Episode 25 - Aria Operations - Enterprise Edition, Product integrations etc. under new VCSP program
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to episode 25 of the BCD roundtable. Today, with me is Matthias and Alain. Alain is your second appearance at the VCD roundtable. So I guess we are talking about ARIA today.
Alain Geenrits:Who knows? No. No.
Matthias eisner:I heard a rumor. Maybe the name might change. But we will see. It's it's a rumor.
Alain Geenrits:The name is going to change, but can I say that here already now? No.
Matthias eisner:Hi, Herna. Welcome to the show.
Alain Geenrits:It's strange, sir.
Matthias eisner:Online or live, we're talking about operations manager. Yes. Why? Because all the service providers with the new contract with VCF will have AARI Operations Manager enterprise edition. So maybe let maybe let let's start with a a very brief introduction.
Matthias eisner:So what are the the key differences between, like, standard, advanced, and enterprise of operations manager? So all the cool additional capabilities enterprise offers.
Alain Geenrits:Right. So we used to have those, 3 degrees in operations. Of course, standard was the the entry level, was only meant for, basic monitoring in your environment, what I call the click around interface. So you have all the objects, but you have to click to find all the data. With, advanced, you got the customizable dashboards or more customizable.
Alain Geenrits:Multi. And, you could do more with them. You have more possibilities. And the big difference is, of course, in the management packs. With the the standard version, you used to have the standard hardware management packs, what we used to call the true visibility suite.
Alain Geenrits:And with advanced, you've got all the networking packs on top of that. And with enterprise, you've got even the the management packs for your SAP, for applications, and even to connect other, monitoring environments like Dynatrace or something like that. Yeah.
Matthias eisner:So so being honest, enterprise adds a lot of value to service providers monitoring their own infrastructures. Yes. And support their customers to even, have an eye on their infrastructure, how how to deal with certain metrics or maybe come up with ideas which alarms to raise because of a certain metric cross the threshold or something.
Alain Geenrits:Of course. And and also a big, big change now in the VCF bundle is, as you mentioned correctly, you get the enterprise version, but that's not all. The management packs have changed too. Yes. Some people will say, well, some management packs have disappeared.
Alain Geenrits:Yes. Like, you can't find the management pack for Cisco networks anymore because the standard management pack for networking devices includes all that now. So, it's included in the standard pack. And very, very important, certainly for service providers is there is no counting objects anymore for the management packs. It used to be that you bought, like, let's stay with the Cisco example, you bought a networking pack for Cisco, and then you had to count like, oh, I have 250 switches, so I have to buy 250 switches slices.
Alain Geenrits:All of that is gone. There is no license counting anymore. Everything is, integrated in the enterprise version of ops, and you can use it and deploy it. You can monitor your, obviously, your cloud directory environment. You can monitor your, basic, VCF environment, your Tensor on Vsphere environment.
Alain Geenrits:Everything is included. No license.
Matthias eisner:Give me one second. Give me one second. You didn't get that right. So because I'm not aware of in the past for enterprise, if you connect a third party environment, maybe a Cisco switch or whatever.
Alain Geenrits:Yep.
Matthias eisner:To to to, operations manager, you had to buy OSIs on top. I know that. Yeah. So that's gone.
Alain Geenrits:That's gone with the management packs. Yep.
Matthias eisner:That's more than great news. That's awesome.
Alain Geenrits:It is.
Matthias eisner:But but only only only from the operations manager side. Right? We're not speaking that's very important for everyone. We're not talking about any maybe licenses needed on the 3rd party vendor side. We don't know that.
Alain Geenrits:No. No. No. No. No.
Alain Geenrits:We
Matthias eisner:And just just to be very clear, we're just talking about the Broadcom licensing site in this podcast.
Alain Geenrits:Alright. Yes. Of course.
Matthias eisner:But but from from that perspective, that's really great news.
Alain Geenrits:And and, of course, operations, but all is also in your bundle. Since it's enterprise, you get ops for networks, with it, which used to be called VIRNEY, serialized network insights. So, if you want to do monitoring of your NSX environment, networking environment, hardware, networking hardware, you can do that. Automation is included.
