Automate Power-On Operations using vROPS

Hi Guys,

Today someone asked "What we we can automate in vsphere environment?"

This question directly hit the automation which I recently done in production environment. My use case might be or might not be similar in your case but I trust that it certainly can give you more ideas on "What you can automate in your environment".

My use case was "These VMs must not powered off due to any reason". There was direct impact on the production if even single VM goes down and in few cases we took much time to dig down the actual cause of the issue where we found that VM was powered off!!! why? how?.....that's different topic.

Just to give you more insight that it is a VRA (Virtual Replication Appliance) of Zerto Disaster Recovery. It is responsible for replication between primary and recovery site. More detail about VRA, you can find here.

Let's see, how could I ensure that none of the VM will shutdown.

See, due to any issue or manual intervention if VM is shutdown then once it will be shutdown, my focus was to instantly turn it on if it is detected as shutdown at any point of time.

Being a DR appliance VM, it was not that business critical and could be handled calmly. isn't it?

There could be many ways to do it but I'll share what I did.

Method 1: Automate Power-On operation using vROPS. This method for those who has vROPS in their environment.

Follow below series of action to do it-

Step 1 - Create a Policy

Step 2 - Create Custom Group

Step 3 - Create Symptom Definition

Step 4 - Create recommendation

Step 5 - Create Alert Definition

Step 6 - Enable automation in created policy in Step 1

I have created a video for demonstration purpose and tried to show the above steps one by one. Your any comment\thoughts are welcome

Play below video to understand the complete procedure to do this.

In case, any doubt, feel free to let me know.

Thank you,

vCloudNotes