Log Insight 3.3 has been released, if you haven’t seen all the new and awesome stuff in there, go check it out the release notes here and the what’s new blog post over at blogs.vmware.com here.

With this new release new ways to license Log Insight is also coming. For all vCenter customers, the vCenter license now includes a 25 OSI pack for Log Insight, with some limitations, I will get to that later. Another cool thing is that all vCloud Suite customers get Log Insight for free as in, you get CPU licenses for the amount of CPUs that your vCloud Suite license covers. This means that all your ESXi hosts as well as all the VM running on the hosts are covered. So not only do you get to log ESXi hosts log files to Log Insight, you will also be able to get logs from any OS which natively supports syslog and from those who don’t support syslog via the Log Insight agent. This means that you will be able to get events from Windows Event viewer logged to Log Insight together with any other log files that you might need. Think of it this way, you will be able to see what is actually happening in the OS of your VM. Things like login attempts across your domain, firewall events, services which have been restarted etc. The list goes on and on, and with OSI licenses you will be able to syslog from any device that supports syslog. This is firewalls, switches, load balances, or even your toasters, coffee machines or your soda vending machines.

If all this seems a little pointless to you, it only because you haven’t tried Log Insight yet. For me Log Insight is all about turning unstructured data into structured data. It’s about getting knowledge about your data center like never before. It’s about stopping be reactive and starting to be proactive. In short “If you not running Log Insight you have no idea about what’s going on in your data center!”

But this blog post was suppose to be about the new licenses.

Log Insight 3.3 Licensing – What keys work

vCenter keys

The only key that work are vCenter 6 licenses keys. So if you still running 5.x or older and of cause have SnS (Service and Support), you need to login to my.vmware.com and upgrade or locale a vCenter 6 license key.

Still on vCenter 5.x – Go to my.vmware.com -> “View & Download Products” -> “All Products” -> “VMware vSphere” and “View Download Components”, now locate “VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3.1 for vCenter Server” and click “Go to download” and now click on “Read More” under “VMware vRealize Log Insight 3.3.1 for vCenter Server – Virtual Appliance” and locate the license key on the right side.

So what are you really getting ? It’s a 25 pack OSI (Operating System Instance) license. What this means it that you can monitor 25 OSI (One OSI, could be a Windows VM, an ESXi host or a firewall).

As an example one vCenter and 24 ESXi hosts would mean that all licenses would be used. As there are many environments with less than this amount of hosts, this leave head room for other devices to be monitored.

But there’s a catch!

• The vCenter liencse key doesn’t give you access to all content pack, but only the subset that has to do with a VMware environment. So no content pack for ASA firewall, USC blade or F5 load balances.
• Only one vCenter license key per Log Insight cluster, even if you have more than one vCenter license key. You are not allow to use it. You will have to deploy a Log Insight cluster/master per vCenter license. IMO this is a bit foolish of VMware, not as bad as vRAM, but close.
• Lastly you can’t “downgrade” a trial license with a vCenter license key. So if you have been testing Log Insight and now want to take it into production, you need to buy a key or deploy a new Log Insight cluster/master. Some what annoying.

If you try to downgrade your license the below error message will be shown.

Cannot downgrade to limited from standard

So in order to use your vCenter license with standard OSI Log Insight licenses you need to combine them. This will probably mean that you can login to my.vmware.com and combine your licenses. But as I write this I have no knowledge of the actual process.

UPDATE: As of Log Insight 3.3.2 vCenter 5.x keys and NSX keys are now accepted!

vCloud Suite keys

The only supported license key for vCloud Suite is vCloud Suite 7 license keys. Currently when i’m writing this the license keys for vCloud Suite 7 hasn’t been released. So you will all have to wait a bit longer. The good news is that keys you are getting includes the full version of Log Insight with all available content packs. So if you can’t wait to try out Log Insight, take it for a test drive now with a free trial version, you easily type in the vCloud Suite license key once you get it.

 

Round up

For all current customers, not much has changed in regards to licensing for you. You will have to combine your vCenter key and your existing key, to get the added value. If you already have CPU licenses and are a vCloud Suite customer, the new PLU license type lets you convert one CPU license to 15 OSI licenses, so that you can monitor your physical devices(switches, firewall or god forbid physical servers etc.). Lastly if you have already purchased OSI licenses and are a vCloud Suite customer, you can do what you have always done or use them to cover even more of your data center, as that vSphere environment is being taken care of.

 

That all for now – hope this will have explain the new licenses.