VmWare ESXi Free Edition Licensing
The List of Limitations for Free VMware ESXi
Now let’s have a closer look at restrictions when using an ESXi server version 6.7 with a free license. Depending on your environment, some restrictions may be unnoticeable for you while others can be critical:
- No Official VMware Support
- Max 8 vCPU per Each VM
- Cannot Be Managed with vCenter
- vStorage API Is Not Available
No Official VMware Support
There is no commercial technical support provided by VMware for free ESXi. You can ask the VMware community for support, and with any luck, you can find a solution for resolving your issue. While commercial VMware technical support works 24×7 and usually provides answers in short order, help in resolving issues by the VMware community may take somewhat more time. VMware commercial support also provides software upgrades.
Max 8 vCPU per Each VM
If you create a VM with more than 8 virtual processors (for example, a VM with 9 virtual one-core processors or a VM with 5 virtual two-core processors), the VM is likely to fail to start on free ESXi, showing the error “There are insufficient licenses to complete this operation”. At the same time, with the Evaluation or Enterprise Plus editions you can create a VM with up to 128 vCPUs (virtual Central Processors Units) assigned to that VM. The 8 vCPU restriction may not cause significant disadvantages, unlike the following two restrictions.
Cannot Be Managed with vCenter
The free version of an ESXi server cannot be managed with vCenter – a centralized server for managing hosts and virtual machines. If you try to add an ESXi host with a free license to vCenter Server, you can expect to get the error: “License not available to perform the operation”. Hence, you cannot migrate machines from one free ESXi host to another as well as use clustering features, because vCenter Server is required to perform these operations. This is a significant disadvantage if you are planning to use multiple ESXi hosts.
vStorage API Is Not Available
VMware provides a data protection framework that is called vStorage API (Application Program Interface) for enabling centralized backup of virtual machines on a host level. vStorage APIs allows third-party VMware backup solutions to make backup more efficiently as well as offload CPU, network, and storage. ESXi Server Free Edition doesn’t allow applications to interact with that ESXi server via vStorage APIs, hence, VMs cannot be backed up from the free version of ESXi on a host level. Your backup application should display an error message in this case. You can only perform a legacy backup of VMs running on the free version of ESXi host that requires the agent installation on the guest operating system.
VmWare burries this link pretty deep
ESXi 6.x
https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/group/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6
kb article
