vSphere Essentials Plus 4.1 upgrade to 5.0

[lukejohnson100]

Hi all,

I work for a non for profit org and we bought vSphere essentials plus (4.1) a few months back as it was pretty cost effective compared with going to standard or enterprise etc.

We bought 3 hosts, each with 128GB of RAM.

We will look to upgrade to vsphere 5.0 in the near future and I have believe I have ran into a problem. As I have 384GB total RAM the limit on essentials plus is 192GB total RAM, half of my RAM capacity would effectively be unusable.

The only thing I can do is upgrade to enterprise licensing, as even standard only supports 32GB per CPU.

Am I correct?

Thanks in advance

Luke.

[Villag3Idiot]

Hi Luke,

Yes you are correct, you are capped at 32GB of vRAM per processor with Standard edition.

See this document, should answer all of your licensing questions...

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

To utilise your existing amount of physical RAM, assuming your hosts have two processors each, you would need to purchase an Enterprise license for each CPU.

[lukejohnson100]

Yep that's what I thought - thanks for the clarification.

[AndreTheGiant]

Note that vRAM entitlement works is pool... So you have to plan how much you need.

To have greater value you can use also more CPU licenses than your physical CPU (in this way you can stay, for example, with standard edition).

But note that this value is related to the vRAM allocated to the powered-on VMs... not necessary with the physical RAM.

Andre