Vsphere licensing

[NuFinis]

Excuse my ignorance but:

We have 1 license for VMWare Essentials that we've been learning with.  Now that we're ready to consider a full move from Hyper-V to VMware what do we need to do that we have 4 hosts?  Can we just buy another Essentials license, or should we buy Standard Edition, and how many hosts does it allow?  I've read some posts re # of CPU's, we have 2 CPU's in each of the 4 hosts

Any other suggestions or comments welcome

Thanks

[IRIX201110141]

If youre fine with having to independent island which you have to manage go for the 2nd. essentials bundle. Its cheap and gives you 3x2 CPU ESXi Hosts and a vCenter instance for up to 3 Essentials Hosts each. No you cant add a 4th. Host to the vCenter Essentials

For managing 4 Hosts

• vCenter Foundation
• 4 ESXI lics (Standard or Enterprise+) for four single socket Hosts or 8 LICs for dual socket systems

For managing 5 or more Hosts

• vCenter Standard
• Right number of ESXi lics (Standard or Enterprise+)

Keep in mind that vSphere Essentials is the one and only license which doesnt "need" buying Support and the Subscription is cheap as hell (65 bucks per year).

Stay below 32 Cores per Socket otherwise you need to double the licenses.

Regards,
Joerg