About VM Monitoring on VMware vCenter
The Panorama plugin for VMware vCenter gives you the
tools to build policy for your vCenter environment using Dynamic Address Groups.
Dynamic address groups allow you to create policy that automatically
adapts to changes in your environment, such as the addition or deletion
of guests. The VMware vCenter plugin monitors for changes in your
vCenter environment and shares that information with Panorama.
The plugin processes the information it receives from vCenter
and converts it into a set of tags on Panorama that you can use
as match criteria for assigning IP address to dynamic address groups.
Each tag has a prefix that describes the hierarchy above the VM.
In this example, each tag in Panorama begins with the prefix
shown below. Each tag includes the vCenter name, data center name,
and cluster name; if you have folders in your vCenter hierarchy,
tags will include the folder names. The order of the objects in
the tag matches the order in the vCenter hierarchy.
vcenter.<vcenter-name>_ParentA_ParentB_Datacenter_CHILD1_CHILD2_Cluster_<tag>
The Panorama plugin for VMware vCenter does not support
tags associated to vApps or resource pools.
The tags are shown in Panorama in the following formats:
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_vmname.<vm-name>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on VM name.
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_guestos.<guest-os>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on guest operating system.
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_annotation.<annotation>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on annotation.
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_vlanId.<vlan-ID>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on VLAN ID.
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_host-ip.<host-ip>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on host IP address.
- vcenter.<vcenter-name>_<datacenter-name>_<cluster-name>_<tag-category>.<user-defined-tag>—this tag maps virtual machine IP addresses based on user-defined tags created in vCenter.The plugin supports a maximum of 16 user-defined tags per VM. Any user-defined tags beyond 16 are not processed.
The Panorama plugin for vCenter cannot process tags that are
longer than 128 characters; this includes letters, numbers, and
special characters. Whitespace in vCenter object names is replaced
with forward slashes. Additionally, Panorama does not support non-ASCII
special characters or the following special characters—
’<>&”
in
vCenter VM names and annotations. Panorama drops tags containing
unsupported characters.To retrieve endpoint IP-address-to-tag mapping information, you
must configure a Monitoring Definition for each vCenter in your
virtual environment. The Monitoring Definition specifies the username
and password that allows Panorama to connect to vCenter. It also
specifies the device groups and corresponding notify groups containing
the firewalls to which Panorama pushes the tags. After you configure
the Monitoring Definition and the Panorama plugin for VMware vCenter retrieves
the tags, you can create DAGs and add the tags as match criteria.
