Save money managing your virtual hosts

As I said in my post below, I read a lot of blogs.  I’ve been meaning to write a response to a post I read on Vcritical.com for a while, and haven’t got around to it.  Vcritical is written by Eric Gray who is a VMware employee, so clearly he has a biased view, much as I do given my employer :).  However it’s always fun to debate the issues, and we shouldn’t shy away from respectful disagreement.

Eric wrote a post a while back “Save $14970 on VMware ESX Management” where he said to save money managing your VMware hosts, don’t use Virtual Machine Manager, and then pointed out that the cost of the Server Management Suite Enterprise license is $1,497 per physical host.

I think Eric is understating the value that the SMSE license brings.  SMSE doesn’t just give you the Operations Manager management license for the host, but also for all the guests running on that host, along with the management agents for Configuration Manager, Data Protection Manager & Virtual Machine Manager.  So now we get detailed information about what’s going on at the host level, but detailed application level information about what’s going in all the guests, plus backup, plus inventory, plus patching, plus software distribution, plus desired configuration management, plus self service VM provisioning, plus a whole bunch of other capability. 

For me the deep application information is really important.  Sure you could take a black box view of the VM and just treat it as a CPU & memory & disk IO consuming thing, but just because it’s virtualised doesn’t mean you don’t want to know what’s going on in that VM.  If that VM is running BizTalk you’d want to know that the BizTalk services are behaving the way they should, if the VM is running Exchange you want to know that mail is flowing, if it’s running SQL you want to know that the SQL databases aren’t running out of space.  The black box view is great if all you want to do is play musical chairs with your VM’s, but if you really want to know that they’re doing what they’re supposed to, you need deep application knowledge.  And that’s where Operations Manager excels.

And forget that Eric tells you that PRO is too hard to configure – it’s not.

Just to be explicit on my comment policy: comments are moderated on this blog, but I’ll publish every comment that isn’t offensive, spam or defamatory.  It just takes me a while sometimes.