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pwjohnston
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Contributor

What version of VCOPS do you think I need?

First of all we’re a rather small installation. 

vSphere Standard, though I expect that to be bumped to Ent or Ent Plus by the end of the year.

1 Bladecenter with 4x blades for our ESXi hosts

4x ESXi hosts

1x IBM DS3524 SAN (I think were around 5 TB useable)

10GB Cisco Nexus connections over iSCSI.

I expect that to increase in size, but probably not more than double our existing infrastructure over the next year.

I’ve learned that with the vSphere Standard version we get VCOPS foundations for free? I’ve been comparing the editions and I’m wondering if this is going to be enough for my environment or if it’s just going to leave me wanting to upgrade.

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-operations-management/compare-editi...

Our big problems right now is that since the environment is new, about a year old, that there is a lot of server oversizing and I think the “Right-sizing and resource optimization

” from the standard version will address that. 

Our other issue is monitoring.  We’re currently using ManageEngine AppManger for monitoring and we had a crash a couple weeks ago.  We’re really trying to get a handle on our alarms/alerting on our virtual infrastructure.

Also monitoring our latency between the vCenter and SAN is critical.  We need something that can monitor not just latency and IOPS, but our queue depth.  We’ve been getting some odd DAVG numbers from esxtop and it would be nice if the VCOPS didn’t include and monitor for QUED that we could somehow have vcops monitor that metric or any other from esxtop.

Of course I do see a few things that I might want in the future like Capacity Metering and Trending in the standard and OS-level change, patch and configuration management if this second is a viable alternative to Puppet.

Does it make sense to just start with the Foundations and prove that’s it’s valuable with management in 6 months or a year going oh year there is more money we have to put into VMWare infrastructure or try to spring for the Standard or higher versions now? We currently have a budget for additional  spending “ie our wishlist.”  I want to recommend something that is going to fit our needs, but not be so far our needs that we don’t use much of it.

Thoughts?

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