Did you know VMware's offering a 25% vSOM discount? That's right, VMware has been providing a 25% discount to upgrade to vSOM from naked vSphere since Labor Day weekend. The standard upgrade price is $825 MSRP, but the promo price drops it down to $620 MSRP. That’s over a $200 savings per CPU. There are some serious savings to be had here so I wanted to quickly bring you up to speed so you could assess the solution and see if it makes sense for your organization.

25% vSOM discount ENDS ON DECEMBER 31!

So what is vSOM? It’s a bundle of vSphere and vRealize Operations (formally known as vCOPS). When reviewing monitoring and management toolsets with a broad stroke, it’s easy to say they’re nice to have but not absolutely necessary. Yet if you dive deeper, there are many features and functions that make the investment worthwhile in the long-term growth and planning of your virtualization environment.

vRealize Operations enables IT to not just see immediate issues, but also potential future problems which can have a dramatic impact on reducing unplanned outages.  With Predictive Analytics and Smart Alerts, it proactively identifies and remedies system issues, while dynamic thresholds automatically adapt to environments to provide fewer and more specific alerts resulting in a 30 percent DECREASE in time to diagnose and resolve performance issues. That’s three hours of your day you get back allowing you to work on improving and emerging your environment rather than troubleshooting constant alert noises and notifications.

The old saying, it’s better to be safe than sorry, speaks volumes in a virtual environment and especially in over-provisioning. Research has shown that 9 out of 10 virtual machines are over-provisioned. While this may not seem like a bad thing on the surface, it leads to diminishing efficiency and optimization within the virtual infrastructure and, more importantly, increased infrastructure costs. Having the ability to manage your VMs more closely and effectively with vRealize Operations (vCOPS), you can finely tune each VM, allocating the resources that are really necessary and as a result save up to 30% in potential hardware costs. This solution provides a holistic overview of your virtualized environment and provides deep insight into the health of your infrastructure which would otherwise be invisible. Capacity planning is another key feature of the vRealize Operations toolset allowing you to model future resource needs and alert on constraints before those constraints result in unexpected system downtime.

Years ago many wondered what the ROI was for ESX?  It was nice to be able to put several VMs on one server, but was it needed?  When we moved from physical to virtual it was a big step, an unknown “pie in the sky” concept that made sense on paper, but would it work and would it be a worthy investment?  Well now we know that moving to a VM environment made sense, and for some it was easy to manage. However, this inevitably led to the issue of resource and VM sprawl and a lack of visibility to overall infrastructure health. vRealize Operations is a comprehensive tool which can provide predictive analytics, capacity planning, and performance and health management.  Hence, it is very much a “have to have” vs. a “nice to have.”

If you’re looking for more information on vRealize, I would suggest downloading this whitepaper.

Now is the time to take advantage of a good deal on a great product! As always, GreenPages can help. If you would like to learn more, get a demo or make the purchase, fill out this form and we'll be in touch!

By Rob O'Shaughnessy, Director of Software Sales & Renewals