Had a question from one of my customers recently.  They asked if vR Ops can report on which VM’s in their environment have hot-add enabled.  Customer has a number of ‘monster’ VM’s and wanted a quick and easy way to verify on a regular basis that hot-add was NOT enabled.  Reason being if hot-add is enabled, this in turn disables vNUMA which could impact performance. (See KB 2040375 for details)

This can be achieved, by modifying an OOTB report and adding additional properties. In order to do this, we need to identify the relevant metrics to include.

Identify Properties to include

Visit the  vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Information Center, make sure to select the relevant version via the drop down.  I’m running v6.6 for this example.  Follow the link to Download vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 Publications and select the Definitions for Metrics, Properties, and Alerts pdf

This document is a must have for any vR Ops Ninja’s out there, as it provides details on all the metric, properties, and alert definitions within vR Ops

In this particular example, we search for ‘hotadd’ and find the following Virtual Machine properties are available

Copy & Modify Existing View

Reports in vR Ops are based on views, and it is a best practice to NOT modify an OOTB view or report for that matter.  Always copy the relevant report, and then make any needed changes to the copy. We’ll use the OOTB Virtual Machine Inventory Summary as the basis for this example.

1. Login to vR Ops, select Dashboards and then Views on the left
2. Utilize the search filter near the top right to look for Virtual Machine Inventory Summary
3. Click the double pyramid icon to clone the view

   

4. This will bring up the edit window, give the new view a name and click data

   

5. Select the drop down next to metrics, change this to property then type part of the property name identified earlier hot add followed by enter. Double click each one to add these to the view, or you can drag and drop.  (TIP,  click the expand icon in the top right to get a better view)

   
   

6. Move each property to the desired position within the view. You can also add a Metric Label to make the results easier to read e.g.
7. Click Save to create the new View

Copy & Modify Existing Report

Next we’ll take a copy of the OOTB Virtual Machine Inventory Summary  and modify that to use our newly created view

1. Under Dashboards, click Reports
2. Utilize the search filter near the top right to look for Virtual Machine Inventory Summary
3. Just like we did before, click the double pyramid icon to clone the report
4. This will bring up the edit window, give the new report a name and click Views & Dashboards

   

5. Now click the X next to Virtual Machine Inventory Summary to remove it 
6. Type the name of the view you created earlier in the filter, then drag this over to the right(don;t forget to click the expand icon). You should see the 2 hot add properties in the window.  Click Save

   

7. Clear the filter from the top right and you should now see your newly created report in the lists available for use.  To run the report manually,  click the run template icon and select your entire vSphere environment

   

8. Once finished, click on the Generated Reports hyperlink and the report is available to download in CSV or PDF format. You can also configure the report to run on a regular basis,  get vR Ops to e-mail it to you, or save to a file share. Example output from my lab,  where you can see that the VM named linux-micro-01a has Memory & vCPU hot add enabled

   

This was a fairly simple example of how you can find the metric or property you need and modify existing views and reports to accomplish what you need.

• Intelligent Ops