vCenter Server 8 Essentials licence - separate host for vCenter

[seth78]

Hello, I have a question about licensing and further installation. I have vSphere 8 Essentials KIT, which includes vCenter Server 8 Essentials. Now, I have installed vCenter as one of VM's on my 3 hosts. Everything is fine, but there is no chance to upgrade host with running vCenter Server VM - it must be shut down to perform upgrade of host, which cause upgrade impossible. I have to manually upgrade environment.

Therefore my question is: can I have vSphere on 3 physical hosts running my VMs, and additional one physical host running vCenter VM using vSphere Essentials KIT? In this case I will have 4 physical hosts, one of them tu use only for vCenter Server appliance.

Thank you very much in advance,

Przemysław Szymański

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Even if that was possible/allowed, the main question still remains. How would you update that additional host?
That's unfortunately one of the drawbacks about the Essentials license, which btw. is not available anymore.

In case you have shared storage, and want to avoid manual patching, one option could be to shut down vCenter Server, unregister it from it's current ESXi host, and register it on an already patched host.

André

[seth78]

Thank you very much, it will be much easier with shared storage, I thought about additional host with free hypervisor and updating it manually, but you have right, main problem still exists. I'll use NAS and NFS, unregistering and registering VM can be done with seconds.

Unfortunately, I read about Broadcom and new plans, Essentials was good budget licence, even with lack of vMotion, but I upgrading vCenter and vSphere host drive me crazy.

Thank you once more, best regards,

Przemysław