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."