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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING VMWARE VSPHERE 5

each, the Essentials Kits come with 6 licenses and a total pooled vRAM entitlement of 192 GB.

All these limits are product-enforced. There are three Essentials Kits available:

u VMware vSphere Essentials

u VMware vSphere Essentials Plus

u VMware vSphere Essentials for Retail and Branch Ofﬁ ces

You can’t buy these kits on a per-CPU basis; these 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 Ofﬁ ces (RBO) kits are differentiated from the “normal” Essentials and

Essentials Plus kits only by the licensing guidelines. These kits are licensed per site (10 sites mini-

mum, with a maximum of three hosts per site), and customers can add additional sites as required.

VMware also has Acceleration Kits, which combine the different components of the vSphere

product suite together. There are three Acceleration Kits:

u Standard Acceleration Kit: This kit includes one license of vCenter Server Standard plus

licenses for vSphere Standard Edition.

u Enterprise Acceleration Kit: The Enterprise Acceleration Kit includes one license of vCen-

ter Server Standard and licenses for vSphere Enterprise Edition.

u Enteprise Plus Acceleration Kit: This kit includes both licenses for vSphere Enterprise Plus

Edition and a single license for vCenter Server Standard.

While the Essentials Kits are bundled and treated as a single unit, the Acceleration Kits

merely offer customers an easier way to purchase the necessary licenses in one step.

Now that you have an idea of how VMware licenses vSphere, I’ll review why an organization

might choose to use vSphere and what beneﬁ ts 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 invest-

ment (ROI) for virtualization projects involving VMware virtualization solutions. Rather than

rehashing that material here, I’ll instead focus, brieﬂ y, 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 vir-

tualization 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 beneﬁ t your organization, I’ll apply them to the ﬁ ctional

XYZ Corporation. I’ll walk through several different scenarios and look at how vSphere helps in

these scenarios:

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