Welcome to vSphere 8 in the real world, and now we're going to discuss licensing.
So the features that you can use in a vSphere environment will be based upon the licenses that you purchase.
The various levels of licensing will allow you to either have more hosts or fewer hosts.
Certain license types will allow you to simply buy more licenses for more cores,
and then you can add more hosts with those cores and license them that way.
And in addition to that, features.
So some licenses include things like vMotion, Storage vMotion, DRS, HA,
some of the more advanced vSphere features.
Virtual distributed switches can be like in your Enterprise Plus licenses.
So what kind of license you buy will determine basically, one, the size of the infrastructure that you can deploy,
as well as the features that will be available to you.
When you buy a license, the upgrades are going to be free within that license family.
So if you bought a license for 7, and then 7 update 1, 7 update 2, 7 update 3 comes along, you'll get those updates.
But when 8 comes out, you won't have upgrades for 8.
You'll have to buy licenses for 8.
If you have 8 and then 8 update 1, update 2, 3 kind of come out, again, you'll have licenses for that.
Licenses used to be what they call perpetual.
So you'd buy a license, and you were licensed for that version of that software.
Now it's subscription-based, which means you're going to buy a license for a number of years, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years.
And then that time's up, you no longer have a license to run that software.
There's no more perpetual licensing like they used to have.
So when you buy a license, basically you're licensing the number of cores.
The license will give you up to 32 physical cores.
So if you have a host that has, you know, two prox, and they are 28, you know, cores each,
then you'll need to buy two licenses for that host because you'll have more than the 32.
So even though that one processor only has 28, the other processor, you'll need to license both prox
because you'll need to have a license for each one of those, the 32.
There was an attempt a long time ago to license virtual RAM.
So the more VMs you run with virtual RAM, you had to license virtual CPUs, and you had to license virtual RAM.
VMware quickly decided that was a horrible way to try and license things.
So now all you do is you license the physical cores in the host.
You're not licensing the number of VMs.
You're not licensing the amount of RAM in there, just the physical CPUs, all right?
And so a license can be assigned to, obviously, multiple hosts inside your vCenter environment.
There is an evaluation license.
So basically the evaluation license is like an Enterprise Plus license.
You want to be careful with that because I have seen more than once where somebody would deploy a vSphere environment
using the evaluation license, you know, waiting to get their actual licenses or something like that,
and they start configuring all these features.
Then they go and they get their licenses from VMware, and they install their standard license,
and they realize they configured features they're not licensed for, and then things start breaking immediately.
So be careful about that.
Make sure that if you are using that evaluation license that you're not planning on turning that into an eventual permanent license
or, you know, your subscription license.
And if you do, only configure features that you are planning on paying for and buying with your license level.
So ESXi used to have a free version.
Broadcom has decided they're not going to offer that free version.
At the time of this recording, there's not a free version.
I've actually heard that that might be changing.
Broadcom might be bringing back the free ESXi.
Things are changing very quickly, so you might want to check that out yourself when you're going to, you know,
look for an ESXi host.
It used to be that you could install ESXi not in vCenter.
You had no VMware vCenter features.
You didn't have DRS, HA, vMotion because you didn't have vCenter.
You just had a standalone host.
You had no support.
You had to go to the community if you needed assistance for something.
Very limited access to, you know, the APIs, only like read information.
You couldn't do anything programmatically to make changes to the host.
And then, of course, your VMs are, you know, limited to eight virtual CPUs per VM.
And the RAM implementations are, again, going back and forth with version 8.
Right now there isn't even a free version, but there were.
Some of those limitations might be removed.
You need to check what Broadcom is doing today, if there even is an evaluation version,
and if there is, what they are allowing and not allowing.
So, they say standard legacy.
What they're talking about is a standard license that isn't vSphere Plus.
Okay.
So, vSphere Plus, with vSphere Plus you'll still have your vCenter server,
but there's a connector to a cloud environment,
which allows you to get some insight into, like, troubleshooting things.
