What is required to use vSphere?

[Elliott Balsley]

Ive been using ESXi hypervisor for a few years as a basic standalone hypervisor.  It works fine for that.  Now I'd like to start using some of the more "advanced" features and I'm very confused about all the different products and licenses.  I'd like to create an "image" in order to deploy new VMs quickly, similar to how you deploy an AMI on Amazon EC2.  Can someone please help explain what products I need to purchase and/or install to make this happen?

I currently have ESXi 7.0 U3 with "vSphere 7 Hypervisor" license.  Do I need to upgrade that to something different?

Do I need to buy a separate vSphere product?

I tried deploying vCenter Server as a VM on the existing hypervisor.  I fumbled through that install and when I tried to add the standalone host it failed with error: "License not available to perform the operation. The vSphere 7 Hypervisor license for "Host" 10.37.163.3 does not include "vCenter agent for VMware host". Upgrade the license."

[heldstma]

Sounds like you have free ESXi Hypervisor that has gone end of life.  That product was not manageable by vCenter Server.  If you are looking at tinkering around, I highly recommend something like VMUG Advantage.  https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership/

If you are looking at workloads for production purposes, your best bet would probably be to contact a vendor such as CDW and purchase VMware vSphere Standard (VVS) which will allow you to do everything you say on that host.  You will need to license all physical cores on every system you have.  It will come with vCenter Server Standard.

MSRP is somewhere around $75 per physical core per year.

I hope this helps.

Matt