Note:

Configure VMware vRealize® Log Insight™ 8.x with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Introduction

This tutorial provides an operational overview of how to use the VMware vRealize® Log Insight™ 8.x Solution with the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution software defined data center (SDDC) cluster. The focus of this tutorial is to describe the available deploy and configuration options and highlight the ‘how-to’ steps required for using the VMware vRealize Log Insight Solution with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Oracle and VMware have developed a fully certified and supported SDDC solution called Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. This solution uses Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to host a highly available VMware SDDC. It also allows seamless migration of on-premises VMware SDDC workloads to OCI.

About VMware vRealize Log Insight

VMware vRealize Log Insight is a log analysis tool that delivers heterogeneous and highly scalable log management with intuitive, actionable dashboards, sophisticated analytics and broad third-party extensibility, providing deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting.

VMware vRealize Log Insight offers lower operating expenses and higher operational efficiency. Additionally, you can maximize ROI by using it with VMware vRealize® Operations™, bringing together best-of-breed tools for comprehensive operations management.

Key capabilities of VMware vRealize Log Insight include:

Note: Thoroughly review the Prerequisites and then, we’ll walk you through the three typical deployment topologies:

Prerequisites

Objective

Collect and analyze Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDC logs with VMware vRealize® Log Insight.

Option 1: Use on-premises VMware vRealize Log Insight to collect logs from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Extend the log analysis capabilities of your on-premises VMware vRealize Log Insight to collect logs and monitor the VMware vCenter Server Cloud by connecting the VMware vCenter Server as an end point inside VMware vRealize Log Insight. When you provision an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution private cloud, you connect your on-premises environment with your private cloud using FastConnect or Site-to-Site VPN.

High-level reference architecture: VMware vRealize Log Insight on-premises collecting data from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution without remote data collectors

VMware vRealize Log Insight on-premises collecting data from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution without remote data collectors

High-level reference architecture: VMware vRealize Log Insight on-premises collecting data from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with remote data collectors

VMware vRealize Log Insight on-Premises collecting data from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with remote data collectors

Before you configure VMware vRealize Log Insight to collect alarms, events, and tasks data from your vSphere environment, you must connect VMware vRealize Log Insight to one or more VMware vCenter Server systems. VMware vRealize Log Insight can collect two types of data from VMware vCenter Server instances and the ESXi hosts that they manage:

For the level of integration that you want to achieve, verify that you have user credentials with enough privileges to perform the necessary configuration on the VMware vCenter Server system and its ESXi hosts.

  1. Navigate to the Administration tab.
  2. Under Integration, click vSphere.
  3. Enter the IP address and service account credentials for a VMware vCenter Server and click Test Connection.
  4. If the vSphere environment provides an untrusted SSL certificate, a dialog box appears with the details of the certificate. Click Accept to add the certificate to the truststores of all the nodes in the VMware vRealize Log Insight cluster.
  5. Click Save.

Note: If you did not test the connection and the vSphere environment provides an untrusted certificate, follow the instructions in Step 4.

Next steps

Option 2: Use VMware vRealize® Log Insight Cloud™ to collect logs from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

VMware vRealize® Log Insight Cloud™ gives IT and cloud ops teams self-driving operations powered by artificial intelligence to optimize, plan, and scale their private, hybrid and public clouds for consistent operations to drive agility and innovation.

Configure Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with VMware vRealize® Log Insight Cloud™

Before you configure VMware vRealize Log Insight to collect alarms, events, and tasks data from your vSphere environment, you must connect VMware vRealize Log Insight to one or more VMware vCenter Server systems.

  1. Deploy a VMware Cloud Proxy for VMware vRealize® Log Insight Cloud™. For more information, see VMware vRealize® Log Insight Cloud™ documentation.
  2. Configure the VMware vCenter Server integrations. For more information, see Configure VMware vRealize Log Insight to Pull Events, Tasks, and Alarms from VMware vCenter Server Instance.

Note: The best practice is to deploy the cloud proxy on each SDDC instance of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. If you use a cloud proxy, ensure it has access to the Internet, or if the outbound internet access for the cloud proxy must be restricted, ensure the minimum cloud proxy prerequisites are met. For details, see Deploy a Cloud Proxy for vRealize Log Insight Cloud.

Option 3: Deploy VMware vRealize Log Insight on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Another option is to deploy an instance of VMware vRealize Log Insight on a vSphere cluster in the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Once the instance has been deployed, you can configure VMware vRealize Log Insight to collect data from VMware vCenter Server, ESXi, NSX-T, vSAN, and HCX.

Sizing and Scaling Requirements

Preset Size Log Ingest Rate Virtual CPUs Memory IOPS Syslog Connections Events per Second
Extra Small 6 GB/day 2 4 GB 75 20 400
Small 30 GB/day 4 8 GB 500 100 200
Medium 75 GB/day 8 16 GB 1000 250 5000
Large 225 GB/day 16 32 GB 1500 750 15000

Correctly sizing the VMware vRealize Log Insight cluster is essential to achieve optimal performance when searching and analyzing logs and to ensure the cluster has the resources required based on log ingestion rate. Adding adequate storage will allow you to retain searchable log data to meet your retention policies. To find the right recommended size to deploy, VMware vRealize Log Insight Sizing Calculator.

Download VMware vRealize Log Insight

Note: Download the VMware vRealize Log Insight OVA file to a location that is accessible to the VMware vSphere client.

You can create a single node and configure it as a primary node or create a data node in a cluster to handle additional data. All VMware vRealize Log Insight Manager installations require a primary node. With a single node cluster, administration and data functions are on the same primary node. A multiple node VMware vRealize Log Insight Manager cluster contains one primary node and one or more nodes for handling additional data.

Deploy and Install VMware vRealize Log Insight

  1. Deploy the VMware vRealize Log Insight cluster in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. For more information, see Deploy the vRealize Log Insight Virtual Appliance.
  2. Perform a new installation on the VMware vRealize Log Insight Product UI. For more information, see Start a New vRealize Log Insight Deployment.

Acknowledgments

Author - Eran Maor (Principal Cloud Solution Architect)

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