VMware licencing

Shad

Shad

Shad

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Joined
1 Dec 2005
Posts
803
Managed to confuse myself with VMware licencing. At work we're looking to run two hypervisor hosts (two E5 CPUs in each host) with vCenter Server (which itself will be a VM). The VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit licence is going to be our best option right? We need vMotion and HA but aren't too concerned about storage vMotion or FT. I priced up the individual components and it came out around £2k more expensive.

Cheers!
 
Thanks Dave. Actually we intend to use shared storage (FC and iSCSI). The Essentials Kit only talks about VSA as far as I can see, but surely normal shared storage and multipathing is supported out of the box?
 
I'm not sure why storage platform was even mentioned to be honest. Essentials Plus is a great product, just be aware of the 2 sockets per box and 6 sockets total license limitations. It's cheap because you need to throw away the license to upgrade, there's no discounted upgrade path. For this reason you should buy as many cores as you can, Dell R520s are about £4k with 96GB RAM, a couple of 8 core Xeons, couple of SAS disks for the vSphere install and some extra NICs, they're pretty basic but do the job well enough.

For the price it's a great product. Not really sure why you'd want to use VSA with only 3 hosts since you'd lose quite a lot of capacity to ensure that the failure of one host didn't affect anything else (especially once you're RAIDing the disks in each host), but you're on shared storage so that won't be an issue.

I'd try and wait for 5.5 since SSO and the vCenter Server appliance have been reworked to not be completely awful, and it saves you a Windows Server license since it's self-contained.
 
Useful info, thanks! Sounds like the vCenter 5.5 appliance is much better which would indeed save us a Windows and an SQL Server license :)
 
Another quick question - if we were to purchase 5.1 I'm assuming we should be able to upgrade to 5.5 when it's released? Since it's just a point release I would expect it to work the same as 5.0 to 5.1 - or I could be wrong.

I have asked these questions to VMware via a sales email but haven't heard anything for over a week... :rolleyes:
 
The key you get is for 5.x, so yeah it'll work.

Note, vcenter appliance used to be limited to 5 hosts and 50 VM's, that limit has now been lifted with 5.5.
For those who haven’t seen it… the vCenter Server Appliance limitations that there were around the number of virtual machines and hosts are lifted. Where the vCenter Server Appliance with the embedded ternal database used to be limited to a maximum of 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines this has been increased with vSphere 5.5 to 500 hosts and 5000 virtual machines. If you ask me, this means that the vCenter Server Appliance with the embedded database can be used in almost every scenario! That makes life easier indeed.


Couple of other awesome enhancements when it comes to vCenter Server:
  • Drag and drop functionality added! So you can simply drag and drop a VM on to a host again, or a host in to a cluster
  • OS X support, I know many of you have been waiting for this one.
  • Support for Database Clustering solutions, finally!
By itself they appear to be minor things, but if you ask me… this is a huge step forward for the vCenter Server Appliance
Click to expand...
 
Shad said:
Another quick question - if we were to purchase 5.1 I'm assuming we should be able to upgrade to 5.5 when it's released? Since it's just a point release I would expect it to work the same as 5.0 to 5.1 - or I could be wrong.

I have asked these questions to VMware via a sales email but haven't heard anything for over a week... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
I wouldn't assume anything at this point. 5.5 licensing has not been announced or discussed, and they have made plenty of changes in the past, so just wait another couple of weeks for the official release.
 
Shad said:
Another quick question - if we were to purchase 5.1 I'm assuming we should be able to upgrade to 5.5 when it's released? Since it's just a point release I would expect it to work the same as 5.0 to 5.1 - or I could be wrong.

I have asked these questions to VMware via a sales email but haven't heard anything for over a week... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Can't comment officially on this as i dont work for vmware, but as long as you have a valid support contract then upgrades are usually free. We went from 4.0 to 4.1 to 5.0 to 5.1 all under our support contract.
 
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