Evening all,
Hoping the community would help shed some light on my questions.
Currently, my orginization is running ESX 3.5 on 3 hosts. We purchased the Acceleration Kit that gave us a license to 3 machines (2 procs per box), HA, DRS, vMotion, all to be managed through vCenter server. On the backend we have a iSCSI SAN housing all the data. Its a thing of beauty and we love it.
Now, after talking, we are interested in adding a fourth host to the mix. Especially because of the economy we are in, I am trying to do this in the most economical budget (read: I have a budget its just not huge). Here are some things I have been turning over as options, just wanted to see if anyone had any input, experience, or words of warning on them (or better ideas).
Purchase another full copy of VMware ESX 3.5. From what I can tell, this is would run us about 7 grand with 1 year gold support to get the version (Enterprise) with HA, DRS, vMotion that we currently have. If I am reading that correctly, that option is out because of budget reasons right now.
Use ESXi free and migrate several machines from my standard ESX boxes to ESXi, realizing that they will not be managed through vCenter and have none of the HA, DRS, vMotion options available. The price is great. The options, not so much.
Use ESXi but pay the fee (have no idea where this is located at) so that we can manage ESXi through vCenter. This is what I am interested in, but unsure of the options we get (DRS, HA, etc), the cost (same as regular ESX license?), or any potential downfalls to doing this.
Lastly, I am making two assumptions.
Migrating several machines from ESX to ESXi is both possible and not the hardest thing in the world to do.
Their are no limitations on the guest OS running on ESXi (like max of 2 procs, 4 gigs of ram, etc).
Would love to hear any thoughts or ideas from everyone, please let me know if I can provide any information that would be of use.
Thanks and have a good one!
