Technology Cap ON: What would a context sensitive vCOps vCenter plugin look like?

For those of you interested in seeing the value of a vCenter plugin for vCOps that is context sensitive read on!  This is going to be a bit of a “Technology Cap ON” post as this is not available as today from VMware.  The video and images included with this post are real, but it was done with a custom vCenter plugin that I give instruction for below. 

The screenshot and video attached will demonstrate how if you are running vCOps to collect virtual infrastructure performance metrics, you can use the vCOps custom plugin to immediately drill into objects that you choose in vCenter.  This functionality is truly awesome, as typically within vCenter you only have the default “performance” tab or the non-context sensitive vCOps plugin.

HOWTO steps

Follow the below instructions to familiarize yourself with how to create a custom vCenter server side plugin.

https://community.emc.com/message/522634

Before continuing you want to make sure that you have successfuy followed the instructions where you can see the proper tabs being displayed in vCenter and it is working per the document.

In place of the files included with the HOWTO post, use the files that are attached as part of this ZIP file.  Place cust_get_ps_xml.jsp and cust_ps_lookup.jsp in the following directory on the vCenter server.

C:\program files\vmware\infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\

Extract the ps_vcops_db_x zip file to a directory on the vCenter server.  Ensure that you can execute the script by running it from Powershell (check header of script for necessary parameters).

Edit the cust_get_ps_xml.jsp file and replace http://vcops01/ with the proper URL to your vCOps server.

Edit cust_ps_lookup.jsp and replace “c:\\scripts\\ps_vcopsdb_101211\\” with the correct path where you placed files from the ps_vcopsdb zip file (including double backslashes).  As well edit the parameters to specify the correct vCOps database ip, username, and password.

To optimize the speed in which it takes to start PowerCLI and Powershell I highly recommend placing the powershell.exe.config file that is included in the following directories.

c:\windows\system32\windowspowershell\v1.0

c:\windows\syswow64\windowspowershell\v1.0

Wallah! You should have a working vCOps plugin.  Enjoy, this should be a bit of a sneak peak for what it might feel like to have vCOps natively in vCenter.