Managing two vCenters

[TheTechie]

Hi,

I have three ESXi v4 hosts (2 CPU each) using vCenter Essential license on my network and am looking to get a fourth & maybe fifth host. Because Essentials limits us to 3 hosts I either have to upgrade to standard licensing or purchase a second set of Essential licenses. Since I’d have to purchase all new licenses for standard for my existing 3 hosts it is more economical to buy a second Essential license (3 more hosts).

However having two Essential licenses means that I have to setup a second vCenter. My question is how hard is this going to make my environment to manage? Will I be able to deploy templates, migrate or clone VMs from one vCenter to another? Are there any third party tools to make this easier?

I’m curious if anyone else has two essential licenses and how you went about managing your the severs.

Thanks.

[Troy_Clavell]

I'm not a licensing specialist, but I can answer your question regarding management of more than 1 vCenter instance. Upgrading to standard would give you more flexibility as to a single vCenter instance, but having two is not that bad. I manage 10 vCenter instances and it can become a little bit of a headache from time to time.

As for templates, you can use converter to copy your templates from one instance to another. Also, if willing, having two vCenter instances allows you to deploy a VM in the first instance and install vCenter on it, allowing for some redundancy.

Hope this helps a bit.

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

Essential is cheaper but is for SMB environment.

You can spend more for a Standard edition of vCenter, but you can manage all ESX for a central point.

Also if you plan to use Orchestrator could be a reasonable choice.

Otherwise you have to manage different vCenter (and the Foundation lack of linked mode).

In this case consider at a central monitoring (for example with Veem Monitor).

Andre

[weinstein5]

As troyindicated you could manage to vCenters but I agree that you will have more flexibility with your environment if your were just to upgrade your vcenter essentials licens to a regulr license and buy two more ESX/ESXi licenses -

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[TheTechie]

Thanks for the quick replies and I'll have to weight the cost vs the flexibility we'd get but I expect we'll end up using two vCenters.

To upgrade to standard we'd have to upgrade our current 3 hosts with 2 CPU at about $1,000 each (6CPU x 1k = $6K) plus buy two more licence for fourth host with 2 CPU ($2k). I also understand that we'd need to buy vCenter seperately which is another $5k.

So to add a fourth host and keep a single vCenter we're looking at $13,000 vs. buy another essentials license at about $1,000 for 3 new hosts with 2 CPU.and use two vCenters.

I don't think I can justify spending an extra $12,000 for this.

Thanks again.

[bnelson]

Call a VMware salesman directly, point this out, and ask for the vCenter upgrade and host licensing for $1000. VMware licensing is always changing and a good salesman will do what is best for the customer.

If you can't get a good salesman, reply gack to the discussion. I am sure someone here can find a good salesman.

[RMichael]

There is a reason it costs more.  Being able to leverage all of your servers from a central location if the servers are at all important is a very valuable thing. Being able to share redundancy is a big deal as well.  If you have 2 clusters and you have appropriate levels of redundancy in them it's going to eat your costs savings in hardware.  That's 2 spare servers worth of cpu and memory if you have 2 clusters.  It's possible finances don't support having the failover that's really needed in which case it's not a worthy topic anyway.  I wouldnt run VMWare without the redundancy needed to support hardware failure so having multiple VCs just doesn't make sense to me in networks as small as yours and mine. I have 7 Hosts in my environment.