VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions was released to the gen­eral pub­lic a week or so ago and is avail­able for down­load right now. As usual you can down­load a 60 day trial, and get started immediately.

Like other recent man­age­ment util­i­ties from VMware, vCen­ter Oper­a­tions comes in the form of a .OVF tem­plate (like vCMA/vMA).

Installing VMware vCen­ter Operations

Down­load VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions and import by start­ing vCen­ter Client, nav­i­gate to the “File” menu and select “Deploy OVF tem­plate…”

Browse to the down­load loca­tion, and find the “VMware-vcops-1.0.0.0-373027_OVF10.ova” file. Select it and click open.

Click on “Next” and review the details.

Hit “Next” once more, and click on “Accept” to accept the VMware EULA and enable the “Next” but­ton.

Spec­ify the name and loca­tion of the VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions VM, and click “Next” to continue.


Now we get to select which host or clus­ter the VM should be deployed to. Make your choices, and click on “Next”

Select your pre­ferred resource pool, if you have any, and once again click “Next”

Now select your pre­ferred data­s­tore, and guess what? We get to click “Next” one more time!

Decide if you want a thin or thick pro­vi­sioned VM, the default is thick but I went with thin pro­vi­sioned in this par­tic­u­lar setup.

The last con­fig­u­ra­tion item, for now, is to map the net­works. Select your net­work map­pings and click on “Next”.

Review the final setup screen, and once you are sat­is­fied that your set­tings are cor­rect, click on “Fin­ish” to start the OVF tem­plate import.

The import starts, and after a few min­utes it should be ready to go!


Suc­cess!

Time to start it up!

Con­fig­ur­ing VMware vCen­ter Operations

After the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions VM has fin­ished boot­ing, it dis­plays a lit­tle infor­ma­tion screen show­ing the IP address and other tid­bits of infor­ma­tion. The most impor­tant piece of infor­ma­tion right now is the DHCP assigned IP address. Make a note of that IP for later.

To make sure we don’t run into prob­lems with time syn­chro­niza­tion we need to make sure that the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions VM time is syn­chro­nized with the ESX host time. To do so, right click on the VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions VM inside of the vCen­ter Client, select “Edit Set­tings”.

Select the “Options” tab, and find the VMware Tools sec­tion.

Find the “Syn­chro­nize guest time with host” option, and select it.

Open the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions web page in a browser, and log in. The default username/password for vCen­ter Oper­a­tions is admin/admin

Log in, and fol­low the direc­tions on screen to change the default username/password.

The new pass­word must be at least 8 char­ac­ters, and at least one digit and one char­ac­ter.
Note: This also changes the root account pass­word for the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions VM.

Next up is con­fig­ur­ing the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions con­nec­tion to the vCenter.

Fill out the vCen­ter Server infor­ma­tion form, with infor­ma­tion per­ti­nent to your infra­struc­ture.
Note that the reg­is­tra­tion cre­den­tials needs to have admin­is­tra­tor priv­i­leges on the vCen­ter Server. You can use the same cre­den­tials for both reg­is­tra­tion and col­lec­tion, or you can dif­fer­en­ti­ate them if required in your envi­ron­ment.

Click on “Save”, and a test is per­formed to make sure that the infor­ma­tion pro­vided is cor­rect.

If reg­is­tra­tion is suc­cess­ful, a new popup appears explain­ing that you need to use the vSphere Client to assign the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions licenses.

Click on “Ok” and the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions setup dash­board appears in your browser.

Go back to your vCen­ter Client and nav­i­gate to the “Home” screen.

You should now see the new “vCen­ter Oper­a­tions” icon under “Solu­tions and Appli­ca­tions”. If it does not appear imme­di­ately, close the vCen­ter Client and restart it to have it pick up the instal­la­tion.
To install the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions license, go to “Home” and find the “Licens­ing” icon.

Click on it, and change the “View by:” option to “Asset”
Right click on “vCen­ter Oper­a­tions” and select “Change License Key”

Select “Assign new license key to this solu­tion”, click on “Enter Key…” and enter your license key and option­ally a label for the key. Click on “OK” to return to the “Assign License” win­dow, and click on “OK” again to install the license.


Your license should now be installed and active.

Go back to the vCen­ter Client “Home” screen and find the vCen­ter Oper­a­tions icon under “Solu­tions and Appli­ca­tions”. Click on it, and vCen­ter Oper­a­tions should already be active mon­i­tor­ing your infra­struc­ture.

Thats it! You now have VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions run­ning in your envi­ron­ment. For details on how it works and reports your oper­a­tions refer to the VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion. Eric Sloof has also posted a cou­ple of great videos in his VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions — Trou­bleshoot­ing Work­flow post that gives an in-depth overview of what VMware vCen­ter Oper­a­tions is capa­ble of doing.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.