VMware Licensing Guide

VMware vSphere 6 Essentials Kit for 3 hosts (Max 2 processors per host)

Covers up to 3 servers with 2 processors each.

  • As many ESXi sessions as your hardware supports

VMware vSphere 6 Essentials Plus Kit for 3 hosts (Max 2 processors per host)

Covers up to 3 servers with 2 processors each.

Up-Sale features over Essentials Kit:

  • vMotion - Live migration of a virtual machine from one physical server to another.
  • High availability - In the event of server failure, affected virtual machines are automatically restarted on other production servers with spare capacity.
  • Data Protection & Replication - Provides agentless, iamge-level virtual-machine backups to disk.
  • vShield Endpoint - Offloads virus scanning activities from each virtual machine to a secure virtual appliance that has a virus-scanning engine, as well as the stored antivirus signatures.

VMware vSphere 6 Standard for 1 processor

1 Socket only - no matter the cores.

  • Data Protection & Replication - Provides agentless, image-level virtual-machine backups to disk.
  • NSX - With NSX, network functions including switching, routing, and firewalling are embedded in the hypervisor and distributed across the environment.

VMware vSphere 6 Standard Acceleration Kit for 6 processors

6 CPUs no matter core count (up to 6 servers).

  • vMotion - Live migration of a virtual machine from one physical server to another.
  • High Availability - In the event of server failure, affected virtual machines are automatically restarted on other production servers with spare capacity.
  • Data Protection & Replication - Provides agentless, image-level virtual-machine backups to disk.
  • vShield Endpoint - Offloads virus scanning activities from each virtual machine to a secure virtual appliance that has a virus-scanning engine, as well as the stored antivirus signatures.

Acceleration Kit ONLY:

  • vSphere Monitoring - Observe performance data, set alerts and alarms, view host health, and view log files.
  • Capacity Optimization - Rapidly deploys a performance management, capacity optimization, and log management solution.
  • Operations Visibility - Proactive identification and remediation of emerging performance, capacity, and configuration issues.


Upgrading from previous versions