VMware Cross vCenter Migration - Do all ESXi Hosts need Ent Plus or just migration hosts?

MJMSRI — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 13:24:16 GMT

Hi All

Query – Licencing for VMware Cross vCenter Migration.
Question -

Do all ESXi hosts in source vcenter and all ESXi hosts in destination vcenter require Enterprise plus licencing to hot migrate VMs?
Or can you just licence the hosts you want to cross vcenter migrate between, such as 1 host in source and 1 host in destination?

Reference –
- To vMotion powered-on virtual machines with the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion feature, you must have a vSphere Enterprise Plus license on both the source and destination vCenter Server instances
- To migrate powered-off virtual machines with the Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion feature, you must have a vSphere Standard license.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/8.0/vsphere-vcenter-esxi-management/GUID-DAD0C40A-7F66-44CF-B6E8-43A0153ABE81.html

Re: VMware Cross vCenter Migration - Do all ESXi Hosts need Ent Plus or just migration hosts?

GeoPerkins — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:28:45 GMT

Only the source and destination hosts need EnterprisePlus license. Not all hosts.

We had 6.5 Enterprise (nonPlus) clusters as source and 7.0 EnterprisePlus clusters as destination. Fortunately we had two extra 6.5 EnterprisePlus licenses, so we re-licensed two hosts in our 6.5 environment. Then to cross-site vMotion we had to first move within the source site to one of those two hosts.

This works well for a migration.

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VMware Cross vCenter Migration - Do all ESXi Hosts need Ent Plus or just migration hosts?

Re: VMware Cross vCenter Migration - Do all ESXi Hosts need Ent Plus or just migration hosts?