Overview
There was a management pack that was introduced a few years back, called Federation Management Pack. It is a pack that is available from VMware Solution Exchange, and it deserves a bit of a special mention.
This Management Pack allows you to create a single pane of glass for your vROps clusters across various datacenters, but it is not like a normal management pack that I come across with most customers. It has some requirements and some limitations. So lets go over those quickly.
Limitations
The Federation MP will collect data from the clusters that you configure in the Management Pack. However it has been setup so that VM data are not being collected, this means you need to connect to the various instances to check on VM data. This is because it would generate a lot of overhead to the analytics cluster to have this as an extra collectable.
Requirements
The management pack should be installed on a stand alone cluster. You might want to use a XL node for this depending on your environment to ensure that it can handle the objects being collected from connected vrops instances.
Best Practices
There are a couple of things that are recommended as Best Practice for this management pack:
- Create a new file of the default configuration file if you need to modify this. (It is similar to the Default Policy in vROps, which also should be copied and modified since it is overwritten i there is an update to the system).
- Do not remove the metrics included by default as it may ruin the functionality of components.
- You need to stop collection and restart it after modifying the configuration file, for the changes to take effect.
- Keep the Management pack slim by avoiding to add unnecessary counters etc.
- The collection of federated metrics are not included in policies. For this reason adding/removing metrics should be done inside the configuration file only. You can however disable/enable policies by policy.
Setup
I added a couple of vrops stand-alone nodes to my setup, AOCOPS06 and AOCops07. 06 will be my federation host and 07 will be a node that will connect to a test vcenter 7 that I have running for a work project.
You can see how to install a management pack here, which is also how the Federation MP is installed.
Once installed you should see it below the other Management packs that come default with vROps.
The contents is limited in comparisson to some MPs that you see out there, but there are some dashboards, views and a couple of metric configs.
Once the MP is added to the vrops you need to configure it.
You do this under Administration –> Solutions –> Other Accounts (If it is not there straight after the installation, then wait a few minutes and it should appear).
Click on the Federation Adapter to configure a connection and fill in the fields required:
Once you press add you will be prompted to accept a certificate, click ok and it should be added.
After a few minutes it should turn green in the overview:
After it is installed you should see it starting to collect data.
As usual you can find views and dashboards under the dashboard field.
One more quick note, which may be useful based on the info about the configuration file. You find that in the “Administration –> Configuration –> Metrics Configuration –> ReskndMetric. A bit down we find two federation xml configuration files. One is for vROps version 6.7 and earlier and the other is for later than 6.7.
As mentioned under Best Practices, you should create a copy of this file and not modify the version that comes with the Management Pack.
That is it for the Federation module.