vCenter Licensing

[MattPurkis]

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

[a_nut_in]

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

[a_p_]

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

[MattPurkis]

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.

[a_p_]

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