vCOPs Licensing Issue

[rmonti]

Hi All:

I installed vCOPs Manager 5.7 in a platform with 4 Host ESXi, 1 vCenter Sever and 240 VM's approximately. All products are in vSphere 5.1.

Also, I have a mix of VM's, Production, Development and Testing inside. So, I need monitoring only the Production VM's that are 50 VM's.

For do it, I have 50 licences of vCenter Operation Management Suite Advanced and we have put 50 VM's in a folder called "VM's Critical" for the 50 Licences.

When I installed vCOPs Manager, in vCenter Server I created a user "read only" for this VM's following the KB 1036195 of VMware but is not working because strangely other VM's are assigned (Development or Testing). In other word, I need monitoring only for this 50 VM's because we don’t have more licences for all VM's on this platform.

The problem is that vCOPs Manager randomly allocated more licenses and not working properly for these 50 VM's selected before.

For example, vCenter Server show 142 VMs assigned by vCOPs and we have capacity only for 50 VM's.

How we can restrict a vCOPs Manager for assigned this 50 licences correctly in my folder VM's Critical?

Thanks!!!

[gradinka]

rmonti,

you say that

"For do it, I have 50 licences of vCenter Operation Management Suite Advanced and we have put 50 VM's in a folder called "VM's Critical" for the 50 Licences."

you have to use either Datacenter or a Cluster object in order to properly limit the VMs vc_ops will monitor.

also, sometimes, the vm-licenses-counter behaves erraticly -depending on the setup, config, etc. But I will let other folks who might know better to chime in on that.

[mark_j]

Do you have a cluster defined in vCenter? Do you have shared storage?

Generally speaking, you want to capture/collect metrics from all consumers of resources belonging to VMs you wish to monitor. For example, you want to monitor VM A. VM A resides on host A. Host A also hosts VM B and VM C. In this case you want to monitor VMs A,B,C entirely since you want to capture all of the workload that is running upon the resources of VM A. This applies to host systems, datastores, etc. This is because if you do not capture all consumers of the resources, you're going to have blind-spots in your capacity planning and analysis. This is bad. So typically we say, the most narrow collect we want to see is the cluster or datacenter level. Really, though, it depends on how shared the resources are between the resources you wish to monitor. If, let's say, you have a datastore shared between 10 clusters... and VMs are running on that datastore across all 10 clusters.. ideally you'd want to collect/monitor/license all of the VMs upon that datastore to ensure you don't have any blind spots.

On the licensing subset config - you need to be mindful of the perms to VMs at the VM & Templates view in addition to the Hosts & Clusters view.. vCOps can get at the VMs via both the security hierarchy paths and it'll utilize the most 'permitting' security to get it's information.