New license: Upgrade vSOM with vCops Standard to vCops Advanced

As a VMware customer you have different options to buy VMware products. You can choose to buy the products separately or take advantage of one the available suites.

Currently the most popular options are to buy ‘just’ vSphere or one of the two suites: the vSphere with Operations Management Suite or the vCloud Suite:

1. When you buy vSphere you pay per CPU for the hypervisor and you have to buy vCenter Server separately. vSphere comes in three editions: Standard, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus. More information in the licensing, pricing & packaging whitepaper.
2. The vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) Suite consists of VMware vSphere Standard, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus and VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite (vCOPS) Standard. vSOM is licensed per CPU for both vSphere and vCops Standard. You can use vCops Standard to monitor the licensed vSphere environment. A required vCenter server license is sold separately.Notice there’s some confusion with the naming of this suite: vSOM Enterprise for example, consists of vSphere Enterprise & vCops Standard. There is no involvement of vCops Enterprise in this case. The licensing, pricing & packaging whitepaper contains more information on vSOM.
3. The third option is the vCloud Suite which comes is three editions: Standard, Advanced or Enterprise. vCloud Suite always includes vSphere Enterprise Plus and vCops Standard, Advanced or Enterprise depending on  your vCloud Suite edition. On top of this the vCloud Suite also includes cloud automation tools such as vCloud Automation Center, vCloud Director and vCloud Networking & Security. The Enterprise edition of this suite also includes VMware Site Recovery Manager for DR purposes.Note that the vCloud Suite is also licensed per CPU; with this license you can use all the products in the suite to virtualize, monitor and automate all the components that are running on the licensed ESXi hosts. Notice that, if you (for example) use vCops or vCloud Automation Center to monitor/automate resources outside of the vCloud Suite licensed environment you will need additional a-la-carte licenses.

Upgrade vSOM with vCops Standard to vCops Advanced

Okay, but what’s the new option? Currently there’s a promotion to upgrade your vSOM environment to vSOM with vCops Advanced. Yes, this is new because vSOM normally only includes vCops Standard! The promotion is available on the VMware website and at via your VMware partner.

I think this is an extremely interesting option because you can now license your vSphere environment with vCops Advanced on a per CPU base. This is an extremely interesting option for VMware customers who want to do more with vCops, but for who Cloud Automation (the vCloud Suite) is one bridge too far.

vCops Advanced offers some very good options on top of the Standard edition such as:

• Custom dashboards – This is an absolute must-have, read about an example of this option in this article.
• vCenter Hyperic – Including OS support for Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX (EULA restricted). You’re not allowed to monitor applications with this edition of Hyperic. You can integrate Hyperic data with vCenter Operations Manager to display Hyperic data in vCops dashboards.
• vCenter Configuration Manager – For configuration management.
• vCenter Infrastructure Navigator – For automatic inventory of running services in your VMs and their relations with other VMs. Read more about vCenter Infrastructure Navigator here.
• 3rd Party Adapters – For integration with 3rd party solutions such as storage solutions (e.g. Equallogic, NetApp), vCloud Hybrid Service and Amazon Web Services. Note: Although vCops Advanced supports the usage of 3rd party adapters, you will probably need additional a-la-carte licenses to monitor 3rd party devices. You have access to the advanced management packs at solutionsexchange.vmware.com.

A comparison of the different vCenter Operations Management Suites is available on the VMware website.

This new option is currently only available as an upgrade, let’s cross our fingers and hope this will change next week :).