What do I need to purchase?

[RobertPRAG]

Hi folks,

Apologies if this is the wrong forum, but I'm having trouble trying to work out what I need to purchase for our new VM environment.

We have just rolled out ESXi server and this is working well during our testing. I downloaded the trail version of Infrastructure 3 and have been using the Virtual Center and Enterprise Converter to test sending physical machines to the ESXi server. This all seems to work well and I am considering the purchase for this reason alone.

However, there is a version of Infrastructure 3 that costs £2000 and another that costs nearly £4500. My main interest is the Converter for hot cloning of images to ESXi. A side not is the APC UPS support which looks like I need ESX server rather than ESXi as there doesn't seem to be a clean way to shut down the ESXi host.

Any advice is really appreciated.

Thanks for all your help

Rob

[kjb007]

The differences you see are Foundation/Standard/Enterprise. All of different features that come with the respective license. You can see those here:

For vc/converter enterprise, you have to have a vc license. The vc foundation license allows up to 3 ESX hosts to connect to your vc and a vc license. That would appear the minimum you would require to have all the base VI3 features.

-KjB

[azn2kew]

You have to determine and decide how important are your virtual machines downtime? Foundation license will not grant you DRS, VMotion and HA and that defeats the purpose of running ESX? If your manager think that hot migration, and instant hardware failure protection such as High Availability and smart dynamic "Distributed Resource Scheduler" for all your CPU/RAM in a cluster, then these features apparently important. If you just need basic ESX farm with standard management console, than Foundation should be fine saves money. In that case, I wouldn't mind using Xen Enterprise than its cheaper in that case since you don't need other features listed. I still think you should get HA and VMotion features but then the price is almost the same if you buy them seperate piece. It better of if you get whole Enterprise package.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant