vsphere essentials plus version 5

[aiea96701]

We are a church so our finances are meager.  However, we do believe in virtualization for our church network.  We have a couple of VCP4 church members who are helping us with our virtualization project.

Currently, we are using ESXi5 hypervisor with 2 Dell PowerEdge Servers hosting our 6 VMs. However, we are hoping to create more  later.    While this is small, we believe that having the Essential PLus kit would certainly aid in the administration and management of our Vmware environment.   Our primary concern is that our technical help is voluntary so we need to reliably keep our Hosts and VMs up and running.   In the hypervisor environment that is not so easy.  With vMotion and HA/DRS it would be a great benefit.

The problem is costs. 

I have seen postings with HP and Lenovo branding selling vSphere Essentials Plus kit version 5 for as little as $900 to $1300.   Our servers are all Dell PowerEdge and have VT technology.  We have the necessary Quad Core Processors with 8GB of memory (and, with luck we will be able to boost it to 16GB).  So, the question is:  Are these postings (and, one is on Amazon) legitimate and can we use these HP and Lenovo branded Essentials Plus kits on our Dell Hosts?

[a_p_]

I can't unfortunately answer the question about using the OEM license on other vendor's hardware. However, the price seems suspect to me, it's actually too much for an "Essentials Kit", but way too less for an "Essentials Plus Kit" (compared to the official prices). Btw. most advanced features like HA require shared storage. From what I understand from your post, it seems that the VM's are stored on local storage!?

To give you an advice on which license to consider, please provide some information about your environment, how you are doing backup, and what benefits you expect from the licensed version. 

André