Compare VMware vSphere Kits for Cloud Computing, Server and Data Center Virtualization

VMware

Protect Your Business and Simplify IT with VMware vSphere

Protect your business with vSphere, the most trusted and reliable virtualization platform in the industry. Ensure high application availability with vSphere’s built-in business continuity features and get the confidence that only policy-based service level management can provide. VMware vSphere Kits provide everything you need to get started.

Download Free Trial Get Pricing Find a Reseller

VMware vSphere, the industry-leading virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures, enables you to run business critical applications with confidence and respond to the business faster. (4:15 mins.)

Compare vSphere Kits

vSphere 5 Kits combine a number of vSphere licenses with vCenter for central management—everything you need to start your virtualization journey. Essentials Kits are great for smaller environments, while Acceleration Kits have more advanced features and can scale to any sized environment. Acceleration Kits with Management add 25-VM packs of management products to the related Acceleration Kits, helping you to maximize your IT infrastructure’s efficiency, security, multi-site availability, and application service levels.

Compare Essentials Kits and Acceleration Kits
Compare Acceleration Kits with Management

vSphere Essentials and Accelerations Kits Comparison

	Essentials Kit	Essentials Plus Kit	Standard Acceleration Kit	Enterprise Acceleration Kit	Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kit
Overview	Server consolidation and centralized management	Server consolidation and business continuity	Scalable server consolidation & no planned downtime	Powerful & efficient resource management	Policy-based datacenter automation
Product Components
Centralized Management 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.	vCenter for Essentials	vCenter for Essentials	vCenter Standard	vCenter Standard	vCenter Standard
Included Entitlement	3 servers with up to 2 processors each	3 servers with up to 2 processors each	8 Processors - scalable with additional licenses	6 Processors - scalable with additional licenses	6 Processors - scalable with additional licenses
vRAM Entitlement 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.	32GB (192GB total) 192 GB is the maximum vRAM entitlement for Essentials and Essentials Plus kits. No additional vRAM entitlement can be added to Essentials or Essentials Plus kits. If more vRAM is required then an upgrade to standard or higher acceleration kit is required.	32GB (192GB total) 192 GB is the maximum vRAM entitlement for Essentials and Essentials Plus kits. No addition vRAM entitlement can be added to Essentials or Essentials Plus kits. If more vRAM is required then an upgrade to standard or higher acceleration kit is required.	32GB	64GB	96GB
vCPU Entitlement The number of virtual CPUs that may be allocated to each VM when using virtual symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP)	8-way	8-way	8-way	8-way	32-way
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware 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.
Product Features
Thin Provisioning Reduce storage needs by utilizing dynamic storage that expands to meet the requirements of the virtual machine with no performance degradation.
Update Manager 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.
vStorage APIs for Data Protection 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.
Data Recovery Protect your data through fast agent-less backups to disk, with de-duplication to minimize use of backup disk space.
High Availability Minimize downtime with automated restart of your VMs following physical machine failure.
vMotion Eliminate application downtime from planned server maintenance by migrating running VMs between hosts.
Virtual Serial Port Concentrator Connect over the network via the serial port concentrator to the serial port console on any server.
Hot Add Increase capacity by adding CPU, memory, or devices to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.
vShield Zones Simplify security management by configuring and maintaining your multiple zones of security within software among shared hosts rather than across separate siloed physical environments.
Fault Tolerance Provide continuous availability for applications with zero data loss in the event of server failures.
Storage APIs for Array Integration Improve performance and scalability by leveraging efficient array-based operations.
Storage APIs for Multipathing Improve performance and reliability of IO from vSphere to storage by leveraging third party storage vendor multi-path software capabilities.
Storage vMotion Avoid application downtime for planned storage maintenance by migrating live VM disk files across storage arrays.
Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), Distributed Power Management (DPM) Align resources usage with business priority by automatically load balancing across hosts and optimize power consumption by turning off hosts during lower load periods.
Storage I/O Control 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.
Network I/O Control 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.
Distributed Switch Centralize provisioning, administration, and monitoring using cluster-level network aggregation.
Host Profiles Simplify host deployment and compliance by creating VMs from configuration templates.
Auto Deploy Deploy more vSphere hosts in minutes and "on the fly".
Storage DRS 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.
Profile-Driven Storage Reduce the steps in the selection of storage resources by grouping storage according to a user-defined policy.
	Pricing	Pricing	Pricing	Pricing	Pricing

vSphere Acceleration Kits with Management Comparison

	Standard Acceleration Kit with Smart Operations Management	Enterprise Acceleration Kit with Business Production Management	Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kit with Cloud Infrastructure Management
Overview	Maximize IT efficiency	Security and multi-site availability	Application service level assurance and on-demand private cloud
Included	vCenter Server Standard 8 x vSphere Standard licenses	vCenter Server Standard 6 x vSphere Enterprise licenses	vCenter Server Standard 6 x vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses
Included Management Products (25-VM Pack)
vCenter Operations	Standard	Enterprise	Enterprise
vShield App with Data Security
vCenter Site Recovery Manager Standard
vCloud Director
	Pricing	Pricing	Pricing