Tobias Paschek:Yeah. Yeah. I know.
Alain Geenrits:I thought I'd mention it, but, okay. Let's not go there.
Tobias Paschek:Aware of it. No. Let's let's look at it.
Matthias eisner:An internal joke.
Tobias Paschek:Alain, talking talking about, Cloud Director or talking about monitoring Cloud Director, in the past, there was something available which was called a dedicated, download available, which was called the tenant app. The download has disappeared. Why?
Alain Geenrits:Yes. It it it has disappeared and people start talking like, see, another problem that has disappeared. Oh, Broadcom. No. It hasn't disappeared.
Alain Geenrits:It's okay. It, I will admit that the product has had a very bumpy life cycle. So it used to be like like I said in, in episode 15, go back and look up episode 15 people. It used to be that we had a product called cold chargeback, VMware chargeback. Years ago, when I started at VMware, it was available 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people used it, and then it disappeared.
Alain Geenrits:It was put in end of life. Then a while later, VMware rewrote completely the capacity management and the cost management in operations. And they said, like, well, for for for business, calculations as soon you have to use vCloud Business or later vRealize Business, which was fun because you had the standard version that was completely different from the, advanced version. And then they rewrote it again a few years ago, and they created a small, standalone OVA called the Tenant app. And the Tenant app, all that it did was bring back billing for the service providers that use cloud providers.
Alain Geenrits:So the so that these people were able to create tenants and to create billing, rules for those tenants and even send out automatic billing. Again, to come back to Matthias' point, in the tenant updates, you have the standard version, which was limited to only billing and some reports, and you had the enterprise advanced or enterprise version that went with operations advanced or enterprise where you could also enable metrics for your customers so that they could monitor metrics themselves and alert. Okay? So there were differences. But all the little program did was, talk to operations to get the data out of the database and use the cost engine of operations to to calculate the billing.
Alain Geenrits:And then also talk to VCD to get, like, which are the tenants and what belongs to what tenant. That's all they did. And now drum roll, the big news is the tenant app or chargeback is now integrated in operations. It's the the little standalone OVA has gone, and, I'll actually change my background so that you see it. Yep.
Matthias eisner:How can you do that?
Alain Geenrits:It's magic. You you know me, Matthias. I do magic with operations. That's what
Tobias Paschek:I do.
Alain Geenrits:Customers keep asking me that, how do you do that? It's magic. So this is tremendous news because it didn't make any sense. It was it it was a a solution on top of a solution. And, with the new operations 8.16, which is the version in VCF now, the whole tenant app or chargeback has been pulled back into operations.
Alain Geenrits:So the good news is, also as we talked about in, episode 15, everything is now centralized for our customers, for the service providers. Everything is now in one interface. Monitoring your own environment, monitoring the tenants, doing cost control of your own environment, billing your customers. Everything is done from this one interface, and you feel it coming that there might be a name change in the future, but who knows?
Matthias eisner:But but, Alain, so you mentioned the tenant app is not part of operations manager. So which version are we talking so what's the latest version number? 816? Or
Alain Geenrits:816 is the latest version of operation, which includes the chargeback. It was launched with 8160 about a month ago, and, 8162 is coming out, I think, this weekend or has just been launched. So it is there. For the people for the p so you see in the in the area operations home screen, they call this the pillars of operations. I can't help that.
Alain Geenrits:Who knows why? But there is a pillar called cost. And if you click on that, you actually see, the cost control on top. You see pricing. Define a pricing policy, and then you see show back, which is the traditional thing for customers who want to internal show back, cost in operations.
Alain Geenrits:And then you see chargeback, and chargeback for Cloud Director, and this is the old tenant app.
Matthias eisner:Tenant app.