It allows VMware support to see your environment
and help you troubleshoot issues you might be having.
Also, you can make some small changes,
minimal, minimal changes to your vCenter environment through the vSphere Plus cloud portal.
So, with your standard license, just your legacy standard license,
you had vMotion and storage vMotion, you had support for multiple virtual CPUs in your VMs,
a fault-tolerant VM up to two virtual CPUs.
If the VM had more than two virtual CPUs with standard, you couldn't make it a fault-tolerant VM.
Of course, you had vCenter, so you had, you know, for backup and you had HA capabilities,
virtualization-based security, storage policies,
a bunch of different things are, you know, pretty standard for the basic versions.
Okay.
Now, next, we had our Enterprise Plus licenses.
Okay.
And with our Enterprise Plus license, obviously, as you can see from the list here, a lot more stuff.
So, we have support for OpenStack.
So, if you were using a cloud provider that was using OpenStack,
you could manage your on-prem vCenter environment and your OpenStack environment in your cloud provider
through your vCenter server with your Enterprise Plus license.
Persistent memory, basically persistent memory,
will allow you to install a persistent memory card into a server,
and it basically treats it kind of like a hard disk, but the VM can use it.
It's much, much faster, like RAM.
So, persistent memory basically is for VMs that need to be, you know, very, very fast,
have a very high amount of uptime.
So, when the VM shut down, that persistent memory stays.
That RAM basically stays.
And when the VM comes back up again, it has access to its persistent memory,
gets it up and running faster, gets back to a certain state faster, things like that.
Host profiles and auto-deploy are included with Enterprise Plus.
We discussed that already in a previous lesson.
vMotion.
So, vMotion is a way of moving a VM from one host to another.
And with our Enterprise Plus licenses,
we have support for doing a vMotion between vCenter servers.
So, if we have our vCenter servers in link mode,
we can move VMs between vCenter servers.
Long-distance vMotions would basically mean I can migrate a VM from one host to
another that are in two different data centers.
There's requirements related to that.
You need to have, you know, very low latency, very fast connections,
and things like that.
But long-distance vMotions are supported with Enterprise Plus licensing.
And cross-cloud, so basically we can migrate VMs from our on-prem environment to,
you know, Azure, for example, and things like that.
So, fault-tolerant VPN.
Standard license only supports up to two virtual CPUs for a fault-tolerant VM.
Enterprise Plus, up to eight virtual CPUs for a fault-tolerant VM.
Virtual machine encryptions, we can encrypt our virtual machines on disk.
Support for distributed resource scheduler, distributed power management.
Storage network I.O. control.
So, basically that will allow us to ensure that certain VMs aren't using up too much storage I.O.
and kind of basically what's called a noisy neighbor and crowding out other VMs
from getting access to I.O.
We can control and make sure the I.O. is evenly distributed to VMs,
or certain VMs can be given a higher priority to get maybe slightly more
or more than slightly more storage I.O.
NVIDIA grid virtual GPUs.
Basically, we can use the NVIDIA grid solution to provide GPUs to virtual machines.
So, if you're doing things like AI, anything that needs a GPU, that NVIDIA grid is supported.
Proactive HA.
So, proactive HA is a way of using services like ILOs and track information and things
so the system can monitor the health of a host.
And if we see a host is starting to not look very healthy,
our logs in advance are showing that a host is starting to not look healthy,
we can start proactively moving VMs off of that host before it actually were to fail on us.
Accelerate graphics for VMs, so we can give graphic cards to our VDI environments
and things like that.
Distributed service engine, that's kind of a cool thing.
So, that uses what's called a DPU or also has been known to be called a SmartNIC.
So, we can have adapters in our hosts that have the ability to on the card process, you know,
TCP IP and, you know, IP offloading.
That's a pretty basic minor thing.
Also, SSL encryption and decryption can be handled on the card and not in our CPU.
iSCSI, you know, traffic can all be processed and managed basically on that card
and not, again, in our CPU.
