That really sucks and is ridiculous and quite despicable  IMO.

Now I have to revert back to  ESXi  3.5,  because this feature is absolutely critical, and the lack of it is a deal breaker.

I'll be strongly considering  the competition  which hasn't had any problems hot-adding virtual disks.

The cost of the advanced edition for such a basic feature simply isn't worth it.

That's only really useful if it's a brand new host.    If the host was installed more than 60 days ago, the eval option isn't available anymore, because it expires.   It might be useful only if it hasn't expired yet  (which is a limited time period)...

Otherwise, switching back and forth between   ESX  Foundation license and Eval mode is not a good workaround for an environment that runs production VMs.

And the whole point of  needing to hot-add a VMDK, is the VM is important, and you want to add more disk capacity without downtime.

The need arising for more capacity isn't something that normally occurs within 60 days of server deployment.

+1

I sent an e-mail to VMWare requesting they lift this license requirement in next update. We are seriously thinking of moving back to 3.5i or moving to Xen (or KVM)...

Here is the reply from VMWare. Good news!

"This is a known bug, expected to be resolved by vSphere 4.0 U1. The correct behavior is that hot add of disk should work with every license.i.e. hot add of disk is still free.

Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks and regards

Leena Joshi

Group Manager, Product Marketing

VMware"