Essentials Bundle licensing and updated VMWare AK's

[ccoope@cmers.com]

We are adding a 4th host to our environment, and looking at either changing the VMWare licensing we have from the Essentials Plus bundle to the Standard Edition AK, or just getting a la carte licenses and running the other host as a standalone box (too much RAM for free ESXi). We need it for Dev/Test, not for Production, so it really isn't needed for Production VM's, which are all replicated offsite using Veeam, and is running fine on our original 3-host cluster. We have the Veeam Essentials Plus bundle to map to our old cluster, and don't need it to cover the new host anyways, but I'm trying to figure out if it would still be valid if we updated the VMWare license, but never allowed the Production VM's to go onto the 4th host, seeing howas the licenses are already bound to the original 3 hosts.

It would be nice for us to be able to add the 4th host with the Dev/Test environments to the cluster for HA and vMotion, but we don't need it for Veeam, and the licensing cost differential is high enough for us to consider other options...

[Gostev]

Yes, you will be totally fine with Veeam Essentials Plus if you don't attempt to backup any VMs from that 4th host with your Veeam install. And to backup those Dev/Test VMs, consider using VeeamZIP functionality of Veeam Backup Free Edition.

[ccoope@cmers.com]

The Dev/Test machines are backed up another way already. Veeam is only used for production VM replication. Thanks!