We have been using the vmware free esxi product for several years now, and are considering deploying a virtualized app-server environment to our datacenter for production use.
We don't know much about the licensing side, and thus my question is:
What licenses do I need to buy, and how much would it cost to get the following 2 features:
1) vmotion to allow running VM's to migrate between physical hosts
2) get rid of the 8-virtual core constraint on the VMs
We will be running on 2x Dell R610 servers, in adjacent racks.
The boxes have 24 hyperthreaded cores, so limiting the app server VM's to 8 cores is just not a good idea, we need to allow them to be larger. Also, because the HW is older gear, the idea of migrating the running VM's will allow us to achieve fault-tolerance, where the VM will stay online if only 1 of the physical machines is running.

I think this is what you are looking for maybe. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

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Hi:

These links might help:
https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/i...D17C9C93E.html

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Soft...e-vMotion.html

Glanced through this PDF. Is vSphere the same thing as ESXi? Would we be able to apply license to existing environment or do we have to create new environment and migrate?
Also, perhaps I missed it, but I didn't see the virtual core limitations discussed, does vSphere allow more than 8 cores per VM?
Seems like what we need is: vSphere Standard Edition. Seems like the Essentials kit offers a vSphere server, I don't know what that's for exactly, we already have the esxi servers in place, and im hoping we can upgrade them without having to buy another server.
as it seems to include the vMotion.

The first document seems to indicate that you need to have a vSphere server. We are running all HP equipment at this time and don't really want to add to the rack space if we don't have to. The Standard edition also sais it can do vmotion, so that would be better option for us.
The way we have things setup now, and seems to be working, is that we have a shared san storage to both esxi boxes. The datastore is shared between both esxi nodes, so both machines already see all the VM's, and we can start any VM on any esxi server easily enough. The real issue is to do this without any outages, which is what I believe I saw esxi demo do at a trade show last year. The demo had a streaming website which he moved the web server between 2 physical boxes without any interruption in service. That is what I would like to see if we can get.
The other major issue we are looking to resolve is that each host has 24 logical cores on 2x X5680 cpus. However, the app servers which are running there are limited to 8 cores. I still haven't found out what license is required to get around this 8 logical cpu limitation for the VMs. It's possible im just not seeing it in the docs, but I have not seen it yet. If it's there somewhere, can you point me to the correct page or verb-age to search for? Thanks

Discuss it with their sales team to be sure you get what you need and want for future.

http://www.vmware.com/company/contact/

I understood your question to be a bit more advanced than simply esxi.

I looked for a clear answer on licensing and these thread's and the discussions were the only thing I could find that even came close to your case.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/447223
http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet...d-to-know.aspx

I think you need the Enterprise Edition + CAL license and a license key.
In 2012 there was a 20 physical limitation that may have changed by now.
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertr...nterprise.aspx

I looked for a little over an hour to get a straight answer on what license (es) are needed for the Enterprise and came up with no dice, sorry. It shouldn't be this difficult; IMO to find out the who, what, why, when and where on the required licenses for the Enterprise.

Ask your company IT Tech or the SQL Representative.

Next time I see the SQL guy I'll ask him.

In the meantime give VMware a call 1-877-486-9273.

Good luck!

When it comes to vmware, you need to give your VMs as little amount of vCPUs as possible. If you have 24 HT cores, it doesn't mean you HAVE to give it all to a single VM, especially with HT (bacause you really have 12 cores with some potential for optimization, not 24 cores as you may think).

BTW, have you considered switching to an opensource solution instead? No limitations, all the features, everything available.

The reason for the higher core count is because some of the applications being used needs lots of cpu/memory resources.
Oracle Databases are one example which need higher core counts for performance/response. Also, the tomcat instances are serving many applications, and need lots of threads and ram or the web pages tend to run slower.
I also do rendering in VM's and rather than having 32 seperate render nodes with 8 cores each, I would prefer to have maybe 4 nodes with 64 cores each.

Also, what opensource options are there? Im not aware of anything other than hyperv and vmware.

There are plenty of ways to go. Your hardware may determine the ability of opensource. Commercial offerings are still more advanced.

There is a similar to bare bones like esxi. (forget that name)

There is XEN and KVM.

Plenty of web pages devoted to lists like this. http://www.virtualizationmatrix.com/...l&free_based=1

Since you are running Oracle, you may wish to look at running Oracle Linux or Solaris and using their virtual technologies. Their resources might offer best use of your system.

I too wondered about using so many resources. Some of the modern vm's can more easily adjust hosts resources.