Agent distribution is not limited to physical servers, but extends to the virtual machine environment. BladeLogic supports VMware through its Virtualization Manager add-on to Operations Manager, while Opsware supports both VMware and Solaris 10 in its SAS Server.
As VMware is deployed on a trial basis by InterBank, agents need to be distributed at least to each of the ESX Servers. Then, depending on the criticality of each virtual machine, additional agents may be deployed for each instance of the virtual environment.
For our fictional bank with 1,200 physical servers and 25 virtual servers, the Opsware package costs include $150,000 per multimaster core server and $1,200 per agent. BladeLogic costs $1,400 per physical server agent and $600 per virtual server agent. Total software costs, including support, run from $2.03 million to $2.21 million.
Get It Done
After product selection and hardware acquisition, InterBank's SCM deployment will follow the path of most typical enterprise management implementations: a detailed requirements analysis, agent deployment, core software installation and configuration, integration and training.
