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VMware has released its latest update to vCenter Operations Manager Suite with some notable changes.

First of all there is now a vCenter Operations Manager Foundation edition which is included with every vSphere edition from Standard free of charge.

The Foundation edition includes basic vSphere Performance and Health monitoring just as Proactive Smart Alerts, Intelligent Operations Groups (New), vSphere Health Monitoring and Self-learning Performance Analytics. It’s a start to at least get you monitoring your environment but for any of the clever analysis and recommendations or capacity management you will need to look at a more feature rich edition or get it included as part of the VMware vCloud Suite.

There are 4 editions and they have had a feature list move around, the above mentioned Foundation (vSphere Performance and Health), Standard (vSphere Monitoring, Performance and Capacity Optimization), Advanced, (Virtual and Physical Infrastructure Operations including Monitoring, Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management) & Enterprise (Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Operations including OS- and Application-level Monitoring, Performance, Capacity and Configuration Management)

The features of the old Advanced edition have now been incorporated into the Standard edition, the old Enterprise edition is now called Advanced and the old Enterprise Plus is now called Enterprise.

vCOPS 5.6 includes plenty of new integration including being part of the new Web Client which is a great (inevitable obviously) change.

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I have had the pleasure today of presenting at the second  UK VMware User Group. at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, near Birmingham.

My presentation was titled vSphere Networking and Converged IO with Blade Servers.

I discussed how converged networking incorporating 10GE and FCoE is become more important as we try to utilise bandwidth more efficiently which is especially important with blade servers which have limited IO expansion. I explained the architecture of Cisco UCS and HP Virtual Connect as examples and how they can work with vSphere.

I went through some of the IO convergence options and also how to still protect your traffic by using either physical or logical separation or software.

No need to repeat everything else in this blog post, you may as well have a look at the presentation and best of all plan to attend a VMUG near you!