It leverages machine learning to proactively monitor and measure the overall health of Dell servers, storage, hyperconverged, data protection, and network devices.
CloudIQ is available at no additional cost to Dell customers with a valid ProSupport contract or higher.
While CloudIQ supports various products, I want to focus in this post specifically on VxRail. Let’s explore the main features in the next sections.
Central Management
CloudIQ allows you to centrally monitor all of your VxRail clusters. This is powerful if you have multiple VxRail clusters deployed across different locations.
Some of those clusters might not use the same vCenter or are not using linked mode, so this will help you to have a true single pane of glass from a monitoring perspective of all systems.
Some of those clusters might not use the same vCenter or are not using linked mode, so this will help you to have a true single pane of glass from a monitoring perspective of all systems.
Health Score
The Health Score is determined by monitoring issues in the following categories: Components, Configuration, Capacity, and Performance.
You can easily view all your VxRail clusters and assess their individual health with simple aggregate health scores. Green indicates that the cluster is in good health, with a score between 95 and 100. Yellow means that the cluster is in fair health, with a score between 71 and 94. Red highlights poor cluster health with a score below 71.
Each issue provides a recommended remediation or link to an applicable knowledge base article. As you can see from the screenshot, you can launch vCenter Server of the respective cluster directly from CloudIQ to rectify an issue.
System Inventory
The Inventory tab provides various cluster attributes at the top half of the screen, such as the vCenter Server version, VxRail HCI system software version, and the license types for the software installed on the cluster.
The bottom half of the window contains hardware and datastores information. The Hardware tab provides views for Hosts, Disks, Power Supplies, and Version Information.
In the datastore tab you can find the data stores configured for this cluster along with the usage capacity information.
In the datastore tab you can find the data stores configured for this cluster along with the usage capacity information.
Capacity Planning
The Capacity tab provides a capacity forecast chart on the top of the page. The chart displays the predicted full date along with a confidence range.
The time range of the chart can be changed using the “From” and “To” drop-down menus. The bottom of the page displays a simple horizontal bar chart showing the breakdown of Total, Used, and Free capacity on the cluster.
The time range of the chart can be changed using the “From” and “To” drop-down menus. The bottom of the page displays a simple horizontal bar chart showing the breakdown of Total, Used, and Free capacity on the cluster.
Performance Monitoring
The Performance tab provides 24-hour charts of CPU, Memory, Disk, and Networking utilization on the system.
Clicking the Host Metrics Report link creates a custom report on CPU, memory, disk, and networking utilization for each host in the VxRail cluster.
Clicking the Host Metrics Report link creates a custom report on CPU, memory, disk, and networking utilization for each host in the VxRail cluster.
System Updates
HCI System Updates functionality allows you to initiate multi-system VxRail updates directly from CloudIQ. You can run pre-check, code staging, and system update tasks on VxRail clusters.The top of the page provides a chart with the VxRail software versions for all monitored VxRail
clusters.
The bottom of the page lists each cluster along with various information such as current version, target version, and vCenter hostname.
clusters.
The bottom of the page lists each cluster along with various information such as current version, target version, and vCenter hostname.
You can perform pre-update health checks on your VxRail clusters. This is a typical operation to run when preparing for a cluster update and you want to know whether the cluster is healthy enough to successfully complete an update.
Some of the clusters might have a status of not supported. Hovering over the status will show you why they are not supported at this time, which could be a health related issue.
The download operation is used to stage the update bundle of the target version onto the VxRail Manager VM of the VxRail cluster.
Afterwards the update operation is used to initiate the execution of the cluster update, with the update bundle downloaded onto the VxRail Manager VM. The update is actually performed locally on the cluster, but can still be tracked from CloudIQ. You can select multiple clusters to perform these operations.
Please note that for the update operation, an additional add-on license needs to be purchased and applied to be able to update the cluster from CloudIQ.
Great, but how to enable CloudIQ for VxRail?
Prerequisites
Onboarding
Accessing CloudIQ Portal
- Valid Dell Support Credentials
- Valid Support Contract
- The nodes within the cluster may span more than one site ID, but the Dell user account (email) must have access to all sites where the nodes reside.
- Connectivity to Secure Remote Services Gateway
Onboarding
- Configure Secure Remote Services:
See the appropriate VxRail Administration Guide (section "Enabling Secure Remote Services.")
You must enable the Customer Improvement Program. The default and recommended collection level is Medium. This collects samples once per hour. - Intelligent MultiSystem Updates Feature:
To perform an intelligent multi-system updates operation, each user must enable vCenter-base access control using the "Enable vCenter Access Control" wizard from the HCI Settings page.
Accessing CloudIQ Portal
CloudIQ can be accessed by navigating directly to the following URL in a web browser: https://cloudiq.dell.com
Log in to CloudIQ using your Dell Support credentials.
When a new user logs in to CloudIQ, they step through onboarding screens.
Once the onboarding process is completed, you will be redirected to the CloudIQ dashboard.
