Plain Virtualization

Have met some customer who are tight on budget and is on Essentials or Essentials Plus. There are some confusion with the packaging of the vCenter editions and I would like to clarify some of this with some of the links around VMware sites for easy understanding. Essentials or Essentials Plus are bundled with vCenter Essentials while vSphere Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus is often quote with vCenter Standard. So what does this mean?  With the different vCenter Edition, there are some hard limitations.  If you refer to my vRAM entitlement post here , I have mentioned that there is a hard 192GB vRAM entitlement and limit to 3 hosts to one vCenter for Essentials and Essentials Plus.   vCenter Essentials bundled ONLY in vSphere Essentials or vSphere Essentials Plus kit is limited to manage hosts up to 6 CPUs or 3 hosts whichever comes first.  This is due to the limitations from this vCenter edition. Also with vCenter Essentials, there is no linked mod...

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...