Any follower of this blog knows that I am indeed a huge vCenter Operations fan! I’ve done a couple presentations about the product both at my local Toronto VMUG as well as VMworld 2012 stressing this. It’s not the uncanny ability to monitor the environment that excites me, it’s the ability for the software to learn the ‘normals’ of your environment and display all of that in a series of coherent, sharp looking dashboards that really drives the value of the product to me!
So, without further ado the VMworld announced vCenter Operations 5.6 is finally available for download so if you are a current VCOps customer you can go ahead and pull down your upgrade. But wait, what if I’m not a VCOps customer? Oh, no worries, with the release of 5.6 so long as you are licensed with vSphere you can go and pull down the Foundation edition for FREE!
Huh!?!?! Foundations edition??? Let’s have a look! With the introduction of the re-branding to the vCenter Operations Management Suite, the foundation edition came to life as well. Having a quick look at the editions I would say that the foundation edition is pretty close to what the Standard edition used to be (minus the dynamic thresholds but still FREE), the standard edition now includes the capacity optimization features that the old advanced edition offered, the advanced edition now includes the physical infrastructure tie ins, with the enterprise edition giving you the whole shebang that the vCenter Operations Management Suite offers. Again, these aren’t the only features included in each edition, you can get a full list here. Some of the best in my opinion
- Being able to intelligent group VMs and monitor your health, workload, capacity, stress, risk as a whole.
- The integration within the vSphere Web Client,
- Although I haven’t had the chance to play with the integration into Configuration Manager and Infrastructure Navigator I’m sure it’s pretty cool.
Check out the full product page here!
