Blue Medora has many integrations between vRealize Operations and other things - like Microsoft AD, MEDITECH health record, and NetApp HCI (full list of integrations can be seen here). In this article we are going to get the NetApp HCI Management Pack working.
When you buy, or get a trial, you end up with a very big license, and the bits. I assume you have the bits, and vRealize Operations. BTW, here is the support page for this management pack if you need the docs.
So you need to log into vROps as the admin user. Next change to the Administration tab.
Once on the Repository page you scroll down to the bottom.
Now you use the Add / Upgrade button.
If this is the first time you are installing the MP you likely do not need to enable either of the checkboxes. But they are useful, and when you upgrade, I generally enable both of them.
Once you have the file selected, as you can see I have above, use the upload button. It may take 3 or 4 minutes. I had some problems so the second time I tried I enabled both check boxes.
Now use the Next button. You may need to confirm to install an unsigned solution but say yes anyway.
Next is accept the EULA.
Now you get to watch the install.
So my installed failed.
I could not figure out why, so I did what is sort of a default in these cases. I shutdown vROps, and added a new disk that was big (750 GB) and restarted. I had to bring online the cluster (in the Admin UI), but after that I could successfully install.
So the MP is installed now!
Now we need to do license. So change to Administration, Management, and select Licensing.
Use the green + button to add a license. Select NetApp HCI from the dropdown men and paste your license in the license field.
The next thing we need to do is create a credential for our HCI gear.
Change to the Administration view, and Management / Credentials.
Now create a credential that will provide read only or better access to your HCI. Use the green + to do this.
Now we create a connection from vROps to the HCI gear - which will use the credentials we just did.
Now change to Administration, Other Accounts.
We select the NetApp HCI and SolidFire button.
We fill in the spaces, and we use the IP for our management virtual IP.
You can see I used the credentials we created already, and now we use the Test Connection button. Which is important, you always use those test buttons.
Now we should wait a little for data collection to happen, but then we should test things and by that I mean we should make sure we see stuff!
So a short time later I can see stuff that is thanks to the NetApp HCI MP.
This shows an overview of your datastore’s and spaced used / not used, as well as latency. So useful info.
In this one we see at the volume level some interesting stuff like IOPS and latency.
I like this widget as it gives a nice overview of the volume usage. But it is also a selector, which means when you select a volume it fills in the other widgets with the appropriate info. In addition, you can see the other NetApp HCI dashboards.
If you create dashboards or widgets you now have all of the NetApp HCI info to work with. That is the nice thing about management packs, they introduce data, as well as widgets / dashboards / reports, but it is done in a way that makes it part of all of the other data so that you can make dashboards that are pretty amazing since they can combine all of the info!
Questions or comments are always welcome,
Michael
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