Mixing vSphere editions within a cluster?

[julian2]

I recently went to a customer site where they were running vSphere 5 Standard and vSphere 5 Enterprise within the same cluster. I've never seen anyone doing that before. Obviously from a best practices point of view this is not recommended. Should they have an issue with the environment, would VMware even support such an environment? I would assume that all the Enterprise features would be disabled as they operate at the cluster level and not the individual host? Thereby making the Enterprise licenses very expensive (both in initial purchase and support) Standard licenses?

I'm trying to find a VMware document that I can reference saying this is not a good idea / not supported, but all I can find is running a mixed version environment, not running a mixed edition environment. I've read the vSphere 5 licensing white paper, FAQ and KB too, and they have no reference to mixed vSphere editions (beyond Operations Manager / vCloud) that I can see. You can sort of make the inference by reading the vSphere best practices guide, but it's only by reading between the lines. I'm after something that specifically states if it's a bad idea / not supported. Got any links? Thanks!

[a_p_]

Although this might not be best practice, I don't see any technical issues with this. To be honest, with all the features which are already available in the Standard version nowadays, there's basically only DRS which your customer may not be able to use in the mixed cluster. All the other features available in the Enterprise Edition (compared to Standard) are features which I think are not used by most smaller companies anyway.

Depending on your customer's needs, it might even be worth checking whether replacing the existing Enterprise licenses with Standard licenses could save them money in the future (renewals/support)!?

André

[admin]

Cluster with mixed ESX/ESXi version

Many have asked me whether if a cluster can be mixed with different versions of ESX/ESXi servers.  The answer is yes even down to ESX/ESXi 3.5, however for version 3.5, you would need to cater the legacy license server.  Please refer to the documentation here. Here is a demo of a setup I did with ESX 4.1 and ESXi 5.0 in the same cluster with HA and DRS enabled managed using a vCenter 5.0.

Please note that upgrading VMware Tools to the latest version will still be supported on lower version of ESX/ESXi servers as it only update the OS drivers.  However, upgrading the virtual hardware will only allow it to be supported on the latest ESXi server.

In such, that in consideration when doing your migration and upgrading of your vSphere environment and perform the virtual hardware upgrade last if possible unless you have enough resources to cater for your HA.

[a_p_]

@Fillips

Rather than copying content 1:1 from a blog - Plain Virtualization: vSphere 5: Cluster with mixed ESX/ESXi version in this case - either just post the link or at least mention the source to give credit to the one who create the blog post!

André

[julian2]

Thanks for the info, however this is a question about mixing editions in the same cluster, not versions. All the software build numbers are the same within the cluster, the editions however are not the same - some are standard and some are enterprise.