vRealize Operations, Part 1: Network Connectivity

vRealize Operations isn’t really a part of VMware’s End User Computing productsuite, but during a new project I had to design a vRealize Operations (vROPS) environment for approximately 5000 virtual machines and came across some interesting things. So the next couple of weeks you can expect posts regarding vROPS and some of the challenges that needed to be solved during the design and implementation.

So, one of the first was to create a complete network topology with vROPS in the center. The current documentation of vROPS doesn’t show all necesarry network ports that are in use. Especially when using third party tools and integration with Hyperic.

The next list shows all required network ports for vRealize Operations (tcp/udp):

Port Number	Description
22 (TCP)	Used for SSH access to the vRealize Operations Manager cluster.
80 (TCP)	Redirects to port 443. REST also functions on HTTP.
123 (UDP)	Used by vRealize Operations Manager for Network Time Protocol (NTP) synchronization to the master node in the cluster.
443 (TCP)	Used to access the vRealize Operations Manager product user interface and the vRealize Operations Manager administrator interface. REST also functions on HTTPS.
1235 (TCP)	Used by all nodes in the cluster to transmit resource data and key-value data for the Global xDB database instance.
3091–3094 (TCP)	When Horizon View (V4V) is installed, used to access data for vRealize Operations Manager from V4V.
6061 (TCP)	Used by clients to connect to the GemFire Locator to get connection information to servers in the distributed system. Also monitors server load to send clients to the least-loaded servers.
10000–10010 (TCP and UDP)	Gemfire Server ephemeral port range used for unicast UDP messaging and for TCP failure detection in the peer-to-peer distributed system.
20000–20010 (TCP and UDP)	Gemfire Locator ephemeral port range used for unicast UDP messaging and for TCP failure detection in the peer-to-peer distributed system.

All vRealize Operations components use NTP, DNS and Active Directory, so the next ports need to be configured as well (tcp/udp):

Port Number	Description
53 (TCP)	Used for DNS
88 (TCP)	Used for Active Directory
123 (TCP)	Used for NTP
389 (TCP)	Used for Active Directory
445 (TCP)	Used for Active Directory

When using Hyperic, the following ports are needed (tcp/udp):

Port Number	Description
443 (TCP)	Used to connect to the vRealize Operations Data Collector.
7443 (TCP)	Used to access the vRealize Hyperic product user interface.
2144 (TCP)	Used by vRealized Hyperic to connect the Hyperic Agent to the Hyperic Server (this por is adjustable).

The next picture shows the used networks in an overview:

Future posts will contain an architecture deep dive, a scalability calculator, a method to connect vRealize Automation to vRealize Operations and probably more..