I am working for a small startup that is looking for a basic hypervisor to virtualize 2 - 3 servers.
Virtual Machines
- CentOS
- Windows 2012 R2
- CentOS
Server
- Dual 6 core Xeon processors (with hyperthreading = 24 cores)
- 128GB RAM
- 12 TB HDD
Basically we want to spin up the Windows server only occasionally (once a month or so) to convert data from MS SQL Server DBs that we receive and then dump them into MySQL DBs running on CentOS. The rest of the time we plan on shutting down the Windows image. The majority of the time we will be running one or two CentOS machines for the bulk of our work.
I downloaded and installed the vSphere 6.0 Hypervisor and the free license and am having an issue:
1. I am getting a vSMP error (similar to that found in the KB article "Powering on the virtual machine fails with the error: Feature vSMP not licensed, requires 8 have 4 (1029801)"
- From this KB article it sounds like I need enterprise plus edition. But when I look at this KB article: Product offerings for vSphere 6.x (2109507), the table implies that virtual SMP is supported up to 128 cores.
Hypervisor (Free) | Essentials | Essentials Plus | Standard | Enterprise | Enterprise Plus | ||||||||||||
vSphere | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 6 | |||||||||||
Maximum virtual SMP | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 | |||||||||||
Thin Provisioning | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | |||||||||||
Update Manager | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● | ||||||||||||
- We can't afford Enterprise Plus, so as I see it my options are:
1. Limit each VM to only 8 cores (severely under-utilizing my new hardware)
2. Buy vSphere Essentials (is this issue resolved in Essentials, or only in Enterprise as the article implies?)
3. Install Linux CentOS on baremetal and then use a desktop based hypervisor for running a Windows image
4. Switch to Xen as an opensource hypervisor
I'd like to continue using VMware, any suggestions on how to resolve this issue or a good option to move forward?
Thanks for your suggestions.