VMware®

vCenter Standard: Provides large scale management of VMware vSphere deployments for rapid provisioning, monitoring, orchestration, and control of virtual machines.

vCenter Foundation: Provides powerful management tools for smaller environments (up to 3 vSphere hosts) looking to rapidly provision, monitor, and control virtual machines.

vCenter for Essentials: Provides the same features as vCenter Foundation, integrated with the Essentials and Essentials Plus kits.

Amount of vRAM that each license adds to the available pool. vRAM is the amount of virtual memory configured to a virtual machine. See vSphere 5.0 Pricing and Packaging White Paper for more information about vRAM.

The number of virtual CPUs that may be allocated to each VM when using virtual symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP)

Qualified purchases of VMware vSphere entitle to free use of enterprise Linux (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware) as guest OS. This offer includes free subscription to patches & updates of the OS and ability to run unlimited number of virtual machines per vSphere license. For more information about Terms and Conditions use the link at the bottom of this page.

Reduce storage needs by utilizing dynamic storage that expands to meet the requirements of the virtual machine with no performance degradation.

Reduce time spent on routine remediation by automating the tracking, patching and updating of your vSphere hosts, as well as the VM's applications and operating systems.

Achieve scalable backup without disrupting applications or users by leveraging supported 3rd party backup software that leverages these APIs. Through this integration supported 3rd party backup software can perform centralized VM backups without the disruption and overhead of running backup tasks from inside each virtual machine.

Protect your data through fast agent-less backups to disk, with de-duplication to minimize use of backup disk space.

Minimize downtime with automated restart of your VMs following physical machine failure.

Eliminate application downtime from planned server maintenance by migrating running VMs between hosts.

Connect over the network via the serial port concentrator to the serial port console on any server.

Increase capacity by adding CPU and memory to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.

Simplify security management by configuring and maintaining your multiple zones of security within software among shared hosts rather than across separate siloed physical environments.

Provide continuous availability for applications with zero data loss in the event of server failures.

Improve performance and scalability by leveraging efficient array-based operations.

Improve performance and reliability of IO from vSphere to storage by leveraging third party storage vendor multi-path software capabilities.

Avoid application downtime for planned storage maintenance by migrating live VM disk files across storage arrays.

Align resources usage with business priority by automatically load balancing across hosts and optimize power consumption by turning off hosts during lower load periods.

Prioritizes storage access by continuously monitoring I/O load of a storage volume and dynamically allocating available I/O resources to virtual machines according to business needs.

Prioritizes network access by continuously monitoring I/O load over the network and dynamically allocating available I/O resources to specific flows according to business needs.

Centralize provisioning, administration, and monitoring using cluster-level network aggregation.

Simplify host deployment and compliance by creating VMs from configuration templates.

Deploy more vSphere hosts in minutes and "on the fly".

Automated load balancing now looks at storage characteristics to determine the best place for a given virtual machine’s data to live when it is created and then used over time.

Reduce the steps in the selection of storage resources by grouping storage according to a user-defined policy.