Today I came across a new challenge, when it comes to VMware products running on Azure. A friend of mine pinged me and asked, if the latest Azure Marketplace template for vRealize Operations isn’t working anymore. 

And for most of the people that know me, these are exactly the challenges I love to tackle and to find out what’s going wrong, so I decided to review and in case I found the issue / remediation task, write a blog about it!

Table of Contents

What is vRealize Operations Manager and why Azure?

vRealize Operations Manager (vROPS) is a monitoring and analytics platform for hybrid clouds and on-premises environments. It helps users manage, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance and capacity of their IT infrastructure and applications. vROPS provides real-time visibility into the health, performance, and capacity of virtual and physical infrastructure, as well as applications and services running on top of it. It also includes features such as proactive alerts, root cause analysis, and capacity planning to help users proactively identify and resolve issues before they impact the business.

In our case we’re not going to install the vROPS Manager on Azure, but the vROPS Cloud Proxy, which sends the logs to the VMware Cloud service. The cloud proxy acts as a bridge between vROPS and the cloud resources, enabling vROPS to collect performance and other data from the cloud resources and display it in the vROPS user interface.

To use the vROPS cloud proxy to monitor Azure resources, you will need to have a vROPS instance running on-premises or in the cloud, and an Azure account with the necessary permissions to create and manage cloud resources. You will also need to configure the cloud proxy to communicate with your Azure account.

Once you have configured the vROPS cloud proxy and connected it to your Azure account, you can use vROPS to monitor and manage your Azure resources, such as virtual machines, storage, and networking. vROPS provides a range of capabilities for monitoring and managing Azure resources, including real-time performance and capacity monitoring, alerting, and root cause analysis.

The issue

Searching the Azure marketplace, we can find an instance called “vRealize Operations Cloud Appliance – Cloud Proxy”, which can only being created in one version “the latest”. 

When you create the cloud proxy, you usually follow the procedure that’s given by the template. Primarily you’re filling out standard values like Subscription / Resource Group / VM name / Region / Username and Password or SSH key before going through the configuration and kick off the process. 

The result.. A virtual machine which is starting, but doesn’t allow you to interact with it, SSH is disabled, the WAAGENT required for Azure as it’s the VM Agent for Linux doesn’t respond, and the admin is not able to proceed with any configuration which can easily lead to frustration. And not even the Serial Console is able to help us (and yes, I hit ENTER already). 

But luckily we have advanced options in the enrollment process which allow us to remediate the steps prior the deployment. This will be shown in the following chapter. 

Installing a vROPS Cloud Proxy on Azure

Basically, the steps mentioned above, using the Azure Marketplace Image is the right way forward. Please use the link below to directly go to the marketplace image to get started. 

				
					https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/vmware-inc.vrealize-operations-cloud-proxy?tab=Overview
				

Which resources will be deployed with this Marketplace image?

For those that haven’t come across Azure very often and that had no touchpoints with ARM templates yet, they might wonder, which resources will be deployed with this image and what kind of relation do they have for my Cloud Proxy deployment? Please find a graphic I created to explain the resources that will be deployed. 

Manual deployment – Azure Portal

Create the virtual machine and follow the steps of the wizard for enrolling the virtual machine. Type in the required values like Subscription / Resource Group / VM name / Sizing (D2s_v3 is Standard) and the authentication method via SSH.