlets are available from PowerCLI 5.5, so, we need at least a vCenter on vSphere 5.1 and the PowerCLI 5.5 installed but much better use las version PowerCLI 6 (not all cmdlets are present in PowerCLI 5.5 initial release)

Use this to verify the version you have installed: 

PowerCLI C:\> Get-VIToolkitVersion

Now with the New-Tag we can review the Tags configured, and with "New-TagCategory" create a Category and after with "New-Tag" the Tag

Now, we are ready to assign Tags to objects, in this case to Virtual Machine:

It´s time to verify it trough Web Client:

Something i didn´t mention jet, is that you can assign multiple Tags to an objet in vSphere , in our case to a Virtual Machine. It means that you can for example tag a VM with the "DDBB_tag" because it´s a SQL DDBB, and Tag it with "Cluster_tag" because it´s a Microsoft Cluster, or with another tag like "Test_tag" because it´s a DDBB SQL Cluster from the Lab Environment.

Why multiple Tags? For vROps it will be useful to create custom groups using different Tags criteria and fix different policies if its a VM from DDBB servers, or if its a VM from Lan Environment..... one VM could be placed in different Custom Groups at the same time :-)

First Part of this post: VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part I

http://virtualshocks.blogspot.com.es/2015/04/vmware-vsphere-how-to-create-tags-part-i.html

VMware vSphere: how to create tags - Part I

What is a tag?

A tag is a label that you can apply to objects in the vSphere inventory. Tags allow you to attach metadata to objects to make them more sortable and searchable.

Tags are grouped into categories, which define how the tags can be applied to inventory objects.

What is a category?

A category groups together related tags in the vCenter Server inventory.

When you create a category, you specify whether multiple tags in that category can be assigned to a given object at one time, or whether only one tag can be assigned to an object at a time. For example, a category called Priority might contain the tags High, Medium, and Low, and be configured to allow only one tag in the category to be applied to an object at a time.

You also specify whether tags in a category can be applied to all objects, or only to specific object types, such as hosts or datastores.

...yes, this is just a Copy&Paste from the original explanation from tags and categories on the VMware documentation....but i´m sure that no one read it...or at least...just a few docu-addicts :-)

Once we have a crystal clear the idea about what Tags and Category are....let´s show how to create them:

continue reading....

Ediciones de VMware vCloud Suite

VMware en su version vCloud Suite dispone de tres ediciones: Standard, Advanced y Enterprise.

En cada una de ellas se incluyen diferentes soluciones: vSphere Enterprise Plus, vRealize Operations (vROps), vRealize Automation (vRA), vRealize Business y vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM): 

vRealize Operations es el antiguo vCenter Operations
vRealize Automation es el antiguo vCenter Automation
vRealize Business es en antiguo IT Business Management

Mas info en:  http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vCloud-Suite-Pricing-Packaging-Whitepaper.pdf