vSphere licence advice

Luke

Luke

Luke

Soldato
Joined
19 Jul 2005
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Location
S. Yorkshire
Hi all, looking for some advice on my current setup.

I have two servers each with 2 quad core CPU's in them.
Each is running ESXi 3.5. At the moment I am using the trial version of vSphere 4 and the benefits in speed over just using VIC on ESXi are vast.

I'd like to put a case to my boss for licencing it following the end of the trial (32 days and counting!) but am having a hard time getting my head around the editions and costs.

I am mainly using vSphere for cloning and migrating guests, so on that basis I thing I can go with the most basic offering which I believe is vSphere Standard. Is this right?

I don't think I can buy just licences without a support agreement, so can anyone tell me the cheapest way to get it licenced for both servers?

cheers
 
If by migrating you mean moving from physical to virtual environment then yes basic would do, if you mean, moving from one piece of tin to another then you'll be using vMotion which is only available in vSphere advanced and above I believe.


There was a nice clear diagram on their site listing the features and what Versions covered them side by side. I'll see if I can find it.
 
https://www.vmware.com/files_inline/images/39587_vsphere_howtobuy_v2_nobuttons_R2.jpg


That's some polished up version of the one I saw before but it's sort of helpful.

One tip I would forward is that using Server 200x datacenter edition reduces your guest licensing costs if they're windows based because you pay licensing per CPU socket. I think it's something like £1800 for 1 socket and £2300 for two sockets ~RRP (that's sockets, not # of cores). But that license allows you to have as many virtualised installs as you want. Obviously you'd need to have about 6 VMs per box to make that viable but if you have big beefy boxes it can save you a packet over licensing every guest OS individually.
 
Thanks for that.
I'm purely doing V2V, and have about 20 guests on each server at any time.
when I say moving, I mean when we see a large spike on one of the server, the ability to just migrate between them to even the load.
All guests are covered by an MSDN licence.

I note that 'Live Migration' is not available in Standard edition. I presume this means migration whilst the guest is in use? I can currently only migrate guests when they are powered off. Any idea if this is basic functionality that is available in Standard?
 
You should be able to move them manually while powered off in standard fine. But yes if you want to do live moves then you need "live migration" (which is vMotion rebranded), that's only available in advanced onwards. If you want to load balance automatically then you need Enterprise or Enterprise+

Once you work out what you want to do and what features you *need* then give their local sales office a buzz and they'll be able to confirm exactly what you need to do what you want.There are quite a lot of vendors in the VM and SAN world at the moment who are quite willing to bend over backwards for your business.
We are by no means a huge company but i've just managed to wangle a 2 week extension on a 1week trial of an EQL SAN box because they're desperate for me to like it. We have about 2.5TB of data across the whole group and I'm only going to be buying 4 if I do like it. But they are happy to give me demo units and throw engineers at me to show me how to get the best out of it for my testing.

Don't take the RRP for granted either, i saw a UK reseller who i can't name on here recently selling vSphere advanced for something like £580 which is something like 1/2 the RRP so there's deals to be had.
 
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That's great advice. Thanks a lot!
I've also found vSphere Essentials, which also seems to do what I need it to.
I'll do a trawl of the net to see what prices are around.
 
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