Plain Virtualization

Recently there was some discussion over licensing in Facebook vExpert group . One of the users questioned about licensing 3 hosts, each placed at one location. He wants to be able to do a snapshot and monitor the health of the ESXi host. He intends to add a fourth host in future. He was also told by the account executive that vSphere Essential cannot meet this requirement. Let me explain some of the information which might be not clear enough. vSphere Essential and Essential Plus kit is a bundle that comes with vCenter Server Essential (which is not available for sale) and vSphere Essential/Essential Plus licensing. ]vCenter Server Essential can only manage up to three ESXi servers. The vSphere Essential kit allows you to license up to 3 hosts or 6 CPUs whichever come first. But you cannot license more than 3 hosts even if each only has 1 CPU. This is because vCenter Essential can only manage up to 3 ESXi hosts. Also, the licensing would not allow you to manage using a vCenter S...

The new licensing scheme is used in vSphere 5. Unlike in vSphere 4, where vRAM is not taken into consideration rather the number of cores per socket. Let do a refresh. In vSphere 4, for Enterprise edition is entitled to 6 cores per physical processor per server. For Advanced/Enterprise Plus edition, is entitled to 12 cores per physical processor.  As for the RAM limitation will be 256GB memory per host except Enterprise Plus which is unlimited. An example would be follows: 1 server with 2 physical CPUs, each with 8 cores. This will require 2 x Enterprise Plus license. If you apply 2 x Enterprise instead of Enterprise Plus license, only 6 cores per CPU will be used and 2 cores per CPU left idle. Let's talk about vSphere 5 licensing. Before we begin, vSphere 5 have removed Advanced edition. A customers who is on Advanced Edition on vSphere 4 will be upgrade to vSphere 5 Enterprise. vRAM entitlement is based on an edition per physical CPU (no more limitation of number...