BE7K VMWare Licensing for VCenter

[C_Noble]

We have purchased Cisco Business Edition 7000's. 

We have upgraded our hypervisors to VMWare 6.7 and we are using the license that came with the system "Foundation for Embedded OEM's".

We plan to integrate our hypervisors into our Enterprise VCenter.

Will VCenter be able to manage the embedded foundation licensing or do we need to purchase additional VMware licensing to integrate a BE7K Hypervisor into VCenter?

Thanks for reading!

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

VMware vSphere Hypervisor
vSphere Hypervisor is a free product that provides a simple way to get started with virtualization at no cost. It provides only basic virtualization capabilities, allowing customers to virtualize servers and run applications in VMs in a matter of minutes. vSphere Hypervisor cannot connect to vCenter Server and therefore cannot be centrally managed. Users can remotely manage individual vSphere Hypervisor hosts using the VMware vSphere Client. There are no restrictions on the number of physical CPUs per host and on the amount of RAM per server/host. The maximum vCPUs per VM is eight.

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-vsphere-pricing-whitepaper.pdf

[C_Noble]

Digging through the BE7K Installation guide I found the following : 

License for the Cisco UC Virtualization Hypervisor Plus, Cisco UC Virtualization Foundation or
Cisco Collaboration VirtualizationStandard is a special Cisco Collaboration embedded OEM license.
It is hardcoded to 2-CPU, pre combined, and cannot split or expand through myvmware.com. It is
neither a VMware Partner Activation Code (PAC) nor a Cisco Product Authorization Key (PAK).
It is pre activated, no registration or activation on myvmware.com or cisco.com required. It does
not support installation through vCenter, license pooling in vCenter, or any vCenter features.'

Question now is what VMWare Licensing I need to purchase to integrate a hypervisor into VCenter???

[Vaijanath Sonvane · Accepted solution]

Hi,

• With Cisco UC Virtualization Foundation, you can integrate your ESXi host with vCenter but not all vCenter features  such as HA, vMotion, DRS, etc. supported with this license. 
• With Cisco Collaboration Virtualization Standard, you can integrate ESXi host with vCenter all its features are supported.

If you need all vCenter features such as HA, vMotion then I would recommend to upgrade your license to Cisco Collaboration Virtualization Standard or VMware Standard license.

[Vaijanath Sonvane]

Hi,

The vCenter functionality depends on which UC Virtualization license you are using. There are three options: "Cisco UC Virtualization Hypervisor",  "Cisco UC Virtualization Foundation" and "Cisco Collaboration Virtualization Standard".

• Cisco UC Virtualization Hypervisor does not support vCenter functionality.
• Cisco UC Virtualization Foundation supports vCenter functionality.
• Cisco Collaboration Virtualization Standard supports vCenter functionality.

Please refer below URL to see feature comparison for these licenses:

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/td/docs/voice_ip_comm/uc_system/virtualization/cisco-collaboration-infrastructure.html#Compatibility