New vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Suite licensing

After VMware announced their new vCloud Suite 5.1 today, a lot of questions came up on how these new products would be licensed. Especially since VMware got rid of the vRAM licenses and it was announced there would no longer be a limit on cores per CPU. In this post I’ll try to give a little insight in how the products and license compare to each other.

The first version is VMware vSphere Standard edition which only limit is that you can use VMs with max 8 vCPUs. The Standard edition has Data Protection (VDP) included and offers features like vMotion, HA, Replication, Fault Tolerance and Storage vMotion. This is not the complete feature set, but to me the most important features.

The VMware vSphere Enterprise edition can run VMs of max 32 vCPUs and adds features like the Storage API for Array Intergration, Storage API for Multi Pathing and DRS / DPM.

The VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition can run VMs with a max of 64 vCPUs and adds Storage and Network IO Control, the dvSwitch, Host Profiles, Auto Deploy and Storage DRS with Profile driven storage.

Suggested retail pricing:

vSphere Standard $ 995
vSphere Enterprise $ 2875
vSphere Enterprise Plus $3495

VMware vCloud Suite

The vCloud Suite Editions come in three flavors aswell. First it is important to understand that all vCloud Editions are based on vSphere Enterprise Plus. The first vCloud Suite edition is the VMware vCloud Suite Standard edition. This edition includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCloud Connector and VMware vCloud Networking and Security.

VMware vCloud Suite Advanced edition adds the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Suite Advanced to the suite. With VMware vCenter Operations Manager you are able to quickly identify problems in your virtual environment.

And to top it all of, there is the VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise edition which adds two extra components: VMware vFabric Application Director and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Enterprise. All three editions are licenced per physical CPU and have no cores, vCPU or memory constraints.

Suggested retail pricing:

vCloud Standard $ 4995
vCloud Advanced $ 7495
vCloud Enterprise $ 11495

vSphere Essentials

As always VMware also released a new Essentials and Essentials Plus kit. The Essentials kit offers centralized management through vCenter Server Essentials with a maximum of 3 ESXi hosts with 1 or 2 physical CPUs. In the Essentials kit only very basic features like Thin Provisioning, Update Manager and vStorage API’s for Data Protection are included. These vStorage API’s for Data Protection give you the ability to backup VMs through these API’s although there is no backup product included.

With the Essentials Plus edition, you do get a backup product named “Data Protection”. Other options included in the Essentials Plus edition are HA, vMotion, vShield Zones, vShield Endpoint, vSphere Replication and a great new componenten: the “vSphere Storage Appliance for Essentials Plus”.

Suggested retail pricing:
VMware vSphere Essentials kit (3 hosts with each max 2 CPUs) $ 495
VMware vSphere Essentials Plus kit (3 hosts with each max 2 CPUs) $ 4495