So, we can basically offload tasks like network security, like SSL encryption,
decryption, and, you know, iSCSI traffic management and things like that to the adapter card,
the NIC, and not take up CPU time.
And that is all provided to us by using the distributed service engine feature in vSphere 8.
Vendor device groups, basically, we have a PCI switch.
We can group devices together and say, if we're going to assign this device to a VM,
this other device has to be assigned with it.
They go in pairs.
So, we might have a certain NIC that has to go with a certain, you know,
network and things like that.
NVIDIA AI-ready enterprise platform.
So, basically, then, again, we're talking about using NVIDIA GPUs for AI-type functionality.
So, we can take advantage of the NVIDIA GPUs and get AI work done in our virtualized environment
and get those very, very fast, you know, run times from the GPU and stuff.
And trust authority.
All this stuff is Enterprise Plus licensing.
So, you need to have, you know, distributed virtual switches.
If you need to have host profiles or things like that, you need an Enterprise Plus license,
not a standard license.
So, as we discussed standard and Enterprise Plus licensing, so the on-prem legacy licenses,
we have standard, which allows us to use our ESXi hypervisor, supports vMotion,
and high availability.
The Enterprise Plus allows us to also use things, all the same things as standard,
as well as our Tanzu Kubernetes grid services.
So, basically, it allows developers to deploy these Kubernetes environments very quickly
and easily in an automated fashion.
They can request the number of, you know, containers they need and stuff.
They can deploy them out.
And then they can do their development work on there.
And when they're done, they can request to have it wiped.
And they don't have necessarily, you know, a lot of many things sitting around that are forgotten about.
They don't have to build these environments by themselves.
It allows developers basically to stand up and tear down environments real quickly
in an automated fashion.
We have support for DRS, distributed resource scheduler, in Enterprise Plus.
So, DRS is basically just a way of automating.
If we have one host that's real heavily utilized and another host that's not as heavily utilized,
vCenter can see this and it can move VMs from one host to another to help balance out the utilization on the host.
So, you don't necessarily have to worry about what happens if, all of a sudden,
these VMs get really busy and these other ones over here slow down.
Maybe at night, you know, these workloads kick off and VMs get busy.
And other workloads taper off because no one's hitting these databases or something like that.
DRS can balance those out to make sure that the workloads that get busier have the resources they need
and resources that, you know, aren't being consumed
or being reserved for services that aren't using them anymore.
All right.
Just a way of balancing out workloads within your cluster.
A single-row idle virtualization basically is just a way of allowing access to PCI Express-type devices.
So, Cloud Connect is the new model.
It's the new thing that VMware is pushing.
So, you still will have your vCenter server.
You'll have your E5 host.
All that kind of stuff is the same.
But now we have this vSphere Plus, right?
And the Plus simply means that there's a connector to the VMware Cloud.
And in there, things like logs can be seen.
It's kind of really helpful for, one, if you call tech support, it gives them instant insight into your environment.
They don't necessarily have to ask you to go and pull logs and things like that.
They can see what's going on in your environment.
They can see a history of what's been going on in your environment.
And they can help you troubleshoot things more quickly.
It also allows VMware to send you alerts on things.
They can say, oh, we're seeing that, like, you have these security vulnerabilities in your environment.
You have these configurations that we consider to be a security risk in your environment.
And we suggest that you fix these things, right?
So those are kind of some of the things that you get with that vSphere Plus, right?
Lifecycle management services, so let you know, okay, you need to update and patch services and things like that.
With vSphere Plus, just not the standard vSphere Plus, you get all the same things as standard, right?
But you also have additional services like developers, additional application performance enhancements,
so basically ways of providing better performance when your development teams are going and creating applications and things like that.
VMware is very big into making sure that developers have the tools that they need to help facilitate quick deployment
and quick development of applications.
So here we have our vCenter server, and we're showing some different levels of vCenter.
Basically, the device that you deploy, the application or the appliance you deploy is the same.
What matters is what license you install on it.
