With vCenter Operations Manager (vCOPS) VMware is offering a great operations management solution for vSphere and vCloud environments. vCOPS is available as a vApp (virtual appliance) or installation. I would suggest to always use the virtual appliance if you’re deploying vCOPS (there’s actually no reason the install the application, it will cost you extra time and doesn’t bring any advantage).
De vCOPS vApp consists of 2 virtual machines. The cpu, memory and disk requirements for the vApp depend on the number of virtual machines you want to monitor. The following table offers some information on this (from the vCops 5 installation guide):
Monitored Resources | Up to 1500 Virtual Machines | Up to 3000 Virtual Machines | Up to 6000 Virtual Machines |
Collected metrics | 600.000 | 1.200.000 | 2.500.000 |
vCPU | 4 vCPU’s:
|
8 vCPU’s:
|
16 vCPU’s:
|
Memory | 16 GB RAM:
|
25 GB RAM:
|
34 GB RAM:
|
Disk | 900 GB:
1500 IOPS |
1.8 TB:
3000 IOPS |
3.6 TB RAM:
6000 IOPS |
vCenter Operations has some firm requirements; this has to do with all the calculations vCops will execute to generate the analystics.
For smaller vSphere environments the above requirements might look as overkill. Although you can configure the vApp with lower cpu and memory values (and yes, vCops will run :)), remember this is not supported by VMware!