Licensing two esxi hosts without vcenter with vsphere essentials kit

[mlocatster]

Good morning,

I have two dell hosts, one buyed some years ago that is using esxi 6.7 free license, the other it's new and it has a vSphere Essentials kit OEM license for 6 cpu, it uses 6.7 edition too. The sum of both hosts cpu count is under 6. As for now using a vCenter does not give us many advantages I would prefer to license these hosts separately.

My questions are:

- Is it possible to license two esxi hosts with the same license key without a vCenter? How cpu is counted in that case?

- Can I create a vCenter later if needed?

- How is counting the OEM buy in that case? Can I license later the last allowed host of another brand?

Thank you

[Alex_Romeo]

Hi,

- Is it possible to license two esxi hosts with the same license key without a vCenter? How cpu is counted in that case?

Answer:

No, you can use one license for 3 servers with a maximum of 2 processors each

- Posso creare un vCenter in un secondo momento, se necessario?

Answer:

Yes!

- How is the OEM purchase counting in that case? Can I later authorize the last authorized host of another brand?

Answer:

OEM Licensing Help

ARomeo

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

Aehh.... shouldnt you have answer with "Yes"?

Fore sure you can insert manually your ESXi Essentials license multiple times. Up to 3 times/ different Hosts.

About vCenter. If you have the ressources... deploy it. Monitoring/Alarming and Statistics are important in small environments.

Regards,
Joerg

[mlocatster]

Hello Joerd,

mmm I think you are right sorry, i misread that answer after I found what it seems a solution for me reading again the agreement from vmware.

At the end if you use vCenter what vCenter seems to do it's to copy the license to the host so licensing without vCenter seems also be good. This is what I did on my two hosts and it worked.

Don't know if I'm right but probably if vsphere essentials is used, an user has only to pay attention that, if vCenter is deployed later, only hosts with the same vSphere Essentials license key should be inserted (from the license agreement). Your advice about vCenter is completely right, unfortunately not much memory on those hosts currently.

Abount my OEM question I didn't found too much..most likely the key will work on other server brands too as it is a key generated from vmware. Probably, as I didn't found a specific OEM license agreement, only the vmware's one is applied. Maybe the difference could be related to support requests...

Thank you

Matteo

[IRIX201110141]

Hi Matteo,

your are totally right.  Yes its legally allowed how you use your licenses.  Interesting question if its technically possible to add 2 or 3 different ESXi Ess licensed Host into the vCenter Essentials. But of course it doesnt make any sense and there is no kind of benefit. Fore sure the max. 3 Host limited stays in place.

Iam a Dell and VMware Partner but we tried to avoid buying OEM.  You have to be sure that you get the End of Subscription notification so that you can renew the Subscription when the time comes. (its around 60,- per Year). Otherwise mark the date within your Outlook

Regards,
Joerg