Alain Geenrits:So for for the people now worried that, we helped them with the tenant app over the years and that they have everything in there and billing and so on, Fear not. There is a migration from the standalone chargeback to this there are migration scripts, and everything you had before is available here. The only big difference is, which you might have questions about is where in the old tenant app, you used to have billing, profiles and you created profiles. And now this is part of the policies. For the people that don't know in operations, a policy is a config file that applies to 1 object or a group of objects.
Alain Geenrits:And, the the pricing policy is just an object that you can enable where you set your pricing for the CPU, the memory, pricing for attack that is called backup. So if you have tenants where you add the backup tech to to their, machines, then you, charge an extra amount for backup because you hopefully also make a backup. Mhmm. A charge for the operating system and so on as well.
Matthias eisner:Backup is fine. Maybe there's a separate tech for restore, which is much more expensive.
Tobias Paschek:Yeah. Yes. We have to back up, but now you need to have to restart patches now.
Matthias eisner:We we have to back up, but no idea how to restore from that now.
Alain Geenrits:And the great news is, of course, that, all the reports, all the alerts are no now in their their, I say, normal place in operations, where you can find them. And it's also from this one console that you can say like, hey, this customer, talking about the customer or the service provider then, this customer has bought, access to, reports for his virtual machines. For the performance, click. I enable report, and and the customer can, use it. The customer wants alerts when the guest file system of his VMs fill up.
Alain Geenrits:Well, I enabled that alert click, and it's all done from this one We can do it per customer? Yes. Per tenant.
Matthias eisner:Awesome.
Tobias Paschek:Awesome. Awesome.
Matthias eisner:So so you can also, centrally create dashboards as a service provider Yes. With, some ideas to visualize data and metrics, and then you have the choice to enable it on a per tenant base.
Alain Geenrits:Yeah. And on top of that, what you just mentioned, Matias, you have to realize what you just said. The service provider can create dashboards, maybe with a little help from us, centrally, one time, and then, dare I say, seldom to all the customers.
Matthias eisner:No. You can say it out loud. It's perfectly fine. Right?
Tobias Paschek:Yep. And and I know we we really talked about licensing much in the in the in the past. But still, I would like to bring up here something again. And I know we mentioned this already, but, you mentioned this also at the beginning of the broadcast, Della. It is now included in VCF.
Tobias Paschek:We are talking about ARIA Suite Enterprise. We're talking about Log Insight. Sorry. Operations for lock, not Log Insight anymore. We're talking about, operations manager.
Tobias Paschek:We're talking about ARIA for network and stuff like this?
Matthias eisner:ARIA operations for network.
Tobias Paschek:Operations. ARIA and yeah. ARIA operations for network, which brings us again to the point, dear beloved service providers start to use it because also your competitors have now the same functionality in the licensing. So this
Alain Geenrits:is
Tobias Paschek:a dramatic change from a Broadcom perspective that all of us are getting now the same license, that same featureability. And to be honest, I can fully understand the customer saying, hey. Okay. If I go to service provider number 1, I don't have monitoring capabilities or I don't see anything, but service provider number 2 is offering a baseline and also provides me with the capability of bringing in additional monitoring. Yep.
Tobias Paschek:Then I would like to choose service provider number 2.
Matthias eisner:It also it also highly depends on on, which customers a service provider has. Right? Because I was talking to my different CSPs, a few are saying, yep. Our our customers don't care. They have just a few virtual machines are very cheap service.
Matthias eisner:That's it. A low cost. But we have spoken to others saying, right, my tenants, they are very concerned about, some metrics, some KPIs, or some KPIs reapplied to metrics because it's important for an application to run and and important for some business processes we have internally. And with with operations manager, now we can offer the tenant to implement even the KPI on metrics. Sure.
Matthias eisner:At that, raising alert and have a different alert if a KPI crosses a threshold compared to just the metric.
Alain Geenrits:Yes. Exactly. KPI monitoring can be done. Remember a project, I did over a year ago. Oh, I think 2 or 3 years ago for a customer.
Matthias eisner:May maybe the previous century.
Tobias Paschek:Or even the long before that.
