Last week I ran into another discussion about the hypervisor under a XenApp deployment it had to be free or very cheap. So the customer was thinking about loading Hyper-V below it. Ok can be a viable option but the admins hoped it would be VMware ESX because they know that hypervisor and it has never let them down in the past six years. So I got the question what is possible, can we use the Free vSphere Hypervisor? I than remembered from VMworld San Francisco 2013 the Free vSphere Hypervisor limitations have been lifted.
So now you can use the vSphere Hypervisor 5.5 with:
- Unlimited number of cores per physical CPU
- Unlimited number of physical CPUs per host
- Maximum eight vCPUs per virtual machine
- But most important the limitation of 32GB RAM per server/host has been removed from the free Hypervisor.
So now you can use it below a XenApp deployment or in a stack where you do not need DRS, HA and vMotion. If you do need a central management solution you can use the Essentials Kit and if you need DRS, HA, vMotion etc. you can use the vSphere 5.5 essentials kit it is for max. 3 servers with 2 physical CPUs per Server.
In Europe the Essentials Kit will cost 690 Euro for 3 years and the Essentials Plus Kit will cost 5.554 euro for 3 years. If you want to have support on your VMware vSphere Hypervisor you can now purchase Per Incident Support for it.