Trying to decide what, if anything, to actually purchase from VMware. The free license of the ESXi product is . . . sufficient. I'd really like central management and/or backup and/or read/write capabilities with rcli (without hacking the installation -- I think I said that correctly).
My issue is this. There's a REALLY big jump in $$$ from the essentials line of products to the Advanced or better line (I think the Standard line is pointless). I currently have 5 VMware servers (2 running Server 2.0 on Linux on newish server hardware, about 4 VM's each, 2 ESXi 4 servers running on old workstations that each house a single VM (because of higher disk IO) and one ESXi 3.5 server running on 32 bit hardware with 1 VM).
Anyway -- with a mixture of mission critical VM's in production and non-critical-little VM's that don't need to live on a SAN and eat up SAN bandwidth, I'm not sure I want to limit myself to 3 physical machines. It would probably be enough for the next 5-10 years, but it would affect my SAN strategies and I would have to buy at least 1 or 2 new expensive servers.
So I thought that perhaps just getting the vCenter Server for the centralized management might work. I can still have 2 or 3 nicer newer servers running ESXi 4 on the SAN with mission critical servers, while continuing to have 2-3 older machines with local drives running individual VM's (I like keeping them virtual for Disaster Recovery puposes).
I just can't find any information on whether it would work, and if it would provide any benefits etc.
