Licensing

[Knowledgable]

Hi All,

Grateful if someone can shed some light on licensing for a stretched cluster. Taking into consideration it would be a 3-node (2 data + witness VM), what would be the licensing requirements for 2 x Servers, both with 2 processors each. Looking at this from the point of view that they have just been unboxed so no vmware software has been installed as yet (with the exception of the witness which would be installed on existing licensed infrastructure).

What licenses would I need ?

[TheBobkin]

Hello Knowledgable,

For vSAN you require licensing for ESXi and also vSAN - which of each of these depends on requirements:

e.g. if DRS is a requirement then you need Enterprise edition ESXi/vSphere licensing.

Are the data-nodes going to be in different physical locations and if so, approximately how many milliseconds over the network from site to site (and sites to Witness)?

Typically stretched-clusters require Enterprise vSAN licensing, however 2-node stretched-clusters only require vSAN Standard or ROBO licensing:

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-65-licen...

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2017/01/24/two-host-stretched-vsan-cluster-with-standard-license/

Hope this helps.

Bob

[Knowledgable]

Thanks for the reference articles.

At present each site is 3 km in distance apart, <1 ms between all three sites as there is fiber (10Gb between data and 1 Gb to witness) joining each. There are only two servers + witness appliance for this setup.

[TheBobkin]

That will work fine for stretched-cluster - was just checking to make sure as Round Trip Time (RTT) of 5msec is the max supported for stretcehd between data-sites, the lower the better of course.

Latest reference guides for stretched-clusters:

https://storagehub.vmware.com/export_to_pdf/vsan-stretched-cluster-2-node-guide

https://storagehub.vmware.com/export_to_pdf/vsan-stretched-cluster-bandwidth-sizing

Bob