VMware Cloud Community
NiharVM
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi licensing options and other hypervisors

Hello,

We have been using ESXi 4.1 for the last 2 years and its been running fairly well so we wanted to keep it for our new project but the new licensing is killing us.

- Our new environment is 2 X R815 4 socket/6 core per socket AMD with 128 GB each. and MD3220i iSCSI SAN

- I just need the bare minimum essentials package but it is limited to dual socket server and 192 GB of vRAM. Someone told me that you can buy 2 licenses of essentials and use 4 socket cpu and 192X2 GB of RAM.

Is this true? Has anyone tried using Hyper-V or Xenserver with similar hardware? I am worreid about MPIO and performance.

Thanks

Nihar

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Reply
Josh26
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

You can find VMware's official statement on the licensing here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/small-business/compare-kits.html

If you hover over the right place, it will tell you:

No additional vRAM entitlement can be added to the Essentials or Essentials Plus kits. If more vRAM is required an upgrade to Standard or Advanced Acceleration Kit is required.

You can always buy, for example, one Advanced Acceleration Kit and several individual CPU licenses, but you may not stack the essentials kits together. I believe whoever told you that is incorrect.

Notice that vRAM != physical RAM. Are you planning on running your two servers in an HA environment, such that the allocated RAM will be < 128GB (or < 192 for that matter)? In this case, the Essentials package will be sufficient.

Reply
0 Kudos