I'm fairly green in the VMWare world, but we currently have a server that came with the embedded ESXi 3.5, which is managed via the VMWare Infrastructure Client 2.5
We are looking at purchasing a new server, which would come with ESXi 5, and after countless hours of research and many questions answered, I think I now have more questions than answers.
On the 3.5 machine, we have two quad core Xeon processors and 32GB between three VM's. Obviously very low usage but it was the least inexpensive route at that time and had certain advantages. This was years ago and much has changed, and we are restructuring the way we look at data storage, availability etc. I would like to migrate the 3 VM's, and a multitude of our physical servers to ESXi 5, and potentially down the road take advantage of features like VMotion, HA, etc.
With 3.5, there were really no costs; ESXi was free, the Infrastructure Client was free, and we never had to purchase any licensing based on number of cores, pRAM or vRAM. Now looking at version 5, it seems that there are fairly tight licensing restrictions, and a much greater initial investment?
My main question: what changed? Did we improperly license in the past, are things really that different, and if I get the embedded ESXi 5 that comes on a Dell Poweredge, does a management client like Infrastructure Client (which I now understand to be a VSphere client) come with it? If not, what type of licensing am I looking for?
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