At what point should I consider vCOPs?

[zenking]

We have 4 hosts and about 75 VMs. Our environment is relatively calm (knock on wood). We're part of a university that just joined depts together for licensing, so I believe we we would be covered for it. But even if there is no additional cost, is the time justified in a small environment like ours?

[TBKing]

Are you planning a larger environment?  Joining more departments together?

It wouldn't be bad to get it in the door and familiar with it before there is a perceived need.

There's a lot in it, but pretty straight forward for the basic set up, and not much overhead to maintain it.

However, if there is a significant cost I would question the value for such a small environment at the moment.

[zenking]

Thanks. I'm sure we'll grow, but not very quickly. I'm waiting to hear back from our TAM about the pricing.

[cjscol]

I would download it and run it in your environment on a 60 day evaluation.  Once it has collected a month or so of data run the reports to see where you have over-provisioned resources to VMs, or even under-provisioned.  I have done this in a number of environments and been able to right-size the VMs delaying the need to purchase new hosts; this alone can pay for the product.

Once the 60 days was elapsed it will fall back to foundation edition.  vCOps Foundation is now included in the base vSphere license so you can run it in this mode without incurring any additional charges.

For your size of environment I doubt you will be able to justify the cost of purchasing the Standard Edition, but at least you will be able to use the full functionality for 60 days and then have a better idea of whether it is worth purchasing or not.

It does take a while to get used to.  You will probably find that you are overloaded with alerts generated from it and will discover potential issues that you didn't even know you had.

[zenking]

Sounds pretty reasonable. I'll check it out. Thanks.