VMware Infrastructure Licensing Questions

[fox1977]

Hi there,

Just wondering if anyone can shed any light on the rather confusing licensing setup of the VMware range of products.

I am planning on running about 3 esxi servers and migrating about 5 servers to the boxes. I was thinking that i could initially run them on individual ESXi boxes to begin with and then once we have the servers migrated over we could look at the VMware Infrastructure package to manage the servers. I think we are looking the middle or top infrastructure package as we really need the high availablity and distributed resource planning features they offer.

The question is how does the licencing work? If we are planning on running 4-5 esxi boxes and the associated infrastructure tools to manage them together do we just need one VI licence and connect this upto the esxi boxes. I think the top package comes out at £5000. Im hoping we only need the one otherwise we may have to shelve the project!! Without going to speak to software suppliers I would like to get an idea of what the costs might be.

Thanks in advance

[Theblacksheep]

Just wondering if anyone can shed any light on the rather confusing licensing setup of the VMware range of products.

I am planning on running about 3 esxi servers and migrating about 5 servers to the boxes. I was thinking that i could initially run them on individual ESXi boxes to begin with and then once we have the servers migrated over we could look at the VMware Infrastructure package to manage the servers. I think we are looking the middle or top infrastructure package as we really need the high availablity and distributed resource planning features they offer.

The question is how does the licencing work? If we are planning on running 4-5 esxi boxes and the associated infrastructure tools to manage them together do we just need one VI licence and connect this upto the esxi boxes. I think the top package comes out at £5000. Im hoping we only need the one otherwise we may have to shelve the project!!

One Vi3 licence per box... standard edition (look up the editions on the vmware site) is nearly 1k per box with educational discount and standard support.

You also might want to manage them from a central area, so you'd need 'VMware VCenter' to manage all the Vi3 boxes. This is about 2k. If you have 3 or less ESXi servers, you can get the Vcenter foundation kit that is quite a bit cheaper.

[ezzauk]

The VMware Infrastructure 3 comes in 4 versions and is per cpu, so if you have 3 dual core cpu's you would need 6 VMware Infrastructure 3 licences, and depending on what version of VMware Infrastructure 3 you bought you might need to buy optional licences for HA etc.

Heres some links that might help.
VMware Multi-Core Pricing and Licensing Policy - VMware

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi_pricing3.pdf

hope this helps

[DMcCoy]

The VMware Infrastructure 3 comes in 4 versions and is per cpu, so if you have 3 dual core cpu's you would need 6 VMware Infrastructure 3 licences, and depending on what version of VMware Infrastructure 3 you bought you might need to buy optional licences for HA etc.

Heres some links that might help.
VMware Multi-Core Pricing and Licensing Policy - VMware

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vi_pricing3.pdf

hope this helps

No, it's sold in multiples of 2 CPU Sockets

"Capacity pricing per two processors. VMware Infrastructure
3 is licensed based on the number of processors on the
physical host and is sold in increments of two processors.
Customers can purchase and deploy or re-deploy any
mix of servers, as required. Each processor may contain
multiple cores. VMware allows customers to deploy VMware
Infrastructure 3 on physical processors with up to six cores at
no additional charge. Additional information may be found at
http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html"

[Theblacksheep]

No, it's sold in multiples of 2 CPU Sockets

Cheers, yeah sorry, ours are all 2 socket MBs so it just worked out that way...