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VMware vRealize Operations Manager is the rebranded name of vCenter Operations Manager (derived from a 2011’s company acquisition) and will be part of the new vRealize suite. But will be not only a barely renaming of an existing product, instead it will be a completely new version with lot of important improvements.

Finally with the 6.0 (now at the 6.0.2) version lot of limitations and minor issues of the previous product has been solved and, although is still not a general purpose tool that can be used on all cases, it’s becoming really interesting and rich and also more easiest.

The improvements are a lot, but what you can immediatly notice are the installation and the setup that are more easy compared to previous 5.x version. Starting from the deployment: finally not only a single OVA (as already was in the previous version) but also a single VA (this make more simplest handle the appliance and also install it without a DRS cluster that was tricky in the previous version).

But system requirements remains high and there are different KB depending by the version and the size of your environment: vRealize Operations Manager Sizing Guidelines (2093783).

Note that the virtual appliance solution is not the only one: there is also a Windows installable option, but I found that the virtual appliance is more easy and faster.

The installation guide describe the entire flow:

One big changes from the previous versions is the scale-out model where you can have more nodes and increase the performance (or the availability) by simple adding more nodes:

VMware-vRealize-Operations-Architecture

The OVF (but is a single OVA file) deployment is really easy and simple and similar to previous versions (except the single node that is deployed instead of two VA).

The setup has really been improved by providing a powerful wizard to handle express installation (really easy and fast, oriented for single node environments), new installation (with more questions compared to the previous one) or expand existing installation (with new nodes):

Setup

The express installation will create a new vRealize Operations Manager cluster with your node as the master node:

Setup1

You can specify the admin password (there isn’t a default one):

Setup2

Then you are ready to go to the next phase:

Setup3

Next phase is the product configuration (note that you have always a flow to understand at which phase you are):

Setup4-Post

You have to accept the EULA:

Setup5

And then enter the license key and validate it (otherwise the product will run in evaluation mode for a limited time). Then you have to choose if enable the customer experience improvement program (common in several VMware products, like also the Horizon suite):

Setup7

Finally the node and cluster setup are just completed and you can login and start with the configuration of the product:

Setup8-Ready

The configuation is similar to previous version, but the UI finally has been improved (also for the product itself), so it’s more easy find the different configuration options.

First to all you have to configure the different adapters (at least the vCenter Server one):

vRealize-Config

Also the PAK management is simple and you can add new solutions by adding the specific pak and it will automatically uploaded to the system:

vRealize-Pak

So an easiest product (compared with previous versions of it), but also a product with a better user experience. And what about the performance and the stability? I found that also those have been improved from previous versions.

The only concern that I have is the user cases where can be applied: if your environments change a lot faster or is complex (and you don’t have all the solution adapters) probably this is not your product. If your environment is “stable” (with not so much VM created and destroyed or not too much changes per day) and almost “predictable” and all virtual (there are adapters also for the physical environments, but in my opinion are still limited compared to other solutions), this can be a good product.

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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.