VMware integration enabling migration of virtual machines impacted by alarms

Data Center Operation offers a consolidated view of the data center's physical infrastructure. It holds data about the physical location of the equipment in the data center as well as an advanced configuration of for example power path and real-time device alarm data from Data Center Expert or other monitoring system. This enables you to quickly analyze how an alarm on one piece of equipment may impact other equipment located in the data center. Making this data available to a virtual machine management system enables this system to automatically move the potentially impacted virtual machines to healthy hosts. 

This feature requires a Data Center Operation: Capacity license and prior installation and configuration of the communication to a supported virtual machine management system:

• Microsoft System Center Operations Manager and Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager (in the Data Center Operation: PRO Pack)
  For further information about prerequisites for enabling this feature, select Data Center Operation: PRO Packin the navigation menu.
• VMware vCenter Server
  You can configure the integration in Data Center Operation System Setup>External System Configuration.

If you connect to more than 5 vCenter servers, you may experience a performance decrease with the server communication.

Alarm and impact configuration in Data Center Operation 

For each host for which you want to enable impact, you must set the properties to include it in the impact analysis in Data Center Operation. Otherwise, it will not show as impacted and the virtual machine management system will not be notified of an impact on the host and enable migration.

The impact analysis data is available in the rack layout in Data Center Planning and as read-only information in Data Center Operations.

You configure the position of your host servers in the data center layout and associate the servers with your virtual servers.

In Data Center Operation, a number of alarms are considered crucial to the continuous operation of the virtual machines. If you have associated a host to a server in the layout that is affected by one of the following scenarios, the system will notify the virtual machine management system of an impact on the host that should be migrated:

• A power supply with an alarm that could lead to imminent power loss, e.g. a UPS is failing or running low on battery
• A cooling unit with an alarm that could lead to a server overheating, e.g. a cooling unit's compressor or power supply is failing

The associated host will be marked as critically impacted (red icon).

• In Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager, the location and impact data from Data Center Operation will be available via the generated PRO tip, allowing the Virtual Machine Manager administrator to configure automatic migration to a healthy location of the virtual machine servers marked as impacted.
• In VMware vCenter Server, the impacted hosts will be put into maintenance mode. For further information, refer to the VMware documentation.

However, an alarm that occurs on one of the power supplies in a redundant power supply setup is considered a non-critical impact and the associated host will be marked as non-critically impacted (yellow icon).

• No PRO tip will be generated from this type of impact in Virtual Machine Manager and no servers will be migrated.
• No data will be communicated from this type of impact to the vCenter Server and no servers will be migrated.

By default, the system supports the standard critical alarm types. However, it is possible to customize the critical alarm and threshold configuration for migration of impacted servers.