Vmware replication with single essentials plus license on single site

[JD1000]

I have a customer who wants an Essentials Plus license being divided up between a single host and a two node cluster on the same geographic site. The single host may move in the future to an offsite location, at which point it will be licensed accordingly with another Essentials Plus license.

This is likely to be built on 5.5 U1.

Right now I need to be clear on how the licensing for the vCenter will work. I understand that you need the vCenter web client and therefore the vCenter server to recover replica machines. The live vCenter server will be virtualised on the two node cluster along with several other machines. I cannot see a way to bring the replicated vCenter server back without the web client, and the configuration of the replication leans towards two vCenters anyway. Therefore I think I need two vCenter servers, one on the cluster and one on the standalone host. Is it permissible to run two 'live' vCenter servers on single geographic site with an Essentials Plus license? I cannot see any other way to do this other than place vCenter outside of the environment(s), which isn't really an option for various reasons.

[bayupw]

Hi

You will need additional vCenter license which means require additional Essential Kit.

Copied from vSphere Licensing Doc http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

...a maximum of three hosts (up to 2 CPUs each) per site and centrally manage multiple sites through one instance of vCenter Server Standard.

So you can have 1 vCenter+2 hosts in site 1 and 1 host in site 2.

You can use vSphere Replication with a Single vCenter Server from site 1 to site 2 as documented in vSphere Documentation here: VMware vSphere 5.1 - Replicating a Virtual Machine in a Single vCenter Server Instance

But yes you will need a vCenter Server+Web Client to Recover the VMs.

You can also protect the vCenter Server with vSphere Replication and Recover the vCenter Server with unsupported way.

See below 2 posts on the details how to Recover a vCenter Server using unsupported way:

Can I protect my vCenter Server with vSphere Replication?

VMware Front Experience: Automating VM recovery with stand-alone vSphere Replication