So if you get a vCenter Essentials, you can input up to three hosts in that vCenter server, right?
You're limited to three hosts, which is going to limit the number of beams you can create and some things like that.
And you'll have either Essentials or Essentials Plus, so you'll have services like vMotion,
but you necessarily don't have like stores, vMotion, HA, but not DRS.
The foundations up to four hosts, and basically from there, you have either a standard license or you have your Enterprise Plus, right?
You can get a standard, your Enterprise Plus licensing with your foundations.
And vCenter standard, you can get an unlimited number of hosts.
So now you're just buying licenses for all the cores in your environment.
You're not just buying, you know, a limited number of hosts, certain levels of features at a reduced cost.
You're now buying, you know, full-blown, you know, all the hosts you want to add at a standard license
or all the hosts you want to add at an Enterprise Plus license.
So you can license the software for one, two, or three years, and you're buying licenses for the software.
But then you need to decide what level of support you want to get with that, right?
You can say basic support, and basic support is kind of like an eight-by-five kind of thing, eight hours a day, five days a week.
And that's for test dev environments, lab environments.
If you're running this really non-critical workload and something happens in the middle of the night or on a weekend,
you're fine waiting until Monday, then that might be a solution for you.
Production is 24 by 7.
And so with the production support agreement, basically you're saying I can call any time, you know, in the evenings,
weekends, whatever, and get support for whatever's going on in my environment.
That is probably the license that's going to be the most important one to get if you've got critical workloads that you can't have down
for, you know, a day or two while you're waiting for the weekend to get over for VMware support to open up for you.
So where do you get your licenses?
You can get your licenses from your MyVMware.com.
If you log into MyVMware.com, it will show you all the different versions of vSphere or, you know,
VMware products that you've licensed.
You'll also see not only your vSphere licenses.
If you have VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion or if you have Horizon or anything like that,
all those different products will show up there.
Your license keys will show up in there, and there will be links in there to download the software that you purchased.
So what's different in version 7 versus version 8?
There's quite a few different things.
So for one thing, distributed services engine is a new thing.
So that's support for the DPUs.
There's been enhancement to the vSphere with Tanzu.
Before, there was a bunch of different libraries that you were, you know, managing Tanzu on-prem
or if you're managing it in this cloud or that cloud, there could be different libraries you'd be using.
Now it's been consolidated into one API and one set of libraries,
and that is going to be used for all the different ways you might use this product.
There's been enhancements to Lifecycle Manager.
So Lifecycle Manager basically has been enhanced, and there's been new features.
So, for example, we can patch multiple hosts at the same time.
We can push out different updates than before.
So some enhancements to Lifecycle Manager.
Obviously, added support for AI and large language modeling.
So that's a big push with everyone, not just VMware.
Some of those features are, for example, adding support for some of the NVIDIA services and things like that.
Guest OS and workload.
So there's been improvements in the type of virtual hardware that's supported.
So, for example, we have virtual hardware version 20 now,
and that's going to give us access to larger VMs and things than we used to have before.
Resource management.
DRS has been improved.
So we have some new features, some new libraries for, for example, monitoring memory utilization.
And with that memory utilization monitoring, we can now schedule DRS more accurately than we did before.
Security and compliance.
So one of the enhancements with security and compliance is TLS 1.2 is supported, nothing lower.
Not 1.1, not 1.0.
You can't go in there and turn that back on again.
So TLS 1.2 or higher is supported in that sense.
Also, by default, you cannot install software that has not been, or, you know,
any kind of drivers or anything like that that's not been signed.
Anything that's unsigned will not be able to be installed by default.
You can turn that feature off, but, of course, you get a bunch of warnings and alerts when you do that.
But by default, they only want signed software installed on the host,
and signed by somebody that is one of their trusted vendors.
So they are, you know, getting serious about making sure that we're installing drivers
and libraries that are, you know, tested and verified by VMware to help make our environment,
one, more secure, and two, you know, more stable in general.