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MarcoLITP
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Licensing / Layout - HCI Kit Essentials + HCI Kit ROBO Standard for 8 offices ?

Our non-profit SMB is looking into switching to vSAN and vSphere in the future. We have eight offices with three having around 50 users each and five having between 5 and 20 users each. The workload is light office administration work with about 25% using multi-media features like streaming video or audio (we hope to address this with RemoteFX on RDS). We are using Remote Desktop Services and like to continue doing this. Our data connections between these are between 70/30Mbit up/down and 140/60Mbit up/down, routed through our provider's MPLS network.

My idea to keep VMware costs reasonable, as we are a non-profit SMB, is using an HCI Kit Essentials for the "datacenter" (one of the larger offices) using 2 or 3 hosts and split up the HCI Kit ROBO 25 VM license over the other sites. We'd give each site the RDS server their (local) users need and use DFS-R to keep data synced with the datacenter for important data. Shared services like Mail and web-apps would be hosted at the datacenter site as well. Veeam can take care of backups in the datacenter site, also housing the Witness VM appliances.At each site we'd have a 2-node setup ranging in performance according to the number of users and expected load.

My calculations show we'd be able to stay within the 25 VM limit of the ROBO license easily, allowing growth. If I read the vSAN 6.7 Licensing Guide correctly, this is possible, am I correct ?

My point for hosting RDS servers at each site is to minimize lag/delay but also to remove complete dependancy on internet connections (own site and datacenter/witness site).

Is this a sane layout for our needs and will we conform to the licensing model ?

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

I think that youre missing a "vCenter Standard" license which is needed to host an "unlimited" number of ESXi Hosts.  Your HCI Kit Essentials only contains a vCenter Essentials which is limited to 3 Hosts because is a bundle of normal Essentials+ and vSAN Std.

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-67-licen...

Please check page 7.

General Info

https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsan/vmware-vsan-robo-solution-overview.pdf

Regards,

Joerg

MarcoLITP
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

That makes sense, I was focussing on VMs and hosts, not on ESXi installs. Do you (or anyone else) have any input on the experience with this kind of setup ?

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IRIX201110141
Champion
Champion

Iam a VMware Partner.

We have customers with ROBO (the normal one and not the HCI Robo). Every customer have one HQ with normal vSphere licensing which means vCenter Standard and ESXi. This can be an Accelerator Kit or normal single licensing or a combination of both because the upgrade path of a Ess+ is a Accel. Kit.

If there is something different in the HCI world... i dont know. I have scrolled through my SKU list and read the descriptions and found nothing.

Regards
Joerg

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MarcoLITP
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It makes sense that we need the HCI Kit ROBO Standard as well as the HCI Kit Standard for our current plan. Would you recommend we get the Acceleration Kit for this setup ? I'm unaware of the license costs at the moment so unsure what would be the most cost-effective.

I got this info from the vmware-vsan-67-licensing-guide.pdf (june 2019):

VMware HCI Kits

New licensing and packaging options were introduced with vSAN. VMware HCI Kit bundles simplify the purchase of vSphere and vSAN licenses. There are five data center kits with per-CPU licensing, three remote office branch office kits with per-VM licensing, and one HCI Acceleration Kit for distributed IT use cases (emphasis and markup mine, for easy reading):

  • VMware HCI Kit Essentials (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Essentials plus and vSAN Standard
  • VMware HCI Kit Standard (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Standard and vSAN Standard
  • VMware HCI Kit Advanced (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSAN Advanced
  • VMware HCI Kit Enterprise (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSAN Enterprise

  • VMware HCI Kit with Operations Management (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, vSAN Enterprise, and vROPs Advanced

  • VMware HCI Kit ROBO Standard (per-VM) that includes vSphere ROBO Standard and vSAN ROBO Standard
  • VMware HCI Kit ROBO Advanced (per-VM) that includes vSphere ROBO Advanced and vSAN ROBO Advanced
  • VMware HCI Kit ROBO Enterprise (per-VM) that includes vSphere ROBO Advanced and vSAN ROBO Enterprise

  • VMware Acceleration Kit (per-CPU) that includes vSphere Standard and vSAN Standard with a ~25% inherent discount on list price, limited to 3 single CPU nodes per cluster & 1 cluster per authorized location; includes no upgrades
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