Alain Geenrits:At one age, the the centuries start to blur. But, where they had this complicated contract with with their end user where, and I remember this because it was so weird. So if the customer had high latency in storage, let's keep it general, and an alert was raised. Once in an hour, that was fine. If there were 3 in the same hour, that was a KPI breach.
Alain Geenrits:And we were only able to solve that for them, with operations, and we're doing some very fancy things in views and super metrics. Yeah. But all those things you can implement now. And as I said, don't underestimate the fact that not everything is in one console. Broadcom clearly clearly set area operations is becoming the operations console of ECF.
Alain Geenrits:So, even for e match it again. Even for look, people. If you have operations, look at this. Everything, the integration also with VCF going with beyond the the chargeback, subject. But you have to realize that the whole integration with VCF is already there too.
Alain Geenrits:This is a dashboard that is included that shows you the the workload, for for your workload environment, not your management environment, but workload environment, sorry, for all the hosts. It's there. It's included.
Matthias eisner:And if we talk about, like, for example, Vura's operations for networks. So that's I think speaking as of today, it's a separate product Mhmm. Site operations manager, and it has its own UI.
Alain Geenrits:Yes. Yeah. But but just like, and you caught me here, because I have no magic to show you now, to show you the integration. But but you have to realize that, more and more, so, operations for logs and operations for networks, they have their separate UI. Yes.
Alain Geenrits:At the moment, still, I don't know of any plans to change that, but they have a high level of integration with operations. Meaning, all the alerts that you generate in networks or in logs, you can send to this console. And and you can play with those alerts, of course, because, for logs, for example, I have written alerts when, we we had the service provider who used a lot of orchestrator workflows for day 2 operations. This would make Matthias happy. But, it was critical to them that the workflows were running, of course.
Alain Geenrits:If a customer runs a attached CD workflow, blah blah blah, that it actually runs well. I called the errors if the workflow was not running, and if there were more than 5 errors per hour, I think, or something along those lines, The alert was actually sent to the corresponding object in operations. And then you get the alert there, and in operations, you can actually open the the GUI, of locks to go into more details. Same thing with networks. Any errors that you get there, you can send to operations, and you can centrally manage.
Alain Geenrits:You can you can see that the whole thing is going towards this centralized console to manage, VCF.
Matthias eisner:That's that's really cool news. So so my personal hope is, because, there is one really cool thing in we realize ARIA Automation, which, if you integrate with operations manager, you can display a few metrics with the object in the Avaya Automation UI.
Alain Geenrits:Yes.
Matthias eisner:So that is something which is currently missing in contractor, as far as I'm aware of. So I desperately hope that that will change in the future. Would make sense to have a few base metrics, but I have no idea if that's on the road map or what up.
Alain Geenrits:Oh, you mean display metrics for
Matthias eisner:the cloud?
Alain Geenrits:You can do that.
Matthias eisner:With operations manager?
Alain Geenrits:As far as I know, you can do that. Another feature that you're talking about, I implemented it at the customer's, because they use the, automation console, and then you can see metrics. Yep. You can enable metrics, for for customers for, but, the only thing I would need to check is the visualization. Can you see them in Cloud Director?
Alain Geenrits:That's something we need to check.
Matthias eisner:I think it's a no, but maybe change in the future. But I think all those changes and and that's what what is the the main topic around today's podcast is every CSP has operations, manager, enterprise starting with the 1st April. April. Yes. And that's the that's the key message.
Matthias eisner:Yeah. So better start thinking about which metrics, which information you provide to the customers, how to monetize it, which products and packagings could be make made out of the whole new licensing, advantage we have provided by remember by Broadcom. Get money from
Alain Geenrits:It is it is important to start thinking about it now because people might still use, other products, fine products, Zabbix or whatnot to monitor their environment. They might have other solutions to do billing. But why would you do that if all of this is included in your VCF?
Matthias eisner:And if we take one step back in terms of, service providers and operations manager, There is still the option to have an isolated workload domain because a service provider runs a dedicated infrastructure managed by the CSP for one customer with the whole DCF licensing. You just deploy one dedicated operations manager instance for that customer. But because it is included in the licensing so there are no worries about all multi tenancy, what needs to be configured to separate tenants from each other because that tenant has its own dedicated hardware. So please, there is your own operations manager infrastructure.
