vCenter and vSphere editions (5.5)

vCenter editions. Just three.

  • Essentials
  • Foundation
  • Standard

Standard is what you usually want. No limits or restrictions.

Essentials is only available when purchased as part of vSphere Essentials or vSphere Essentials Plus kits. Not sold separately. These kits are targeted for SMBs. Limited to 3 hosts of 2 CPUs each. Self-contained – cannot be used with other editions.

Foundation is also for 3 hosts only.

All editions of vCenter include the Management service, SSO, Inventory service, Orchestrator, Web client – everything. There’s no difference in the components included in each edition.

vSphere is the suite. There are three plus two edition of vSphere suite.

Two editions are the kits:

  • Essentials
  • Essentials Plus

Three editions are bundled with vCenter Operations Manager:

  • Standard
  • Enterprise
  • Enterprise Plus

The Essentials & Essentials Plus editions only work with vCenter Essentials. The Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus work with vCenter Foundation or Standard.

Essentials is pretty basic. Remember it is for 3 hosts of 2 CPUs each. Standalone. In addition you don’t get features like vMotion either. All you get is (1) Thin Provisioning, (2) Update Manager, and (3) vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). Note the latter is only APIs. It is not VMware solution vSphere Data Protection (VDP). Also, no VSAN.

Essentials Plus is a bit more than basic. Once again, only for 3 hosts of 2 CPUs each. Standalone. However, in addition to the three features above you also get (4) vSphere Data Protection, (5) High Availability (HA), (6) vMotion, and (7) vSphere Replication. So you get some useful features. In fact, if I had just 3 hosts and I am unlikely to expand further this is the option I would go for – for me vMotion is very useful and so is HA. Sadly, no Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS). But you do get VSAN.

Moving on to the big boys …

Standard gives you all the above plus useful features like (8) Storage vMotion, (9) Fault Tolerance, and some more (Hot Add & vShield Endpoint). Still no DRS.

Enterprise gives you all the above plus (10) Storage APIs for Array Integration (nice! but useful only in an Enterprise context where you are likely to have a SAN array and need something like this), (11) DRS, (12) DPM, and (13) Storage APIs for Multi-pathing. As expected, features that are more useful when you have a lot of hosts and are in an Enterprise-y setup. Except DRS :) which would have been nice to have in Standard/ Essentials Plus too.

Finally, Enterprise Plus. All the above plus (13) Distributed Switches, (14) Host Profiles, (15) Auto Deploy, (16) Storage DRS – four of my favorite features – and a bunch of others like App HA, Storage IO Control, Network IO Control, etc.