This part of the lab is presented as a Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation. This will allow you to experience steps which are too time-consuming or resource intensive to do live in the lab environment. In this simulation, you can use the software interface as if you are interacting with a live environment.

The orange boxes show where to click, and the left and right arrow keys can also be used to move through the simulation in either direction.

Data center administrators do not have a built in way of understanding their current and past operation of their vSAN powered cluster.  There are cluster related vSAN metrics in vCenter, but they are isolated to just storage related information.

vRealize Operations provides an "Operations Overview" dashboard offering a first point of visibility into a vSAN powered cluster.

This is important as it provides a single stop location that further helps administrators understand the health and well being of their environment.

Via the built-in 'vSAN Operations Overview' Dashboard, you'll notice in the vSAN Environment Summary widget that vR Ops is showing both aggregate and per cluster statistics.  This widget rolls up stats from all of the vSAN Clusters in the environment.

1. Each metric has a sparkline graph that represents the metric over time.  In the IOPS Served Widget, there is a time period of higher activity occurring.  Click the sparkline graph for IOPS Served to drill down on this specific time frame.
2. Click the right-hand scroll bar so that our timeline is visible
3. Click to select the beginning of the time interval
4. Click to select the end of the time interval
5. Note that we have clear visibility now to the aggregate IOPS characteristics for all of our vSAN Clusters during this time period.  Click OK to return to our Dashboard.

Let's select a specific vSAN Cluster to see information only for that Cluster.

1. Click the vSAN Cluster(Production-Mixed-Std)
2. Note that vR Ops has current and past statistics for the number of vSAN hosts, virtual machines and vSAN storage used within this vSAN Cluster.  
3. Click the right-hand scroll bar to scroll down
4. Note that the total number of components available and the percentage used can also be easily viewed in this dashboard.  We can also get a quick understanding of past and present usage of Host CPU and Memory.
5. The Alert Volume widget provides an easy way to understand the timing of when alerts occurred, with their associated severity.  Click on the Jul 6 date to easily zoom in to a more specific time window.
6. Cluster Wide IOPS, latency and throughput can all be viewed at the cluster level to see any abnormal changes in behavior of the Cluster.

In Summary, this native vR Ops vSAN Operations Overview dashboard delivers:

• Aggregate capacity statistics across multiple vSAN Clusters
• Historical trending of an aggregate of Clusters and individual Clusters
• General performance Key Performance Indicators such as IOPS, throughput and latency
• Time based tracking of alerts on the selected vSAN Cluster

To return to the lab, click the link in the top right corner or close this browser tab.