VMware Infrastructure Licensing Questions

[foxy1977]

Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone can shed any light on the rather confusing licensing setup of the VMware range of products.

I am planning on running about 3 esxi servers and migrating about 5 servers to the boxes. I was thinking that i could initially run them on individual ESXi boxes to begin with and then once we have the servers migrated over we could look at the VMware Infrastructure package to manage the servers. I think we are looking the middle or top infrastructure package as we really need the high availablity and distributed resource planning features they offer.

The question is how does the licencing work? If we are planning on running 4-5 esxi boxes and the associated infrastructure tools to manage them together do we just need one VI licence and connect this upto the esxi boxes. I think the top package comes out at £5000. Im hoping we only need the one otherwise we may have to shelve the project!! Without going to speak to software suppliers I would like to get an idea of what the costs might be.

Thanks in advance

[JonRoderick]

Hi

to get all the features you talk about (HA etc) you're going to need Virtual Center. That comes in at about £3k (last time I checked).

I think I'm right in saying that if you want to manage ESXi using Virtual Center, you're going to need to purchase an ESX licence and these are usually sold in dual-socket packages - again around £3k but I'm sure it will vary depending on reseller. ESXi is only 'free' when you manage each host in isolation - this becomes unmanageable past around 3 hosts and if you want to use advanced features like HA.

So, for your 3 hosts with VC, you're looking at around £12k (based on dual-socket boxes).

Hope that helps.

Jon

[weinstein5]

Yes you will be able to run the 5 virtual machines on ESXi - depending on the configuration of the server you are installing ESXi on you might be able to run all 5 on the same box - Once you are ready to full VI-3 environment you will need to license as follows:

• 1 VMware Virtual Center Management Server license

• You will need virtual center agent licenses for each esx server and these are licensed per physical cpu in the esx server - so for example if you have 3 ESX servers each with dual quad core CPUs you will need 6 cpu licenses

• VMotion and HA is licensed like the virtual center agents

• DRS is licensed like the virtual center agents but it also requires VMotion licenses as well

VMware has created bundled pricing for these items - check out -

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