Mastering VMware vSphere 6. Marshall Nick

only, but keep in mind that vSphere with Operations Management would be licensed and packaged in much the same way.

      You’ve already seen how VMware packages and licenses VMware vCenter Server, but here’s a quick review:

      • VMware vCenter Server for Essentials, which is bundled with the vSphere Essentials kits (more on the kits in just a moment).

      • VMware vCenter Server Standard, which includes all functionality and does not have a preset limit on the number of vSphere hosts it can manage (although normal sizing limits do apply). vRealize Orchestrator is included only in the Standard edition of vCenter Server.

      In addition to the two editions of vCenter Server, VMware offers three editions of VMware vSphere:

      • vSphere Standard Edition

      • vSphere Enterprise Edition

      • vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition

      No More vRAM and No vCPU Limits

      If you’ve been around the VMware vSphere world for a while, you might recall that VMware introduced the idea of vRAM – the amount of RAM configured for a VM – as a licensing constraint with the release of vSphere 5.0. As of vSphere 5.1, and continuing into vSphere 6.0, VMware no longer uses vRAM entitlements as a licensing mechanism. VMware has removed any licensing limits on the number of vCPUs that can be assigned to a VM.

      These three editions are differentiated primarily by the features each edition supports, although there are some capacity limitations with the different editions. Notably missing from the licensing for vSphere 6.0 are limits on vRAM (see the sidebar “No More vRAM and No vCPU Limits”).

Table 1.3 summarizes the features that are supported for each edition of VMware vSphere 6.0.

Table 1.3 Overview of VMware vSphere product editions

      Source: “VMware vSphere 6.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging” white paper published by VMware, available at www.vmware.com.

      It’s important to note that all editions of VMware vSphere 6.0 include support for thin provisioning, vSphere Update Manager, and the vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection. I did not include them in Table 1.3 because these features are supported in all editions. Because prices change and vary depending on partner, region, and other factors, I have not included any pricing information here. Also, I did not include VSAN in Table 1.3 because it is licensed separately from vSphere.

      For all editions of vSphere, VMware requires at least one year of Support and Subscription (SnS). The only exception is the Essential Kits, as I’ll explain in a moment.

      In addition to the different editions described previously, VMware offers some bundles, referred to as kits.

      Essentials Kits are all-in-one solutions for small environments, supporting up to three vSphere hosts with two CPUs each. To support three hosts with two CPUs each, the Essentials Kits come with six licenses. All these limits are product-enforced. Three Essentials Kits are available:

      • VMware vSphere Essentials

      • VMware vSphere Essentials Plus

      You can’t buy these kits on a per-CPU basis; they are bundled solutions for three servers. vSphere Essentials includes one year of subscription; support is optional and available on a per-incident basis. Like other editions, vSphere Essentials Plus requires at least one year of SnS; this must be purchased separately and is not included in the bundle.

      The Retail and Branch Offices (RBO) Kits are differentiated from the “normal” Essentials and Essentials Plus Kits only by the licensing guidelines. These kits are licensed per pack of 25 virtual machines. Central management of all the sites via vCenter Server Standard is possible, though vCenter Server Standard must be purchased separately. vCenter Server Essentials is included.

      Now that you have an idea of how VMware licenses vSphere, I’ll review why an organization might choose to use vSphere and what benefits that organization could see as a result.

      Why Choose vSphere?

      Much has been said and written about the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for virtualization projects involving VMware virtualization solutions. Rather than rehashing that material here, I’ll instead focus, briefly, on why an organization should choose VMware vSphere as their virtualization platform.

      Online TCO Calculator

      VMware offers a web-based TCO calculator that helps you calculate the TCO and ROI for a virtualization project using VMware virtualization solutions. This calculator is available online at www.vmware.com/go/calculator.

      You’ve already read about the various features that VMware vSphere offers. To help you understand how these features can benefit your organization, I’ll apply them to the fictional XYZ Corporation. I’ll walk you through several scenarios and show how vSphere helps in these scenarios:

      Scenario 1 XYZ Corporation’s IT team has been asked by senior management to rapidly provision six new servers to support a new business initiative. In the past, this meant ordering hardware, waiting on the hardware to arrive, racking and cabling the equipment once it arrived, installing the operating system and patching it with the latest updates, and then installing the application. The time frame for all these steps ranged anywhere from a few days to a few months and was typically a couple of weeks. Now, with VMware vSphere in place, the IT team can use vCenter Server’s templates functionality to build a VM, install the operating system, and apply the latest updates, and then rapidly clone – or copy – this VM to create additional VMs. Now their provisioning time is down to hours, likely even minutes. Chapter 10 discusses this functionality in detail.

      Scenario 2 Empowered by the IT team’s ability to quickly respond to the needs of this new business initiative, XYZ Corporation is moving ahead with deploying updated versions of a line-of-business application. However, the business leaders are a bit concerned about upgrading the current version. Using the snapshot functionality present in ESXi and vCenter Server, the IT team can take a “point-in-time picture” of the VM so that if something goes wrong during the upgrade, it’s a simple rollback to the snapshot for recovery. Chapter 9, “Creating and Managing Virtual Machines,” discusses snapshots.

      Scenario 3 XYZ Corporation is impressed with the IT team and vSphere’s functionality and is now interested in expanding its use of virtualization. To do so, however, a hardware upgrade is needed on the servers currently running ESXi. The business is worried about the downtime that will be necessary to perform the hardware upgrades. The IT team uses vMotion to move VMs off one host at a time, upgrading each host in turn without incurring any downtime to the company’s end users. Chapter 12 discusses vMotion in more depth.

      Scenario 4 After the great success it has had virtualizing its infrastructure with vSphere, XYZ Corporation now finds itself in need of a new, larger shared storage array. vSphere’s support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS gives XYZ room to choose the most cost-effective storage solution available, and the IT team uses Storage vMotion to migrate the VMs without any downtime. Chapter 12 discusses Storage vMotion.

      These scenarios begin to provide some idea of the benefits that organizations see when virtualizing with an enterprise-class virtualization solution like VMware vSphere.

      What Do I Virtualize with VMware vSphere?

      Virtualization, by its very nature, means that you are going to take multiple operating systems – such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Novell NetWare – and run them on a single physical server. While VMware vSphere offers broad support for virtualizing a wide range of operating systems, it would be almost impossible for us to discuss how virtualization impacts all the