ESXi

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  • 1.  Managing vSphere licenses with large environments

    Posted Apr 26, 2017 01:38 PM

    Hi,

    We have an environment with 30 vCenter instances and 2300 hosts. The person managing the licensing part has left the company and now i am left with some questions regarding licenses moving forward. All vCenters are not linked, and the number of hosts per vCenter varies with each instance.

    We have a plan to upgrade to vSphere 6.0 and i'm not sure how to generate license keys so that they are easiest to manage. Could you help answering these questions?

    #1 - If I generate a single license key, valid for 30 vCenter instances, and I assign to each vCenter individually, am I breaching the EULA in any way?

    We will never assign for more than what we are entitled to, but does it constitute a breach?

    #2 - If #1 is not possible, that means, given I have no linked more configuration, that we need 1 license per instance?

    #3 - Same questions for ESXi hosts. Can we just have 1 license key for all hosts, and we enter it in all vCenters, and we are responsible for making sure we never go over the assigned limit overall? Or we need only licenses never used in any other vcenter instance?



  • 2.  RE: Managing vSphere licenses with large environments

    Posted Apr 27, 2017 12:42 PM

    Hi,

    Last time i checked you combine and then can "break up" any licenses you have within the my vmware portal (if you have the rights to do so for those licenses).  So you could have 30 x single vcenter license and a 30 licenses for x number of hosts (depending on how many hosts per vcenter).

    The best approach would be to talk to your VMware TAM on this.

    Thanks

    Chris



  • 3.  RE: Managing vSphere licenses with large environments

    Posted Apr 28, 2017 12:53 PM

    Hi,

    Thanks for the response, i just also heard from vmware on this topic. In a nutshell this is what they said.

    "

    Please be informed that the single license key that you obtain upon combining, can be used on all ESXi hosts as well as for vCenter server. As long as the assigned quantity of the license key does not increases the total capacity of the license key, you will be under license compliance.

    "

    As I understand it we are free to have a single license key for vcenters , associated with as many vcenters as the license allows us.

    The same would apply to ESXi licenses, so we can associate the ESXi license with whatever hosts we like (via vcenter or other means) as long as the CPU count is below the number of CPUs it was issued for