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amitpatel001
Contributor
Contributor

Vcenter Two Different Sites

Hi

We are looking at having two different vcenters so 1 at our main site and one at our DR site, unfortunately the subnets are diferent so we have gone down this route as it gives us the benefit of HA on 6.5 etc at each site.

Our current vcenter is on 6.0 and we only have 1.

How does licensing of ESX hosts work on the two vcenters?  Anyone else do the same thing?

Any help appreciated..

Many Thanks

6 Replies
daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

You will require licenses for hosts at both sites as well as either two vCenter licenses or a single license with two entitlements.

Mike_Gelhar
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vCenter 6.5 in HA mode does not require additional vCenter licenses for the HA nodes but this is not designed (or supported) to work across different sites. It's a great solution for local HA but it's not designed as a DR solution.

If you have two vCenters, you need two licenses. If you install the vCenters in Enhanced linked mode, all vSphere and vCenter licenses can be managed centrally via either vCenter. If you do not link the vCenters (each is in a separate SSO domain) you will need to have licenses for "site A" ESXi hosts on "site A" vCenter and "site B" ESXi hosts would have their licenses managed by "site B" vCenter. Hope this helps.

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amitpatel001
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Mike

Thanks for the info the requirement is to have two vcenters as they will be on different subnets and local to the environment. Thats why we like the HA as we are only looking at 15-20 hosts per location.

I dont think link mode is supported in a mode where two subnets are different?

I do have two licenses for vcenter but the main thing i am not sure how to do is licenses managed by site A and Site B.

I suspect i would have to speak to vmware re licenses site A and site B?

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Mike_Gelhar
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

You can do linked mode across subnets. You may need adjust firewall rules if the subnets have a firewall between them.

for license assignment, when you get licenses from the portal just add the license keys to the vCenter that will be managing those hosts. If you initially get one key for all hosts, you can split the allocation to meet your needs and then have one key for hosts in vCenter1 and another key for vCenter2.

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SureshKumarMuth
Commander
Commander

You can split the licenses by contacting vmware licensing support , so that you can use them on two sites separately.

Regards,
Suresh
https://vconnectit.wordpress.com/
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amitpatel001
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks really appreciate the help. I was thinking of linked mode but that has no HA for PSC and we dony use F5 etc for loadbalancer as this is what os required.

We use brocade which is not supported in the HA link mode config.

So 1 vcsa per site seems to be our only solution if i am not mistaken.

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