Personally, I love tags in the vCenter Server. Tags makes objects more sortable and searchable in the vCenter Server and other solutions as vROps. For example, you can create custom vROps groups based on tags. Let’s have a quick look how to create this in vROps.

I assume you already have your categories and tags in place. I’ve created a category called “VDI Desktops” and a tag called “Virtual Desktop” which is assigned to all virtual machines that are running VDI in my vCenter Server.

Create custom vROps groups based on tags

Open a web browser and navigate to your vROps user interface. Login with the administrator account. Go to the Environment, make sure the Groups tab is selected and click the green plus sign to create a new group. Next, in the New Group window, enter a name for the new group. Select Environment as the group type, select appropriate policy and check the “Keep group membership up to date” checkbox. In the Define membership criteria section select vCenter Adapter -> Virtual Machine as the Object Type. Select Properties, in the category field enter “tag” as the search criteria and double-click the Summary -> vSphere Tag. In the next criteria filed, select “contains” and enter your tag as the property value. Click the Preview button on the left down to preview the group membership. Click OK to save and close the new custom group and you’re done!

I strongly encourage you to experiment with different categories/tags/object in your vCenter Server and different criteria definitions! 🙂

Note: if you not seeing the tags in the drop-down list, have a look at this fix on the VMware Communities website.

Cheers!

– Marek.Z