ESXi Licencing

[BrushWithTheBlu]

Hi

I have spent a few hours trying to get my head around the new VMWare Infrastructure 3 Licencing, and I am struggling to get a complete picture.

Here is what I have gleaned so far from the white paper on pricing, and elsewhere:

I can obtain as many copies of VMWare ESXi 3 as I want and install them on as many host servers as I want, because the licence is free.

I can replace the evaluation licence that installs with ESXi 3 and then expires (why expire a free licence???) with the serial number that gets emailed out when you register for the free copy of ESXi

I can install a copy of VMWare Infrastructure Client on my PC and use it to connect to any of my single host servers, one at a time. Again, this is free, and indeed without it, would render the concept of a free ESXi licence meaningless, as VMWare Infrastructure Client is the only meaningful way to connect to ESXi 3.

If I want to manage host servers from a central location, or take advantage of 'higher level' functionality, then I need to buy into the VMWare Infrastructure 3 'package', the basic offering of which is the Foundation level, which will cost me $995 per server, and in addition I MUST purchase Support and Subscription (SnS) which will be an additional $495 per server for the (basic) Gold level - in other words $1490 per server, with an annual recurring cost per server of $495. In addition, I must also purchase (as a minimum) a single licence for VirtualCentre Foundation, which is an additional one-off cost of $1495.

Can anyone either confirm or correct my assumptions? (and if you correct them, can you please point to a ref on the VMWare site that explains why my assumption is incorrect)

Thanks.

[weinstein5]

Your assumptions are correct - the reason VMware does bundle the non-expiring license with ESXi is because they want you to register the product and only then will you get the non- expiring license. In regards to SnS is so that you can stay current on the software particularly with majow release, VI-4, do out this year. Also most enterprise software companies do bundle SnS wth their products VMware also has bundled packages called acceleration kits you might look at - I would contact VMware sales or VAC in your area to help you with pricing.

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[Erik_Zandboer]

Hi,

Pretty much correct. I would buy support, although this is not neccesary - once you have a license, its yours forever - no annual replacement or anything like that. In a true production environment I would suggest to go for support though. A single ESX server is going to house maybe 20-30 production machines (or even more), so such a server should have support in my opinion.

If you have shared storage I would definitely go for enterprise licenses - thats where all the "fun" comes in - DRS and vmotion.

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[BrushWithTheBlu]

Hi

Thanks for that.

I'm reading on the VMWare site, that SnS is mandatory with any of the VMWare Infrastructure 3 packages, and the support seems to be charged on the same 2-processor basis as the Infrastructure 3 licences themselves, although I'm inferring that as I cannot find anywhere where that is stated as a simple statement.

However, my final query is this - we are moving our production centre and will be moving to virtualised servers for the first time. Some servers will be mission critical, some not, and at this point I cannot be sure exactly how many host servers we will need, but we have spare physical server capacity.

Therefore, I'm guessing that a sensible route would be to purchase a minimum number of Infrastructure 3 Foundation licences as I think we will need, and connect these into the central VirtualCentre Server, and leave the others virtualised but not connected into the VirtualCentre server, but rather managed directly and therefore at no license cost.

Then if we need more mission critical capacity, to upgrade the 'free' licensed servers to an Infrastructure 3 licence and put them into the central 'pool', and if we feel we need vMotion or HA then to upgrade that to Standard or Enterprise versions downstream.

Given the cost difference between a direct-connect VM host (free) and the basic Foundation licence + SnS ($1540) it seems to me it would be easy to overspend.

[Kallex]

Hi!

Actually for the Central management, there is quite recent, specifically ESXi crafted "ESXi Management Kit" for up to 3 hosts (attached the url if it happens to work).

It quotes around bit over 800€. It's the same vCenter I understand, only licensewise (might be technically as well) bound to max three hosts. If you outgrow this number and/or have other than ESXi:s among those three, you cannot control them. And also if I recall right, you cannot control the ESXi:s from other vCenter either without getting proper vCenter Agent license for them.

Then there is the vCenter Foundation Acceleration kit for full 3 ESX hosts with vCenter...

Br,

Kalle

[Erik_Zandboer]

Yep,

That is Foundation which maxes out at three hosts. You can also use ESX with these licenses btw...

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[Kallex]

Hi!

Yes for the Foundation. The ESXi Management fits only for ESXi though (for one third of the price of the Foundation).

Br,

Kalle

[Erik_Zandboer]

Ok.... That sounds interesting!!!

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