vCenter 5.1 Standard - Cannot Manage ESXi Essentials Hosts Anymore?

[daveclaussen]

Hi all!

I have 12 vSphere Essentials servers and 16 vSphere Enterprise servers. I have one vCenter Standard server managing all of them.

I just upgraded my vCenter server from 5.0 to 5.1 (3 hours). Now, when I open vCenter, some of those Essentials hosts have a red flag next to them with the following alert:  "Alert  The host license edition is not compatible with the vCenter Server license edition"

Research tells me that my Essentails hosts now require an Essentials vCenter server to manage them and even worse, there can only be three Essentials hosts per vCenter Essentials server. Someone please tell me that the internet was lying.

I should mention that the four servers with the red flags alerts are Essentials, v5.x. The others servers are at v4.x and ARE NOT showing the alert.

Any ideas friends?

- Dave

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

From a licensing perspective this has always been this way. A vSphere Essentials Kit consists of 1 vCenter Server for Essentials and 6 CPU licenses for up to 3 hosts and these licenses may only be used together.

from http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/esx_esxi_eula.html

VMware licenses VMware vSphere Essentials or VMware vSphere Essentials  Plus editions (collectively "Editions") to you solely for managing up to  three (3) server hosts and your use of these Editions is limited to  servers with up to two processors. For these Editions, the server hosts  must be managed by the VMware vCenter Server that is provided with these  Editions, and that same VMware vCenter Server cannot be used to manage  other server hosts not included with these Editions.

The only exception is vSphere Essentials for Retail and Branch Offices, which can be managed centrally from a single vCenter Server (see http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf)

André

[daveclaussen]

Ok, that is fine, but why then was I able to use my vCenter Standard server to manage all of my hosts, Enterprise and Essentials, prior to v5.1?

[a_p_]

Unfortunately I can't answer this question. However, there's always a technical and a marketing/legal side, maybe they just missed to close this "hole"!?

André

[GASP201110141]

I have the same problem. When I had vCenter 5.0, I was able to manage vSphere 5 Essentials. Now that I installed vCenter 5.1 I get the error. I didn't upgrade the hosts to 5.1, maybe this will solve the problem. daveclaussen did you solve your problem?

[daveclaussen]

There is no problem unfortunately. The EULA for the VMware Essentials kits specifically states that the the six Essentials CPU licenses can only be managed by the one vCenter Essentials license that came with the kit.

The only option, if you want to manage hosts using Essentials licenses with one vCenter Standard/Enterprise server, is to upgrade those Essentials licenses. I am going over all of that now and will probably consolidate my Essentials servers down as far as I can and just purchase Standard licenses for those servers.

The Essentials kits were made for small offices that will utilize only the licenses that came in the kit - no more. That is why they are so inexpensive. It is the perfect option for a small office.

Good luck.