Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss Solution Manager.
So, Solution Manager is a new feature in vSphere where it basically allows for third-party vendors to put solutions,
as well as VMware themselves on it, not only third-party, but also for third-party vendors,
to create solutions kind of specific to vSphere, and they can be monitored and managed in one central place.
They don't have to have all these third-party plug-ins that are managed from all these different locations.
We can add a solution into vSphere and manage it through this vSphere Solutions Managers tab.
So, in the first summary, we can go in. We'll obviously have the product name.
If it's from VMware, it would be the VMware product. If it's from a third-party vendor, like a SAN or something like that,
it could have that vendor's name in there, a description of what it is, a link to the vendor's website,
whatever configuration information you might have. There's some kind of GUI access that you would need to get in.
So, like a link to go in and manage this solution. This is a place you can go in there and kind of manage the solution,
but it might have a link to a URL for a configuration page or something like that.
So, here you're seeing that first screen where this is the vSphere ESX Agent Manager.
So, from here, you can go in and you can see what solution's been installed.
This is a VMware solution for managing VMware agents that are on the system,
and it just kind of gives you a breakdown of what the product is, what their link is for the management.
Here you see the IP address for linking for management at the bottom there.
So, then you have a monitor tab, and the monitor tab has your tasks and your events.
So, here, under tasks and events, if there was some kind of an event, if there was some kind of an alert that was created by the solution
or an alert that there was an update or something wrong with the system or an action was taken,
you triggered an event, you scheduled an event to happen, and it was triggered, that would be under tasks.
You can see all that here. Right now, in this screenshot, there's nothing in there.
No events have occurred, but had they been, you know, something triggered, this is where you'd go to look and see that.
Then under configuration, you have your configurations tab.
Under your configurations tab, you're going to have your agents that are going to be listed there,
issues that you have selected to work on, any triggering times that you have set up to be triggered on a certain event.
Now, here, we're looking under our configuration, and there's nothing we can really do.
Nothing is available for us to go in and create an action, create a certain event that happened at a certain time
or to check out and, you know, dig deeper into this.
And lastly, our VMs.
So, if the solution requires a virtual appliance to run and manage that solution, which many solutions do use, you know,
virtual appliances for that, then the virtual appliance will be listed here.
So, you'd see the virtual appliance or appliances that are used for managing that solution.
And so, you'd be able to know, if you're looking at your environment, like, what are these VMs for,
you might go to your solutions manager and go to the VMs and say, oh, that VM is running,
and go to the VMs and say, oh, that VM actually is related to this solution over here
that we use for managing, you know, a storage solution or something like that.
So, the VMs tab is where you're going to find that.
So, solutions manager is really just a nice and central place where third-party vendors and VMware
can go in and register their solutions.
You can see all the information about them.
You can see the version you're running.
You can see the vendor that's distributing it, any virtual machines associated with it.
You can see events that have occurred, all in one central place.
You don't have to go to 10 different places and log into different pieces of glass to look for logs
and things like that.
All the events and stuff can be listed here.
So, actually, it's a pretty nice addition to vSphere.