vCenter Server 6 Essentials Instances??

[bakerjw1]

Through our corporate licensing group, I was given an vCenter/vSphere essentials license. As described, we can only have 3 hosts in our data center.

Something that has caught my eye on the licensing screen is the number of instances under each license. So far our ESXi hosts have only been dual core servers so it is understandable when it says that the CPU usage is 6. But what does it mean for the vCenter Server 6 Essentials license capacity? i.e. usage is 1 instance but capacity is 15...

We are looking to grow our datacenter and are just trying to get a better understanding of the aspects of VMWare licensing.

[daphnissov]

You appear to have an Essentials license which grants you 90 CPUs worth of sockets, which is something I've never seen. You also have a 15-seat entitlement to that vCenter Essentials license. So either someone at your organization bought a whole bunch of Essentials kits that may be used for ROBO purposes, or that someone really screwed up the purchase order. Each Essentials Kit can only be used to manage up to 3 hosts under one vCenter. That would suggest 30 kits, but with only 15 vCenter entitlements your limitation will be 15 separate Essentials clusters. Are you certain this is what you're planning to do here?