Changes to VMware’s vCloud Suite 5.5

Also read: VMworld 2013 San Francisco – Recap

With the announcement of VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 (and vSphere 5.5), some interesting changes have been made to the composition of this suite. This article will point out these changes.

First of all VMware vCloud Automation Center (vCAC, pronounced as vCake 😉 is playing a more prominent role in the suite. vCloud Suite Standard includes vCAC standard, vCloud Suite Advanced includes vCAC Advanced and vCloud Suite Enterprise surprisingly includes vCAC Enterprise.

These three vCAC versions differ in terms of available features where vCAC standard offers basic provisioning and management options, advanced offers governance and extensibility options, vCAC enterprise includes application provisioning, changes and data (f.k.a. Application Director). vCAC will be the primary tool for deploying private clouds whereas vCloud Director will be more a IAAS service provider solution. I will post another article on this soon.

Also new is that vCenter Operations Management Standard is added to vCloud Suite Standard! This is something we were waiting for; especially for customers running vSOM (vSphere with Operations Management) and upgrade to vCloud Suite standard was not really an option because it lacks vCenter Operations Management (vCops) standard. This has changed now, which makes upgrading from vSOM to vCloud Suite Standard a logical step.

vCloud Suite Advanced and Enterprise respectively include vCops Advanced and vCops Enterprise.

I don’t see any difference in the vCloud Networking & Security (vCNS) editions; in vCloud Suite 5.0 and 5.1 a difference was made between cCNS standard and advanced: It looks VMware now only offers one version of vCNS available in all editions of vCloud Suite. In any case the question is what the role of vCNS will be with the availability of VMware network virtualization platform NSX.

What didn’t change is that vCloud Suite is still based on vSphere Enterprise Plus and vCloud Director in all editions of the vCloud Suite, Site Recovery Manager is only part of the vCloud Suite Enterprise.

Pricing

vCloud Suite is priced per CPU and excludes vCenter Server license. List price (in euros) for vCloud Suite Standard is 4,495 per CPU, whereas advanced costs 6,745 and enterprise is priced at 10,350 per CPU. vSphere /w Operations Management is priced at 1,565 EUR for Standard, 3,265 EUR for Enterprise and 3,815 EUR for Enterprise Plus version.

Notice that the difference between vSphere Enterprise Plus /w Operations Management and vCloud Suite Standard is just 680 EUR. For this additional 680 you will get vCAC standard, vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security. You will not loose vCops because it’s included in vCloud Suite standard….sounds as in interesting option…right?

For up to date pricing check the VMware website or ask a sales representative. For a full feautre comparison please visit this page.