Hi everybody,
I just wanted a clarification on a licensing issue for a potential customer.
We've always used & bought ESX and paid ESXi versions. And Veeam Backup has no issues with them.
This potential customer claims that a free ESXi host can work as a replication target for their (paid) ESXi 4.1 production host. This is wrong, I think. I need a licensed ESXi host even for the target, right?
I think this potential customer will never get it right
Yep, search ftw thanks Wes for taking care of this question. That is right, free ESXi aka unlicensed ESXi aka vSphere Hypervisor is a no-go as either source, or target host. ESXi has to be licensed with at least VMware Essentials license, otherwise VMware blocks most APIs - specifically to prevent 3rd party apps from managing it.
I think the customer might be talking about the fact that you could potentially use production VMware licenses to deploy your DR site. Since you are not running any active workload on those hosts unless your production site is down, there should not be license infringement here. And while I heard about something like this before, it would certainly be best for a customer to confirm this with their VMware sales rep.
thanks Wes for taking care of this question. That is right, free ESXi aka unlicensed ESXi aka vSphere Hypervisor is a no-go as either source, or target host. ESXi has to be licensed with at least VMware Essentials license, otherwise VMware blocks most APIs - specifically to prevent 3rd party apps from managing it.