Hi
Can someone help with me a vCenter licensing question.
We are about to P to V multiple infrastructures, and need to know if the vCenter licensing model purely works on the amount of processors you have across all your infrastructures.
for example:
Would i be allowed to use a single license that would cover 8 processors across 2 different air gaped infrastructures, installed twice. Or would i need to purchase 2x seperate vCenter licenses for 4 procs in each?
Thanks
Hey Matt,
Licensing at VMware is based on CPU sockets. So if you have a license of 8 sockets, you can either have 8 servers of 1 socket (physical processor - not cores) or 4 servers of 2 sockets each or one server with 6 sockets and one server with 2!
http://www.vmware.com/support/licensing/
Regards
a
As mentioned by a_nut_in, only the ESXi hosts are licensed by CPUs/sockets. vCenter Server itself is licensed per instance. So if you are going to manage all hosts from a single vCenter Server you'd need one license for vCenter Server plus the appropriate amount of CPU licenses for the hosts.
Hint: If you are new to VMware, you may initially purchase an Acceleration Kit which contains one license for vCenter Server as well as 6 CPU licenses.
André
Ah bugger thats going to be expensive.
Essentially we have 8x seperate infrastructures zones that need to be P to V, each consisting of 4 physical hosts with a single 4 core Xeon in each. They must be air gaped for security reasons, so we must have a vCenter in each which is going to be very expensive.
Thanks for the help.
Depending on your needs, you may want to take a look at the special prices Essentials/Essentials Plus Kits. Each of these two Kits contain a vCenter Server license as well as 6 CPU licenses. These Kits support a maximum of 3 ESXi hosts with up to 2 physical CPUs/sockets each.
André