vCenter Operations: Expensive? Maybe, But It Is Worth It!

If you didn’t know, today is national vCenter Operations day!

So I thought it would be useful to go over some of the finer points of this product. I am however, going to do things a little backwards. With some of the earlier reviews people were pointing out that the licensing and cost of this product is a bit high, its per VM again.  Now compared to other monitoring tools, I would agree, but what people are forgetting is that the model of per CPU will be going away across the board at some point and the all you can eat model is a thing of the past.

Price:

• Standard: $1,250 for a 25 VM pack or $50 a server.
• Advanced: $3,125 for a 25 VM pack or $125 a server.
• Enterprise: $34,250 for a 25 VM pack or $1,370 a server, and not that isn’t a typo.

Why so much?

Because it is a useful and valuable tool, because too many people deploy their virtual environment blindly using excel sheets and homemade solutions, because people don’t know what is going on before it is too late, and many more good reasons. Some argue they have a monitoring solution; this will compliment the solution and add much more value. The truth is people of have a production server environment can’t afford not to have this solution. Slow performance cause slow productivity, which equals real lost dollars.

 Features:

 Standard

• Designed to work with vCenter
• Performance analytics, automatically identities building performance issues and their root causes
• Optimizes resource usage and maintains configuration compliance
• Real-time capacity metrics
• Configuration Change Events (huge value here)

 Advanced

• All of the above plus
• vCenter CapacityIQ

Enterprise

• All of the above plus
• More advanced features
• vCenter Configuration Manager

The real scoop

It is a must have if you have any high performance applications, more than 10 VM’s (25 packs I know) but still, or any tier one applications. Its true, in my opinion it should be included for free, but it is a high quality product that carries a lot value.

More Information:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-operations/overview.html