ITA offers a consolidated view of the data center's physical infrastructure. It holds data about the physical location of the equipment in the data center as well as an advanced configuration of for example power path and real-time device alarm data from Data Center Expert or other monitoring system.
This enables you to quickly analyze how an alarm on one piece of equipment may impact other equipment located in the data center.
Making this data available to a virtual machine management system enables this system to automatically move the potentially impacted virtual machines to healthy hosts.
This feature requires an ITA: Capacity license and prior installation and configuration of the communication to a supported virtual machine management system:
- VMware vCenter Server
You can configure the integration in ITA System Setup > External System Configuration.
If you connect to more than 5 vCenter servers, you may experience a performance decrease with the server communication.
Alarm and impact configuration in ITA
For each host for which you want to enable impact, you must set the properties to include it in the impact analysis in ITA. Otherwise, it will not show as impacted and the virtual machine management system will not be notified of an impact on the host and enable migration.
The impact analysis data is available in the rack layout in Data Center Planning and as read-only information in ITA.
You configure the position of your host servers in the data center layout and associate the servers with your virtual servers.
In ITA, a number of alarms are considered crucial to the continuous operation of the virtual machines. If you have associated a host to a server in the layout that is affected by one of the following scenarios, the system will notify the virtual machine management system of an impact on the host that should be migrated:
- A power supply with an alarm that could lead to imminent power loss, e.g. a UPS is failing or running low on battery
- A cooling unit with an alarm that could lead to a server overheating, e.g. a cooling unit's compressor or power supply is failing
The associated host will be marked as critically impacted (red icon).
- In VMware vCenter Server, the impacted hosts will be put into maintenance mode. For further information, refer to the VMware documentation.
However, an alarm that occurs on one of the power supplies in a redundant power supply setup is considered a non-critical impact and the associated host will be marked as non-critically impacted (yellow icon).
- No data will be communicated from this type of impact to the vCenter Server and no servers will be migrated.
