NSX per socket and NSX for desktop licensing coexistance?

[BigDaddy1]

We are using NSX per socket licenses for our server infrastructure. We are now expanding NSX to our VDI environment and will use NSX for desktop licenses for the VDI infra.  Will we be able to set the VDI clusters up using the same primary that we use to manage our existing infrastructure or will we need to start another NSX installation for VDI alone because the licenses cannot be mixed?

Thanks and have a great day!

[hansroeder]

As far as I'm aware it's still a bit difficult to combine both license types (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). But it is possible: just use the VM (desktop) based licenses if you cannot combine them with the socket based licenses. I've opened a Service Request about this with VMware a couple of years ago and this was their advice at the time.

My advice, however, is to definitely create a new/different environment for VDI. It will cost you an additional vCenter Server appliance and NSX Manager (and NSX Controllers if you want to do network virtualization), but I've always found it to be troublesome to host both server infrastructure and VDI in the same vCenter (especially when you want to upgrade vCenter, NSX, etc., which you may or may not want to do for these two separate environments at the same time).

My other advice would be to definitely look into NSX-T (2.4.1). Even if you do use the same vCenter Server but with different clusters for server infrastructure and VDI, you can still use both versions of NSX (just not in the same cluster).

[BigDaddy1]

Thanks for your reply.  We do have separate vcenters for server and desktop.  I have a ticket open and will let you know what they say.  Our InfoSec folks would like to have a single deployment for ease of managing a single ruleset, but I'm not married to the idea.  I will look into NSX-T as well.

Thanks!