Released on April 4, 2013, vCenter Operations Manager makes the next step forward in managing your vSphere environment.

What’s New

vCenter Operations Manager 5.7 is the latest release of VMware’s integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

More Flexibility with Capacity Planning

Assess capacity risk and plan by allocation and/or actual demand: Set policies based on your varying business needs to assess capacity risk, efficiency, and forecast. For example, different buffers, over-commit ratios, alert thresholds, business hours, etc., across production and test-dev environments.

New views for Cluster Capacity Risk: Quickly identify via color-coded Cluster capacity risk view which clusters grouped by business criteria, etc., are at capacity risk—facing a capacity shortfall now or in the near future or just not sized right. Drill down for each cluster in the Cluster Risk Detail view to analyze which resource is it constrained on and why.

New policies for common environments and workloads: New out-of-the-box policies, such as Production and Test-Dev policies, enable quick set-up of vCenter Operations Manager capacity settings for common types of environments. Additional new out-of-the-box policies, such as Batch workload, Interactive workload, and Ignore VMs policies, help fine-tune capacity configuration settings to accurately right size and analyze different workloads based on their performance characteristics.

Improved Self-Monitoring

This release introduces new diagnostics metrics to monitor the health and availability of vCenter Operations Manager components, such as Analytics, Collector, Active MQ, Web server, database, and operating system.

Widgets with Improved Flexibility and Usability

• Health Tree Widget: Easy visualization for large number of objects.
• Generic Scoreboard Widget: Support for Sparkline, string metrics, and metrics filtering by resource.
• Metric Sparkline Widget: Configurable color ranges and units, support for resource type and label.
• Resource Widget: Customizable to add metrics beyond health.
• Top-N Analysis Widget: Support for analysis based on latest values.

New Custom Relationship Widget

Allows you to build a custom resource hierarchy and relationship view, just like the existing out-of-the-box vCenter Server view.

Custom UI Import and Export Changes for Dashboards and Super Metrics

• Export format changed from binary (.bin) to XML (.xml): .bin formats are still supported for backward compatibility.
• DBCLI Enhancements: Programmatically import and export Super Metrics.
• Pre-population of Dashboard objects during import.

Balanced Metrics Profile

This release introduces a new metrics profile that reports a reduced set of metrics. Increase the scalability of vCenter Operations Manager to support more resources by changing the metrics profile to the new “Balanced” profile in vCenter Operations Manager Administration.

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Filtering Capability

You can configure how resources discovered by vCenter Infrastructure Navigator are displayed in vCenter Operations Manager. This release introduces a configurable filtering capability to the vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter to control Application service and Application resource reporting. For each resource type, you can configure either “blackList” or “whiteList” filtering in the configuration file filterList.txt.

• blackList: The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter ignores specified entries. If an Application Service name or an Application name is included in the “blackList,” it is not reported by the vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter. This is the default setting. The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter filters unknown Application service names by default.
• whiteList: The vCenter Infrastructure Navigator adapter reports only the specified entries. If there are no entries added to the whiteList mode, none of the resources of the corresponding resource type are displayed.

New Browser Support

This release adds new support for the following browsers: Apple Safari version 6, Google Chrome versions 24 and 25, and Mozilla Firefox 18 and 19.

Security Hardening

This release includes additional security hardening and increases compliance with The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and The Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) guidelines.

Now, the process for upgrading from vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 to the latest build based on vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.

Upgrade Process

 

1. Log in to your vCenter Operations Manager UI virtual machine through your web browser at https://<UI VM IP Address>/admin

2. Click the Update tab on the admin user interface.

3. On the Update tab, click Browse to find the update package

4. Choose the appropriate update package (VMware-vcops.5.7.0-1073531 is the base 5.7.0 release). Click Open.

5. With the path to your update package filled in appropriately, click Update.

6. Confirm the update by clicking OK.

7. The update package will then be uploaded to the vCenter Operations Manager appliance.

8. When presented with the EULA, accept the terms of the agreement, then click OK to proceed.

9. Click OK to confirm the update.

10. The update will now proceed. You will see a status bar for several minutes while the update moves forward.

11. You will, at some point, be logged out of the admin console. You can log back in to watch the update finish.

12. The update progress will be displayed on the Update tab.

13. Once the update is complete, you will see something similar to the message below.

14. You can verify your update by checking the About dialog through the client. It should now show vCenter Operations Manager version 5.7.0 build 1073531.