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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.

Here’s what’s new:

• vCenter Server Compatibility
• Integration with VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator
• Integration with VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
• Integration in the VMware vSphere Web Client
• Custom Intelligent Operations Groups
• Flexible Group Policies
• Application-level monitoring
• Operational compliance views
• Actionable recommendations
• Automated workflow triggers
• Capacity Analysis
• Improvements in stress detection and computation
• Improvements in Interpretations and Recommendations
• Custom Reports (Experimental)
• Custom User Interface Enhancements

I’m very happy to see the appearance of a free Foundation edition as I’ve always thought vCOPS is a great product but perhaps hampered by cost for basic monitoring, now even more so as the prices have increased for the other editions.

Previously the Standard edition was list price $50 per VM and now this has increased to $125 per VM but I suppose this has been justified by the addition of the previous Advanced edition features as well as Capacity Optimization and Intelligent Operations Groups and Policies Actionable Recommendations. $125 per VM is going to be a pricey option for a Standard Edition when there are other products to consider.