Can I buy (4) of vSphere Essentials Kit and use them on 12 physical servers?

[sfresher]

All we need is baiscally a paid verion of ESXi with full VMware API support.  The Essential, which is good for 3 hosts, seems affortable to us.  Let's say I have 12 hosts, can I buy (4) of Essential and use them on all my hosts?

And what if I decide to use vCenter later?  Can just a buy vCenter Standard, and still keep the Essentials?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I haven't dealt with that specific situation myself, but I beleive you might want to get the Essentials (or Essential Plus) for Retail or Branch Offices license instead of 4 Essentials kits. See page 5 - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf.

[a_p_]

I'm not 100% sure, however afaik only the vSphere Acceleration Kits are limited to 1 kit per customer and location. Please double check with your reseller. Anyway, Essentials (Plus) Kits cannot be combined with other licenses, you need to use the included vCenter Server for Essentials instance to manage the 3 hosts in the kit.

from the EULA (http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/esx_esxi_eula.html):

VMware licenses VMware vSphere Essentials or VMware vSphere Essentials  Plus editions (collectively "Editions") to you solely for managing up to  three (3) server hosts and your use of these Editions is limited to  servers with up to two processors. For these Editions, the server hosts  must be managed by the VMware vCenter Server that is provided with these  Editions, and that same VMware vCenter Server cannot be used to manage  other server hosts not included with these Editions.

André

[MindTheGreg]

Minimum order for the Retail or Branch Offices license is 10 kits. Heard it on the communities roundtable podcast about the ROBO kit.

[DSTAVERT]

As Dave mentions I would look at the branch office versions of  Essentials / Plus which come with vCenter Essentials but can also be  managed by a central vCenter server standard at a later time.

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/remoteoffice/products.html

Correction

From the ROBO link

Customers  virtualizing a large number of branch offices will be eligible  for  discounts through the VMware Purchase Program (VPP). SnS is sold   separately, and a minimum of one year is required. There is a maximum of   three virtualized hosts per site, and a minimum initial order quantity   of 10 packages.