VI3 Licensing Question

[jg2593]

I have a question about how many liceneses to purchase for the following:

I am bulding two ESX server hosts (These are dual-processor servers for a total of 4 sockets). I plan to create 5 virtual servers in total. I am purchasing Virtualcenter because I want to use vmotion and will use the server base licensing model and have the virtualcenter and license server on the same physical windows server 2003 standard machine.

Can someone give me a breakdown of the licenses that I would need to purchase for both the VI3 Standard and VI3 Enterprise. I want to quote out both scenarios to see a cost comparison. Thanks in advance.

[steve_bourque]

You would need to purchase 2 licenses for ESX (each valid for 2 physical processors) plus a license for VirtualCenter.

There is also the Vmware Foundation Bundle, but I do not believe that this supports VMotion. ()

-Steve

[jg2593]

Thanks Steve. Buying VI3 enterprise offers less complexity with purchasing licenses because vmotion is included. Vmotion doesn't come with VI3 Standard so I would have to buy vmotion as an add-on if I purchased VI3 Standard.

So would you happen to know how many vmotion add-on licenses I would would have to get for vmotion if I plan to have 5 virtual servers hosted across two ESX server hosts?

Thanks for the link too!

[steve_bourque]

If you are going to use the features, it seems worth it to purchase Enterprise. With Enterprise you also get DRS (which requires VMotion in addition to buying the DRS add-on with standard edition). With that in mind, make sure that you hardware is on the HCL for those features, and that you have the resources to use them (particularly a SAN). As for the add-on licenses, it seems as those would be per ESX standard license, although it is unclear from the VMware store's description. I purchased Enterprise licenses, so I have not had to deal with the add-on licenses.

As for the actual VMs, you can use all of the features of VI on as many virtual machines as you can get on your hardware. If you have the hardware to support 100 VMS, the licensing is the same as if you can support 5 VMs (as long as you have the saem number of physical processors). However, if you are planning on running Windows on your VMs and using VMotion, Microsoft's licensing for the OS is a little sticky. You must buy a Windows license for each VM for EVERY piece of hardware (i.e., ESX Host) it might run on. So if you have 5 VMs running across 2 different hosts, and will be migrating them between hosts, you have to buy 10 Windows licenses. There are also timeframes and different rules for different version of Windows, so you may want to look into it more closely. If you are planning on running many VMs across a large cluster of hosts, it may pay to purchase Windows Datacenter, which allows for unlimited VMs. Like I said, it can get sticky.

Hope this helps.

-Steve

[jg2593]

Thanks for the info. Very helpful. I think I will go VI3 enterprise. I am implementing this in a small organization so I thought I would get VI3 standard with virtual center and vmotion add-on licenses.