Connecting ESXi5 hosts with free licences to vCenter?

[tairatcliff]

I have a client that is currently running 2 hosts with ESXi5 hypervisor. They are have registered these hosts against the free licence and can freely use the hosts individually.

They are looking to upgrade their setup to include vCenter and I would like to get confirmation on the hypervisor licencing and connecting to a vCenter server.

If they buy a licenced vCenter server, will they also need to upgrade the hypervisor to the licenced edition? or will they be able to connect the free licenced hosts to a licenced version of vCenter and just have reduced capabilities?

[Josh26 · Accepted solution]

I can confirm that to connect to vCenter, you will need a licensed ESXi host. Any license will do, except the free one.

[tairatcliff]

Thanks for that.

Can you also confirm that it is possible under the evaluation licence of vCenter to connect hosts with the free licence? I'm just wondering if we can set it all up for them for the 60 days and see how much they use it before actually going out and buying a vCenter licence and 4x vSphere licences for the hosts.

[Josh26]

Hi,

It is possible to connect an evaluation of ESXi to any license, evaluation or otherwise, of vCenter.

However, free ESXi cannot connect to any license of vcenter.