During VMworld 2021 we announced vRealize Operations 8.6 which now provides allot of new features and capabilities. You can see an Whats New overview here as well as a feature walk through here.

I this post we will focus specifically on the UI enhancements. The UI changes are the same for the SaaS version as well as the on premise release. Lets dive in!

When we used to log on to vRealize Operations in the past we used to have a list of menu items up top as well as the left side example:

The new simplified navigation interface creates a smoother navigation with enhancements like favorites for dashboards, a new administration page, the ability to pin dashboards and views as well as support for expressions in custom groups. With the UI enhancements we now also have the ability to customize the menu for Non-admins in order to provide the end users of the product with only the access they require.

Here is a quick glimpse into favorites as well as the pinning:

From a navigation perspective the side menu automatically collapses while navigating in order to give us more space to navigate through the menus. With the redesigned UI we now have secondary navigation allowing us to navigate through the menu`s allot easier without having to go back and forward to get where we need to

The object browser also allows us to switch to the correlation mapping by just pressing the toggle switch up top. The correlation mapping is allot easier to navigate as well. In the example below i have an example of a correlation mapping spanning from the PDU system which monitors the power as well as the cabinet that can monitor the fan speeds via the Flowgate management pack that can be downloaded from the Marketplace

The home page has received a couple of enhancements as well with a couple of new additions

I was recently going through a vCenter upgrade and got stuck at an error Exception occurred in postinstallHook. I tried reverting from snapshot and trying again but i ran through the same issue.

The issue in my case was that the catalina.properties had the wrong permissions. The fix was to change the permissions to perfcharts:cis and then resuming the update in the VAMI interface. The catalina.properties is located /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties. The command to fix it is

chown perfcharts:cis /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Then restart the vmware-perfcharts service by running:

service-control --stop vmware-perfcharts
service-control --start vmware-perfcharts

I recently upgraded my vCenter to 7.0.3 18700403 and i noticed that when i went to Lifecycle Manager i was welcomed with this error. “Authentication failed, Lifecycle Manager server could not be contacted.“

Im not aware of a fix for this issue however using the [email protected] seems to be working.

If you like me deployed SSC (SaltStack Config) outside of LCM and are now trying to import it under LCM management you probably ran in to the following error:

Error Code: LCMVSSC10018
vRealize Automation SaltStack Config import failed as unable to validate license. Check whether proper license is applied to vRealize Automation SaltStack Config appliance.
Exception while importing vRealize Automation SaltStack Config as unable to validate the license key. Check vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager logs for more information

Ive tried to research the issue but i had no luck. The following steps worked for my environment.

Find the license key for SaltStack under the my vmware portal. It would be labeled vRealize Automation SaltStack Config entitlement ex:

Once you have the key create a file under /etc/raas/something_license

In this file add the key from the my vmware portal

Change the owner of the file to the raas user by running

chown raas:raas /etc/raas/yourfilename_license
systemctl restart raas

Additionally also make sure the license key is available in the lifecycle manager locker. If you need help with the locker you can find instructions on how adding the new key here

You should now be able to import the SSC install into LCM