Introduction

This document is currently being drafted by the VIOPS community and is constantly changing

(if you want to help shape this document, send a private message to Steve Chambers)

This document provides the material, references and structure for a VI3 Event Management workshop.

The purpose of the workshop is to bring together VMware Certified Professionals (VCP), Operational and Systems Management professionals to share understanding of VI3 and Event/Systems Management so that a monitoring system can be jointly developed for VI3.

The goal of the workshop is to use a whiteboard diagram of non-virtual and VI3 managed objects to identify the events and integrations that need to be designed to integrate VI3 with your event management system.

This workshop is one of the VI3.Blueprint activities and is essential to create a fit-for-purpose VI3 solution.

Intended Audience

VMware Certified Professionals (VCP) and Systems Management, and Operational professionals.

Outline

The outline of this document should form the agenda of the VI3 Event Management workshop.

1. Your Event Management System

2. Map the Transient/Operational Events

3. Map the Trend/Planning Events

4. ITIL v3 Areas most affected by Virtualization

The first part of the workshop is to develop a common understanding of VI3 and event management.

This is essential to bring together the VCPs, the IT Ops staff and systems management professionals to a common understanding before planning the VI3 Event Management solution and feeding into the design next stage.

This is only a discovery workshop so do not expect a fully working solution at the end of this workshop: be happy with a team who understand the same big picture and are focused on next steps of going deeper to design and implement the final solution.

The first step of the workshop is to draw up, side by side, the non-virtual event management system on the left, and the virtualization event management system on the right - then the second part of this workshop connects the two.

You are aiming to have a diagram like this (also included as a png + visio as an attachment to this document).

Figure 1 - Your Event Management System

As well as creating your own representation like this diagram, you are also trying to produce a table of Managed Object types.

From the left hand, non-virtual side you should be able to build up a list of managed objects - a sample:

Action Complete the above list with your team.

You should also be able to do the same to the right-hand, VMware Infrastructure side - a sample:

Action Complete the above list with your team.

A transient alert signals a period of deviation from normal thresholds which may require the attention of operational staff. Brief duration or isolated threshold crossings should be filtered out before an alert is passed along to operational staff. Such events could include unusually high guest activity due to application or operating system fault, virus activity, or an unusual guest action such as batch file compression or conversions.

Some causes of these alerts may require operational staff to make adjustments to the VMware Infrastructure including initiation of troubleshooting procedures. Operational responses can be routed to appropriate teams based on the Managed Object (e.g. ESX Host) which has triggered the alert.

Note: the table below is not an exhaustive list because the list changes with releases - check the documentation for your release

A long-term alert signals a trigger point for expansion within the virtual environment. Expansion triggers originating from an ESX Host may signify a lack of overall resources in the cluster and can initiate the expansion process to add another node to the cluster. Cluster-initiated alerts are clear signals to initiate expansion procedures including the addition of nodes to the cluster.

All long-term monitoring alerts needs to be routed to the VMware Center of Excellence so they can be evaluated and expansion procedures initiated. Detailed discussions of the recommended capacity management process are found in the section entitled Capacity Management in VMware Infrastructure Service Design

Note: the table below is not an exhaustive list because the list changes with releases - check the documentation for your release

|Low Disk Space |Guest Operating System |Remaining disk space below a threshold (Example: Less than 1GB of space remaining on C:) |Notification event to operations and virtual machine owner that increase in storage allocation is required |

ITIL drives business value by helping IT organizations standardize processes, share common terminology, and provide integrated IT service management across the IT organization . VMware virtual infrastructure enhances these processes.

• Financial and Service Portfolio Mgmt

• Cost model changed from a fixed cost basis in the physical environment to a charge what you used model in a shared virtual environmen

• Availability, Capacity and Continuity Mgmt

• Higher utilization on the same asset, better ability to manage capacity across a larger pool of shared resources (instead of simply increasing capacity)

• Availability and continuity can be done with less cost and complexity

• Change, Configuration and Release Mgmt

• VMotion allows movement of VMs across physical resources

• Increased flexibility to change as well as more ways to control change

• Event, Incident, Problem and IT Operations Mgmt

• Eliminate agents while improving visibility for Incident detection and problem root-cause

• Greater automation in incident response, better ways to minimize problem impact