VMWare licences

[Jawloms]

Could someone please help me with VMWare licensing?

 

I've tried calling VMWare and the first person I got I could hardly hear, so I called back and got cut off during the question of "Can I take a number in case we *click* beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep". I have also emailed them and got no response.

 

Basically, I always thought you have to buy it if you're seriously going to use it. I got a quote a number of months ago (we have five servers with two processors and one with one processor) for around £6,000. I have come to question it though as I logged in to my VMware the other day and underneath my download link for "VMware vSphere Hypervisor 6.0 Update 1" (which I have a license key for) it says;

 

Terms and Conditions

This license key can be deployed on an unlimited number of physical hosts, but is restricted to deployment on less than or equal to 100 Physical Servers.

 

If that's the case, does that mean I can just install it and use it but not on more than 100 servers at a time?

 

Thank you

 

Stuart

[Davit2005]

I thought vSphere was licensed to CPU count but admittedly I don't get too much involved with licensing, the head of Dept does that and I just let him know what we have??

[Jawloms]

That's what I thought too, but why do the terms and conditions imply otherwise?

[Steve21]

The basic version always has been free, they removed the RAM limit but the CPU is still capped at 2 I think

 

But it depends what you want from it, for example the free one doesn't (note - didn't last time I used it) let you use vCentre, or High Availability, or VMotion etc.

 

But if all you want is a virtual setup etc it's fine

 

Steve

[Steve21]

To clarify the above, again unless it's changed or I'm going mad.

 

vSphere is the client to connect and manage the ESXi which is free.

vCenter manages clusters of ESXi (Like VMM for HyperV) which is licensed per CPU etc

 

(Don't hold me to that )

 

Steve

[Jawloms]

When I asked for the quote I had five servers with two processors each, and one server with one processor. The quote I got was for;

 

11x Academic VMware vSphere 6 Standard for 1 processor @ £480 each

11x Academic Basic Support/Subscription VMware vSphere 6 Standard for 1 processor foTechnical Support @ £100 each

[Steve21]

That's the full version (or should I say one of them), so you get HA/VMotion/replication etc

 

What's the purpose of the virtual servers? Did you want to be able to fail servers between them etc? If so the free version isn't going to work. But seems overkill using it on 6 servers if you want all the features.

 

Do you want support etc or happy with forums?

 

Steve

[Jawloms]

Currently running Hyper-V without any failover etc setup, so moving to VMWare wouldn't lose me anything in that sense. Definitely happy with just forum support.

[PotNoodleTech]

I moved from VMware to Hyper-V for this exact reason - A. VMware couldn't give two hoots about you or you're questions, they finally just said to me "go see a reseller they can deal with you" And B. The licencing costs of VMware are considerably more than Hyper-V if you use Microsoft EES Licencing.

[DanielDi]

That's what I thought too. The basic version always has been free, they removed the RAM limit but the CPU is still capped at 2.

[twin--turbo]

vSphere/ESX is free, no ram limit , no CPU limit ( or at least nothing low )

 

You then have vCenter that brings them into a cluster . That costs.

 

You can have

Essentials ( Max 3 Servers with plain HA)

Essentials Plus ( Has more things like vmotion IIRC)

Standard ( more than 3 servers with most of the bells )

Enterprise ( More than 3 servres with some fairly useless addons)

 

TT

[kmount]

Link here to compare what each edition includes functionality wise - Compare vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management Editions | VMware United Kingdom

[Jawloms]

So after all of that, I have now found out that VMWare only supports hardware RAID controllers, and two of my Dell servers have the S110 which isn't a proper hardware RAID controller, so I would have no redundancy in my disks. Hyper-V it is then! Grrr....