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steve_f
Contributor
Contributor

ESX Licensing for a COLD ESX Host at replicated site

We are planning a DR sire for a customer, production will have 3 x hosts and 1 x VC server. running PRod, Dev and UAT environments, all the prod servers will be replicated to another Data Centre SAN where there will be a single ESX box to run the core services, this will have VC as a VM and be in a powered off state except for DR tests (yearly)

Do we need to have a separate ESX license for this box?

Are there an implications to having VC powered off in starting up the ESX box?

Cheers

Steve

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Anders_Gregerse
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

In earlier versions of ESX you could encounter problems starting VC if the ESX did not have a license. I would recommend to have a physical pc or server with the licensing service installed and have a copy of your licensing files on that as a disater recovery solution for the licensing part. As long as ESX can get a valid license you can do everything the license allows you to do.

Whether you need to buy an additional license for the cold ESX is something that should be described in the license agreement, but if it's using a licensing server that should be a problem, but you might need some sort of license to test and keep it up to date.

Rodos
Expert
Expert

Steve, if you are replicating to the DR site you must have network connectivity.

That being the case I would recommend actually purchasing a license for the host. You can run a DC out at the DR site, you can run a test or dev machine, after all you have a copy of the production data to test with. You could upgrade it and test new version of ESX before you put them into production. If its a single host you could just purchase a foundation license and then change it over in a DR scenario. You could manage it by the same VC and if that was virtual you could replicate the VC too.

Thats my recommendation

As to do you need a license for the DR box, if you run something on it, you need a license.

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steve_f
Contributor
Contributor

Good idea, never thought of getting the basic license, what is killing us though is that the DR machine is a 4 Processor version so it needs 2 licenses packs. but as we dont need any of the enterprise functionality at this stage it could be an idea.

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