One month after the vCenter Log Insight announcement and the public beta for the product was released, the product is now generally available! The details about the product were announced back in June, but you can read all about it here: http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-log-insight/overview.html.
One thing I would like to discuss is pricing…
vCenter Log Insight is a standalone product with a licensing model per OSI. The question becomes, what is an OSI? Per http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vcenter-log-insight/buy.html:
VMware vCenter Log Insight is licensed on a per operating system instance (OSI) basis, which is defined as any server, virtual or physical, with an IP address that generates logs, including network devices and storage arrays.
In my opinion, the easiest way to think about an OSI is any unique IP address that is the origin of an event. Concrete examples should make this more clear:
- I have 1 vCenter Server instance with 2 ESXi hosts and 10 VMs and each is sending logs to Log Insight, how many licenses do I need? 13.
- I have 10 VMs sending logs to a syslog aggregator and that syslog aggregator is sending logs to Log Insight, how many licenses do I need? 10 unless the syslog aggregator is also sending its own logs to Log Insight in which case you would need 11.
- I have 10 applications running on a single VM and all 10 applications as well as the VM’s OS logs are sending logs to Log Insight, how many licenses do I need? 1 unless the VM has multiple NICs and logs are being sent to Log Insight from multiple different IP addresses in which case you would need one per IP address sending log messages.
The cost per license was discussed back in June and is $200 per OSI. In terms of purchasing, Log Insight is sold in packs of 25 licenses.
© 2013, Steve Flanders. All rights reserved.
