Compare before you buy.
With VMware vSphere 4 Essentials you can consolidate your existing physical servers into 3 physical hosts, with each 2CPU.
VMware vSphere Essential & VMware vSphere Essentials Plus – are all-inclusive packages that enable you to virtualize and consolidate many application workloads onto three physical servers running vSphere and centrally manage them with vCenter Server for Essentials. Click to compare VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus – Download the edition that fits your needs!
With the Essentials edition you get:
- Management of your 3 ESX hosts with central management server – vCenter Server for Essentials
- Update manager – to have centralized patching of your ESX hosts AND your Virtual Machines via licensed Shavlik technology.
- VMFS Virtual SMP™ VMware ESXi or ESX – clustered file system VMFS – VMware Virtual Machine File System. In the version 3.0 it introduced directory structure in the filesystem.
- 1 Year Subscription.
With the Essentials PLUS edition you get much more than that:
- High Availability – HA – If one physical server fails, the VMs which had been running on that server are automatically restarted on another server – member of Vmware HA Cluster.
- VDR – VMware Data Recovery – Backup solution for all your virtual Infrastructure. I have done a series of video articles on VDR. You can find Part1, Part2, Part3 and Part 4. Also the restoration of individual files is supported on Windows VM – see my how-to article on that.
- 1 year of Production Support.