Tobias Paschek:And here's the access.
Matthias eisner:Here's the access. Yeah. And same for, and here's the access.
Tobias Paschek:Here's the access. Yep.
Matthias eisner:And same for aria operations for log.
Tobias Paschek:Yep. Especially especially when when it comes also from from my perspective, this is something which will be really important, one head for the customer, but also for the for the CSP as well. Rightsizing in the future becomes an interesting point, an interesting game?
Matthias eisner:It depends. Right? I thought it seems before the tenant.
Tobias Paschek:Calls are now a really interesting subject. Let's call it let's phrase it this way. That that that maybe right sizing of the whole infrastructure is also an interesting chapter.
Matthias eisner:No. That's true. Yeah.
Tobias Paschek:Yeah. And and also what if scenarios maybe. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Alain Geenrits:Yeah. You can still do those in the operations. Yep.
Tobias Paschek:Yep. But to be honest, what I would like to, add also to the to the whole thing is, since you know, okay, now we can we can utilize it, provide add on to your customer. Your customer can now really utilize here as an additional services. Yeah. And costing or cost cost calculation or, cost reporting to the customer, billing to the customer is a huge improvement.
Alain Geenrits:And remember that for customers with specialized needs, all of this doesn't mean that this is now a closed environment. It is not everything is integrated, but you you still have access through the API, for example, to your data, with the billing. Remember for a customer, in the the US, I even wrote a Python interface to export the CSV data from billing, to import it into Workday. All of those things are still available. If you want to send alerts instead of through email, through, a web hook, to something like serve well, ServiceNow and Slack are standardly defined.
Alain Geenrits:You don't need to do anything. But anything else like, OTRS for ticketing also, it can be easily done.
Tobias Paschek:And and I know it that you can do that.
Alain Geenrits:We would.
Tobias Paschek:I I have seen it live that has has created OTS tickets as well when when operations manager was, has raised an alarm.
Alain Geenrits:Yeah. Which does not mean that you have to call us for all OTRS.
Tobias Paschek:Find out. You take it.
Alain Geenrits:It was not easy, but yeah.
Tobias Paschek:On on on one hand, we have now talked about the advantages for the for the for the customer itself. What's the advantages having operations manager for the service provider itself? Talking about management domain, talking about monitoring really the physical environment, root cause analytics and stuff like this.
Alain Geenrits:Yeah. What you see behind me, the same console, the same product that they use for the customers, they can use for their internal advantage. So you have all the monitoring, monitoring performance, performance bottlenecks, alerting, doing monitoring of things like your vSAN storage or what have you, seeing what is going on. And, of course, building on top of that, the, capacity calculations, operations that will, tell you when you have to add capacity, when you run out of capacity, and your internal costing. Because for a lot of people, the question of how do I build my customer depends, of course, on how much does it cost me.
Alain Geenrits:And Mhmm. Operations without any adding anything using, the same software, you get the the cost reporting, the show back, and the billing so they can follow-up internally how much the environment is costing them and even do some rightsizing like, are there, environments where I'm running a host with a 2 meter load that I could redeploy or, or resize, what have you. Yeah.
Tobias Paschek:Mhmm.
Matthias eisner:I'll give you a hint. If the host is committed, it doesn't make any difference. Yeah.
Tobias Paschek:Yeah. Yeah.
Alain Geenrits:And remember again, what we said in the beginning, big advantage for the service providers internally. The management packs, they're all included now. It's enterprise. So Right. If you're in run your infrastructure on, Dell, fine.
Alain Geenrits:There's a connection management pack, to Dell, HP. What have you, Lenovo, so you can also start monitoring, the hardware you're running all of this on from operations. And and have a, dare I say the word, have a single pane of glass.
Matthias eisner:I think that's a great advantage and because all the licensing is not included in VCF.
