Question on Licencing allocation

[Newbie009]

Hi all,

In Operations Manager you need to enter licences with the 25 VM packs.

My questions are:

1) If I have more than 25 VMs in the vCenter Server and I add only 1 25 VM pack of licences, how will the 25 VMs be chosen?

2) Is there a way to manually choose which VMs to include in the 25 VMs to be monitored?

3) If there is a way for you to choose which VMs to monitor, if I wanted to monitor other VMs could I change the chosen VMs to monitor?

4) The monitoring is per VM (eg the 25 VM pack) but what about the monitoring per ESX, cluster etc?

Is an ESX Host only monitored IF all VMs on that host are being monitored

So basically I want to know how the following (for example) would be configured/could be configured to understand how it works:

1 x vCenter Server

4 x ESX servers

10 x VMs per server

1 x 25VM pack of licences for Operations Manager

Thanks in advance

Mark

[jddias · Accepted solution]

Hello Mark,

  vCenter Operations Manager considers any powered on VM to be a "managed" VM and thus counts against you license entitlement.  If you want to limit the VMs being managed, you will need to set up a collector user when you register your vCenter.  This account should only have permissions for the VMs you wish to manage with vC Ops.

The following steps will guide you through setting up limited collections.

1.   Select a user account that will be used for the limited collections.   Ideally, you would create a new "service account" for this specifically.
2.   From vCenter, right click on the vDC or Cluster you wish to perform  collections against for vC Ops and select "Add Permissions" from the  menu.
3.  In the Add Permissions dialogue, select the role to be used  (Administrator role is fine) and add the user you created in step 1.   Make sure that "Propagate to Child Objects" is selected.
4.  Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each vDC or Cluster you desire to collect against.
5.  Log into the vC Ops Admin UI (can be reached at http://<ip of UI VM>/admin) where you will default to the registration page.
6.  For your vCenter, click the "Update" button.
7.  Modify the "Collector user (optional):" with the user ID you selected in step 1.
8.  Modify the "Collector password (optional):" with the password for the user ID you selected in step 1.
9.  Click on "Test Connection" (you may have to also re-enter the "Registration password" for the test to succeed).
10.  Upon successful test, click "Apply"

You have now set up limited collections, you can verify this by checking the vSphere UI.

[Newbie009]

Hi jddias,

That was an excellent answer and exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you very much.

Regards

Mark