vROPS | A bit about

It is VMware powered tool to monitor, analyze, troubleshoot and predict the environment. It stands for vRealize Operations Manager, previously known as vCenter Operations Manager (Before the vRealize suite).

Why vROPS?

Because it can help in below challenges

• In reporting - We can create, generate and send reports on demand and on a specific time
• In analysis - We can analyze environment health\issues with the help of metrics
• Capacity Planning\Resource Optimization - We can keep an eye on resource utilization, reclaimable resources, can track workload growth and plan resource addition or optimization
• Proactive Monitoring - By creating dashboards in vROPS, we can monitor required component on a single screen without logging multiple components. Also it enable us to create mail notifications which triggers in case of any condition met for example, continues high cpu etc.
• Troubleshooting - vROPS helps a lot in troubleshooting any component of vSphere
• In Security Audits - Management packs like PCI-DSS can do complete environment security audit when works with vROPS
• Multi vendor support - vROPS can be integrated with around 50 different application including VMware's and other vendors for example, Dell EMC, Cisco, vCD, Amazon and Azure etc.

vROPS Cluster and cluster nodes:

Cluster can be of single node and multi node.

In single node cluster, there is only one node, which is known as Master Node. It serves administration and data services. It should be implemented only on small scale businesses where we have less number of virtual machines and other workload.

In mulitnode cluster, there is One Master node, One replica node (optional for HA), one or more data nodes and one or more collector. Each component share the load accordingly to job given and serve under Master Node. What exactly each component do?

Master Node:

It is the first ever nodes you deploy to use vROPS. It is an appliance, downloadable from VMware's site. Here is VMware definition of Master node:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/vRealize-Operations-Manager/7.0/com.vmware.vcom.vapp.doc/GUID-1B014716-0289-4FD9-8D94-E6F077CE4182.html

Replica Node:

vROPS support HA. Because Master node is backbone of vROPS cluster so if that goes down then my vROPS portal will be inaccessible and all metric collection will be stop until it recover back. To overcome this we deploy another vROPS appliance and make it Master Replica Node. More information is here-
https://pubs.vmware.com/vrealizeoperationsmanager-61/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vcom.core.doc%2FGUID-071E3259-625A-437B-AB34-E6A58B87C65B.html

Note: 

1. To enable HA, you must have one data node deployed in addition of master node
2. In case of failure with Master node, role transfer happens automatically with 2-3 minutes of downtime

Data Node:

Data nodes are additional nodes used to scale out the larger environment. Want to know when and why you need data node. Go through the KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/57903

Remote Collector Node:

It don't process any analytic function. It just collect objects into its inventory for monitoring purposes. A remote collector node usually installed to navigate firewalls, to reduce bandwidth across the data-centers, connect to remote data source or to reduce the load on vROPS on analytic cluster.

You must have at least a master node before adding remote collector nodes.

Thank you,

vCloudNotes