As you probably know, VMware vRealize Operations is a suite of products that automates operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity, and configuration management. This suite derive from the VCOPS (vCenter Operations Mananagement) core and has been recently rebranded in the new vRealize suite name.

The new v6 of this suite bring not only a new name, but also a lot of changes and improvements and a good book that cover this aspect are more than welcome.

Unfortunately there are so much and actually one of the few is the VMware vRealize Operations Performance and Capacity Management book.

The power of this book is that has been realize by VMware guy from the vRealize team (nice the page that describe the team itself) and he bring a lot of experience both from VMware point of view, but also from a possible customer and user point of view.

Also this book focuses on the management (especially from the performance and capacity perspective) of the SDDC by giving interesting information. But, of course, it does not cover all aspects of operations, such as configuration management, compliance management, and availability management.

This book is an intermediate-level book and it assumes you have hands-on experience of vSphere 5.5 and vRealize Operations 6.0, and also some overall knowledge of vCloud Suite, Virtual SAN, Horizon View and NSX.

The overview could also be interesting from a VCDX or VCAP-DCD preparation because it cover some aspects in design impact, but note that does not provide design suggestion or best practices. But honestly it can be useful also for an adminastrator to better understand how measure (and what measure) an SDDC.

From my point of view, it’s quite interesting because it’s not just the typical technical manual with common procedure on how configure or set your environment.  Instead it provide a good overview on what is a SDDC, how can you manage it (mostly on  the performance and capacity perspective, but those are well covered) and also it does cover processes, organizational structure, financial management, and audit.

The counter part cover CPU, memory, networking, storage and is quite deep and complete, both from the vCenter counters, but also on the vRealize Operations counters.

The dashboard section is really great and the only pity is that is limited in a single chapter… IMHO more chapters with more examples were a better value for this book.

As written, don’t expect to find how deploy and configure the vRealize Operations suite, this kind of stuff are not covered at all, but there are some free documents or other book specifically for those aspects.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.