How to enable PRO with VMM
Last week I mentioned I was going to talk about how to enable PRO with VMM. PRO stands for Physical Resource Optimization.
If you followed my steps from last week, your Operations Manager and VMM servers are configured to work together to provide monitoring and alerting within your virtualized environment. This also means that your environment is ready for you to enable PRO. PRO can be enabled at the cluster level for both VMware and Hyper-V. Customers can set two main PRO settings—the Monitoring Level and the Automation Level— for each host cluster in their virtualization environment. These settings tell VMM which monitors to enable for hosts and virtual machines within the host clusters and which monitors to configure to auto-implement their respective remediations
Through VMM, you can enable the monitoring of clusters based on the severity of alerts and PRO will only monitor for either Critical only or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following procedure tells how to enable PRO on a cluster for both Warning and Critical alerts.
1. From either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrator Console, find your host cluster and open the properties.
2. On the PRO tab, select the Enable PRO on this host cluster check box.
3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all PRO Tips. To restrict the PRO Tips to Critical alerts only, select the Critical Only option.
4. Click OK to save your settings.
Through VMM, you can enable the automatic implementation of Tips based on the severity of alerts. PRO allows you to specify this setting for each cluster within your environment, and when enabled PRO will only automatically implement either Critical or both Critical and Warning alerts. The following steps would be used to enable PRO to automatically implement tips on a cluster:
1. In either Hosts or Virtual Machines view of the VMM Administrators Console, find your cluster and open the properties.
2. On the PRO tab, select Enable PRO on this host cluster.
3. By default, the monitoring level is set to Warning and Critical, which means that PRO will enable all monitors and display all tips. If you would like for PRO to monitor for and display only Tips with a severity level of Critical, select Critical Only.
4. Select the Automatically implement PRO tips on this host cluster check box.
5. By default, the automation level is set to Critical Only, which means that only PRO Tips with a Critical severity level are automatically implemented. If you would like for all tips to be implemented automatically, select the Warning and Critical option.
6. Click OK to save your settings.
The toolbar of the VMM Administrator Console contains a PRO Tips button, which opens the PRO Tips window, shown below. The window shows all active PRO Tips that the user has access to. (For more information about user roles and delegated administration in VMM, see VMM 2008 Help).
If you click on this button, a new dialog pops up. The top half of the screen lists the Tips, and the bottom half shows details for the Tip that is currently selected. The fields on the left side of the details pane are automatically generated based on the context of the Tip. The content on the right side is product knowledge for the alert, which is developed by the management pack author. The product knowledge for each alert can contain four sections: Description, Recommended Action, Causes, and Summary.
If a selected Tip has an associated action and is still Active, users can click the Implement button to initiate the associated recovery task. Alternatively, if the administrator chooses to not implement a tip, she can simply click the Ignore button, and the Tip will be dismissed.
Thanks to a few of my team members that generated this content and allowed me to share this with you.
This is one of the most important features of the VMM 2008 release and I hope that it provides/adds a lot of flexiblity to your monitoring environment.