Power CLI commands availability with VMWare Essentials license

[simonigletft]

Greetings,

We have a couple of ESXi servers running our tests and we are looking at consolidating our setup. The Essentials licenses looks good with our budget but it is unclear what added value vCenter brings in a management perspective. For what I gathered, Power CLI provides VM Management features liking cloning or moving a vm.

As the Essentials license, not the Plus one;the very basic, does not have VMMotion, I was wondering if all the PowerCLI commands were available with that licence.

Said otherwise, will the command below work with an Essentials license ?

$vm2 = New-VM -Name VM2 -VM VM1 -Datastore $datastore -VMHost $host

Creates a new virtual machine named VM2 by cloning the VM1 virtual machine on the specified datastore and host which could be difference from the source copy.

Any insight to using Power CLI with the Essentials package would be greatly appreciated !

Thanks

Simon Glet

[ssumichrast]

PowerCLI doesn't care about license version.  However if you attempt to issue a command that you are not licensed for, vCenter will reject the command and PowerCLI will throw an error. 

I believe essentials allows you to clone VMs, so as long as cloning in the license that command will work.

[simonigletft]

Hi Steven,

Yes, I see that there no backdoor management option with PowerCLI and a Essentials license 😉 For our needs, it seems that WMVware licenses are either too limited or way overkill. Never mind, we will be looking at third party options or test drive other virtualization solutions.

Thanks !

Simon Glet