Alain Geenrits:Yeah. And on top of that, you have things like the the management pack builder, which is now also available, and used a lot. I've seen somebody who, actually wrote himself a management pack for Veeam backup, a customer. So the management pack builder allows you, if you have anything in your environment that you would like to monitor and there is an API available, The work is already almost done because it it it's a click interface, a little of the data that is running that says, what's the endpoint I have to connect to? What kind of credentials?
Alain Geenrits:What do you want to get out of here? Which metrics or properties? And bam, you're done. And you have new monitoring in your operations.
Matthias eisner:Alain, do you have an API?
Alain Geenrits:Yes. But it's hidden. Special licensing.
Matthias eisner:No. I think that that's it's all great news and and and, each CSP is is more than welcome to take the advantage out of the new licensing model with VCF and enterprise operations manager. And I think monitoring their own infrastructure will be the first step. And the second step, providing additional visualization for their customers. Because as I said, they're currently running a phase.
Matthias eisner:Each CSP needs to decide how many course do I commit. How many course do I consume using overage or on demand? And then add a price tag to everything and do the math, which is cheaper over a 3 years period. And that will be challenging in the next few few weeks to to solve that math equation for each CSP.
Alain Geenrits:I can only say if they already had operations, it would have been easier.
Matthias eisner:Who have already collected 6 months of data?
Tobias Paschek:True. No. But he is right. I'm sorry. Halal is right.
Tobias Paschek:Yeah. Absolutely. Actually absolutely. That's that's that's still why I really I fully support the decision from Broadcom to say, hey, we will go with operations of this area Yep. In the whole VCF, and we need to include it because it makes no sense not to have it included.
Tobias Paschek:What was really from my side, and huge, surprise was that the whole true visibility suite licensing is gone and gets fully integrated in in into the enterprise license. That was really an absolutely amazing, announcement because this was not suspect suspected, to be honest. And now you have it and just you can monitor your whole data center and if your pizza gets delivered as well.
Matthias eisner:Interesting.
Tobias Paschek:If there is an API, you can monitor it.
Matthias eisner:Right. The management pack for the pizza delivery guy.
Tobias Paschek:And we know that you can orchestrate it as well. Yeah. Different story. Different product. Same different product.
Tobias Paschek:But also, yes, same suite. Absolutely. Same suite, but different product. Alright.
Matthias eisner:Alright. Alaa, thank you for coming. I think, you shared a ton of very useful information with the community. Thanks for that.
Alain Geenrits:You're welcome.
Matthias eisner:Everyone is more than welcome to reach out. Yep. And we're more than happy to support you guys if you have any questions around operations manager and how to visualize data and to build super metrics. And I'm still mad that my session got declined 8 years ago, but that's a different story.
Tobias Paschek:This is a different story.
Alain Geenrits:Yes. A dark story.
Matthias eisner:Alright. So, guys, everyone, any questions? I can't see anything in the comments or something, Jose.
Tobias Paschek:No questions.
Matthias eisner:So he's the admin. He says no. So thanks for watching. I think it's recorded. We'll be sharing later on on our all on all our well known public facing social media platforms, whatever they are called.
Matthias eisner:I have no idea. And thanks for watching. Have a great weekend, and a like, and thanks for coming.
Alain Geenrits:Thanks. Thanks, guys. Have a great weekend.
Tobias Paschek:Also, happy Easter because next week, there is there'll no no not be a live session. And then there are already Easter holidays, and the week after the Easter holidays, we will come back with episode 26. Easter holiday? Yeah. Easter Bunny's gone.
Tobias Paschek:Next Friday next next Friday, Saturday, Sunday is Easter weekend.
Matthias eisner:Do we have already a topic for episode 26?
Tobias Paschek:I think at the moment, not really. But maybe we will then already talk about the final decisions, what's going on about licensing. But let's see what we really will do in
Matthias eisner:the next Or we do something about Avian Network inside or
Tobias Paschek:we do talk about our network inside. Alright. Guys, have a happy time. Bye. Bye.
Tobias Paschek:Bye.
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