Confused on v5.6 SCOM licensing

[stephorn]

So we have an environment with multiple facilities spread across North America.  We have both vCenter Standard or vCenter Essentials Plus licenses depending on the facilities needs (7 facilities with 2 at Standard level and 5 at Essentials Plus).

We have 75 OS licenses of SCOM v5.6 to monitor the critical guest OS's across the entire organization.  The total guest OS count between all locations is closer to 150.

What we want to do is have SCOM monitor ALL vCenter instances and use the Foundation licensing for these OS installs.  Then designate the "critical" guests and have use the Standard Edition licensing for those.

1) Is this possible?

       - If so then how?  When I go past 75 guests by adding the other vCenter instances I get massive warnings that we have exceeded our license count.

2) I have seen reference that you can limit the licensing possibly by using vCenter permissions or SQL query editing......there again I do not want to remove them from SCOM - just use the more advanced features on certain guests.

So far the product is producting some excellent metrics but we do not have the budget currently to purchase Standard level suite licenses for all guests.

Any help is appriciated.

Thanks,

Andy

[jddias]

First, just to make sure I'm not misunderstanding - when you say "SCOM" are you really talking about "vC Ops"?

Assuming that's the case...

At this point, your option would be to stand up an instance of vC Ops which is licensed for the advanced capability and then use a collection ID that is only associated with the objects you want to fall under that entitlement.

[stephorn]

Yes - I do mean vC Operations Manager.  Sorry I got my shortcuts between VMware and MS mashed together :-).

I see your point about two instances, with one for Standard Suite and the other for Foundation but then I lose the ability to have a "single" reporting point that we can use to report on all performance metrics.  It is important for us to have a single location where all our data is aggregrated together and that is what I was hoping to use vC Ops for.

Good suggestion - anyone else have an idea?

Andy

[mlebied]

You should be able to adjust the SQL query that SCOM adapter uses to filter only the devices you are licensed for.