Management packs are content packs that you can add to vROps to make it more functional. It already comes with a load of them when you first install vROps 8. The first one most people activate/configure is the vSphere connector. You can also add more solutions to your vROps installation. Many of these you find in the VMware Solution Exchange. These content packs brings extra goodies to your solution, such as dashboards, and alerts etc.
Below we will go through the configuration of the most important management pack, for vCenter and also add the SDDC management pack which is often one of the first packs downloaded.
You find the Repository with the already added management packs under Administration –> Solutions –> Repository
Some are already activated when you install vROps and some you can activate in case you have the products running. Some you can deactivate also if you do not need them (any more).
If you go two steps up from Repository you find the Cloud Account. Here you can add your vCenters or connect to Cloud Providers. Click on the account you want to add and fill in the information.
You will need to create a set of credentials for vCenter. You can create these before you setup the connection or during the configuration. I tend the find it is better to create them first. The highlighted area below is where you create them at first. After that then you just fill in the information required and click Add.
The other Management Pack that many people tend to add early on is the SDDC management pack. You have to download that, and you do that from the Solution Exchange. If you search for SDDC, it should be one of the first ones to come up.
Click on the box and click on try, this will start the download of the pak file.
After this you need to go to Repository and add a new one (right at the bottom you can click the Add/Upgrade button. This opens up a screen where you can browse to the location of the pack file. Find the file you downloaded from the solution exchange and then click on upload to upload the package to the vROps servers.
After that is done click on next. Do check that you have a green check mark that says the pak file is valid.
On the second Screen, accept the user agreement, click next. Then the installation starts.
Once it is finished. Click on the Finish button. You will now have a new management pack down below the other ones. Notice this one you can not deactivate. You can only uninstall it.
You may also notice that it is already configured with 3 accounts. That is because it has already added itself to the three nodes of the analytics cluster (2 analytics nodes and a remote collector).
If you click on the three accounts, you willl see that they pop up under “Other Accounts” where I have the ARCs also.
Now the SDDC management pack itself does not have anything else to configure, but there is one little caveat that I want to share. You will most likely get an alert for your vCenter along these lines:
“SDDC Config Notification – vCenter OS Credentials Missing, Services may not be discovered for this vCenter. Please Configure the VC HOST OS Credential in Inventory Explorer”
This alert is because of the SDDC health adapter can not get into the OS of the vCenter. To fix this go to:
Administration –> Inventory –> Adapter Instances –> SDDC Health Adapter Instance.
Use the Filter to search for your vCenter and then locate the vCenter with fqdn and SDDC Health Adapter. CLick on the edit icon to modify it. It will (unlike my shot here) have no entry. Create an ID for your root user and password for your vCenter and click OK.
You can then cancel the alerts and they should not appear again or wait a while (5 minutes or so) and they should disapear. (Keep in mind you will have to update this if you have set your root account to expire).
You can see what content a management pack delivers by going to: Administration –> Repository. There you find the management packs. To see the content click on the 3 vertical dots on a management pack and select “View Content”.
This will display the categories of the management pack:
That is it for now on Management packs. As I mentioned above, there are many more to pick from. Some are free, some are not and some you have to register for.