Available only with Enterprise Plus license Storage and Network IO Control (SIOC and NIOC) Imagine you have dozens of data stores but when deploying virtual machine you just need to select single cluster and Storage DRS will take care about the placement of the virtual machine as well as for rebalancing storage usage. Same functionality as standard DRS only this time it is all about rebalancing storage utilization. With VM encryption you can encrypt virtual machine on the hypervisor level and this is totally transparent for the operating system itself. Only available with Enterprise Plus license. Also, with Distributed vSwitch you get more functions that are not available within standard vSwitch like inbound connection shaping, port mirroring or resource allocation (NIOC) Virtual machine encryption You do not need to maintain dozens or even hundreds of standalone vSwitchies on every single host but instead you do that only once and centrally. If you have large environment in terms of hosts or your environment is quite dynamic this is the answer. With Distributed vSwitch you get one (or more) logical switches that are configured from one central point – vCenter Server. One of the killing features of Enterprise Plus license. Once DRS finds out some disbalance it invokes vMotion to migrate virtual machines do different hosts and maintain cluster balance.
DRS is used for rebalancing your cluster so the hosts are utilized evenly. What does that means is that you can for example evacuate virtual machines from host where one of the power supplies have failed.Īgain, feature of the Enterprise Plus license. Basically together with hardware vendors who provide monitoring agents of the hardware you can take those metric as an input for HA. This is nice feature of Enterprise Plus license. Standard edition support FT for virtual machines with maximum 2 vCPUs and Enterprise Plus edition support up to 4 vCPUs. With vSphere 6.5 VMware improved this feature quite a lot, they have changed the internal mechanism how the online replication of the VM state is done and now FT is supported up to 4 vCPUs (prior 6.5 it was only possible to use FT with 1 vCPU).įT basically mirrors every single operation within VM to the shadow VM so in case of downtime of the host shadow VM immediately takes over with no disturbance to the VM itself. From simple VM vMotion (the original one) they have added storage vMotion which is not presented in Standard version, which is great news all the way up to cross-vSwitch vMotion, cross-vCenter vMotion and long-distance vMotion.Ĭross-vSwitch vMotion is available in standard version (although you can work with distributed vSwitch which is not presented) but cross-vCenter and long-distance vMotion is available only with Enterprise Plus license. VMware is improving vMotion capabilities with every new release and support many types of vMotion at this time. So let’s start with standard product line – VMware vSphere Standard and Enterprise PlusĪs said, both products are licensed per physical socket and you need to purchase vCenter server as well.įirst let’s have a look at the original comparison from VMwareĪs you can see there are lot of features so let’s talk about key components that are available with Enterprise Plus license and are not included in Standard edition. For those VMware introduced vSphere Essentials Kits that are sold as a bundle that covers whole environment and VMware vSphere for ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) that again, covers whole physical infrastructure as a bundle but you are limited with number of virtual machines. There are minor deviation from this approach especially when talking about SME companies. Meaning that you need to have as many licenses as you have physical sockets within your server. In this post I will try explain some of the features in more depth so you can easily understand what business value such features brings to you and you can easily decided what version is right for you.įirst I have to say that majority of the products offered by VMware are Per-Socket licenses.
When I speak with customers they are bit confused what license they need and what features are included.
Today, I would like to go through basic VMware vSphere licensing of core component – VMware vSphere.