VMware vSphere 8 Essentials Kit for Small Businesses

The VMware vSphere 8 Essentials Kit is a starter kit that enables small businesses to virtualize and centrally manage their physical servers. The result is lower hardware costs, greater operational efficiency and reduced upfront capital investment. The kit includes six CPU licenses for vSphere Essentials (for three servers, up to two processors per server) and one license for vCenter Server Essentials.

VMware has worked hard to remove the physical limitations of the free vSphere hypervisor. For example, the memory limit in vSphere 5 is still 32 GB. With ESXi 6.5, there is now no hardware limit other than a maximum of two physical CPUs and eight vCPUs per virtual machine. Running two six-core Xeon processors with 128 GB of RAM and RAID configuration on one machine is no longer a problem. A machine configured in this way is a very powerful virtualization host and requires no paid licenses.

The vSphere 8 Essentials Kit is designed for small businesses that need up to 3 hosts and 2 CPUs each for server consolidation. Includes vSphere (ESXi only) and vCenter Server for centralized management of hosts and virtual machines. If you need additional features like high availability, check out the vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (the plus sign in the name varies).

vSphere 8 Essentials Kit at a Glance

Naturally, paid software offers more features than free products. In this case, the free vSphere edition lacks certain tools and features such as vMotion, Fault Tolerance or vSAN. All of these features require at least three server nodes. The limitations associated with free vSphere editions can be divided into two areas: Hardware and feature set.

Future virtual machines using DirectPath I/O will therefore benefit from more virtualization features such as vMotion, rather than being tied to the original host. This feature requires the new virtual hardware version 20.

vSphere 8 Essentials Kit Scaling Groups

VMware showcased the next major releases of vSphere and vSAN at Explore 2022 (formerly VMworld). Key new features include Device Virtualization Extensions (DVX), higher scalability of vHardware 20, device group configuration policies, vTPM and vSphere datasets.