licensing dilemma about vsphere essentials plus

[vicmackey82]

I work in the public sector for a joint venture of municipalities who configures itself as a new juridic entity and has the duty to run the IT sector in behalf of all the involved municipalities; two of these ones have bought in past years a vSphere essentials plus bundle who licenses up to 3 hosts with a max of 2 sockets per host. Since we actually got 6 hosts in all our datacenters spread around the territory and, except for one site, all the hosts would be "standalone" with no need to be managed by a vcenter, if we follow the procedures to entitle these two licenses to the new juridic entity (filling up a LATF module and transferring licenses from the municipalities to the joint venture), would it be legal to "unpack" the host licenses included into the essential plus bundle on the hosts spread in the territory? or is there any restriction inside the essential plus EULA (I'm still trying to find it around the web without success) who forces me to install all the 3 ESXi licenses included in the bundle in the same geographical site?

[maishsk]

Welcome to the forums.

You will not be able to "unpack" the licenses for the ESXi hosts.

The limitation for Essentials is 3 servers with up to 2 Physical CPU's each. I am pretty sure you cannot split that into 6x1CPU.

I also do not think that will comply with the original licensing you purchased.

[vicmackey82]

Thanks for the prompt answer Maish!

Maybe I've explained myself in the wrong way.. i do not need to split up essentials plus licenses in terms of physical cpu, i know that for this thing i could buy an accelleration kit and upgrade to a standard license but we could not actually afford that fee.

Let me have a try again: let's call all the municipalities as A, B, C, D and E and the joint who is a new legal entity and who will manage all the IT as U; A gots 2 HS22 with two physical cpu each, B, C and D got each a Proliant rack server with two multicore processors and are not running any VMware product yet and E gots a Proliant tower server with a single socket; A and E are owners of a essentials plus license who could cover up to 3 hosts with not more than 2 physical processors.. the thing I'd like to know is if I follow the procedure to transfer licenses to U, all the hosts could be covered by the pair of essentials plus bundles we got also if those servers are placed in different physical sites.

what do you mean with "original licensing"?