vCenter Operation Manager 5.6 – deployment and configuration

March 5, 2013

As most of you already know, VMware vCenter Operations Manager Foundation 5.6.0 is free of charge for all VMware customers, regardless from license type.

What is this for ? vCenter Operation Manager – quick definition from VMware site.

Deployment

Download from vCenter Operation Manager VMware website
Create two DNS entries for VM’s
Create IP POOL in target datacenter – minimum details :
- IP POOL name
- DNS domain
- DNS server
- associate network that should use vCM

IP POOL

Deploy vCenter Operation Manager from ovf template. I’m not going to show how to deploy VM from ovf, is a very easy task. In fact you will be deploying vAPP with two VM’s Analytics VM (vcm01) and UI VM (vcm02). Both VMs are SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (64bit).

vAPP

Configuration:

Change virtual machine resources, vCPU and RAM by 50% in PROD, or even more for homelab.
Power vAPP on and wait untill both VM’s get powered on
Open VM remote console and verify configuration status

vCM remote console screen

Log in to vCM https://<IP or FQDN of UI VM>/admin with below default credentials
- user: admin
- password: admin
Provide details of the vCenter Operation Manager, use hosting vCenter Server details or provide them manually.

vCM configuration

change password for root and admin accounts
connect vCenter Operation Manager to vCenter server

vCM connection details to vCenter server

connect linked vCenter server – optional
click on finish button to complete configuration, process might take several minutes, be patient 🙂
When configuration process finished successfully enable vCenter Operation Manager plugin on vSphere client

That is basically all what one has to do in order to deploy vCenter Operation Manager. Using vSphere client go to Home –> Solution and Application and click on vCenter Operation Manager.