I’ve seen many questions on vSAN packaging over the last months so I figured I would share a table that shows what is possible with which license. A lot of the confusion is around the “ROBO” use case, and I want to make it crystal clear that you can deploy a 2-node ROBO configuration using Standard, Advanced or the special “vSAN for ROBO” 25VM pack that will be made available. Anyway, when it comes to functionality the table below should make it crystal clear what is included with what.
Before anyone asks, “stretched clusters” refers to the vSAN stretched cluster workflow / feature. Two data center rooms in the same building leveraging external witness capabilities through the stretched cluster workflow requires “Advanced”. Three datacenters stretched across campus distance using “fault domains” does not require Advanced, but can use Standard.
Also note that “vSAN Advanced” is included in the “Horizon Advanced” and the “Horizon Enterprise” Suites. If you have either of those, I highly recommend testing vSAN, I am seeing more and more customers taking advantage of it, a great storage platform which performs extremely and is really simple to manage is included in your suite, why not use it?!
The below table shows what the current licensing/packaging looks like for vSAN 6.6. Note that for vSAN 6.5 “all-flash” is now available in all licensing levels. In vSAN 6.6 “QoS” has been dropped down to Standard, and “Local Site Protection for Stretched Clusters” and “vSAN Encryption” have been added to Enterprise. For pricing, please contact your partner or a VMware sales rep.
| vSAN Standard | vSAN Advanced | vSAN Enterprise | vSAN for ROBO Standard | vSAN for ROBO Advanced | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SPBM | X | X | X | X | X |
| Read/Write SSD Caching | X | X | X | X | X |
| Distributed RAID | X | X | X | X | X |
| Distributed Switch | X | X | X | X | X |
| Snapshots / Clones | X | X | X | X | X |
| Rack Awareness | X | X | X | X | X |
| Health Monitoring | X | X | X | X | X |
| vSphere Replication * | X | X | X | X | X |
| Two Node Robo Configuration | X | X | X | X | X |
| Two Node Direct Connect | X | X | X | X | X |
| All-Flash | X | X | X | X | X |
| Quality of Service | X | X | X | X | X |
| Dedupe and Compression | X | X | X | ||
| RAID-5/6 | X | X | X | ||
| Stretched Cluster | X | ||||
| Local Site Protection for Stretched Clusters | X | ||||
| vSAN Encryption | X |
* vSphere Replication is new with a 5 minute RPO, this was exclusive certified for vSAN. In some material you will see this being referred too as vSAN Replication.
Full licensing white paper can be found here,
thanks for clearing things up! ….. that said I was being told/informed that to do all flash VSAN with Horizon there was a supplemental cost per user/ccu on top of Horizon Advanced/Ent? Is that 100% not the case?
That is not the case.
Hi Duncan,
I have the need for a 4 host 2 sockets each with less than 25 VM’s. I am getting vSphere ROBO edition license to save on vSphere licensing. Can I get vSAN ROBO licenses as well? I want all 4 hosts to provide resources but the total in cluster is less than 25 VM.
Thank you very much
What you are describing is not ROBO? Even the regular vSphere ROBO eula would not allow you to do this from a licensing point of view. By the way, if you are running less than 25 VMs I would recommend single socket servers and regular VSAN licenses, the cost of that would be 7.5k instead… cheaper than the ROBO license.
Why does a regular vsphere EULA not allow this? ROBO licenses are not bound to CPU sockets anymore since 5.5.
Not bound to CPU sockets indeed, but they are bound to the use in a ROBO configuration. If you have a single site which is not a ROBO scenario then using these license would be a violation of the EULA.
Can we have a cluster of three ESXi hosts in the same location, two with higher specs to run VM and one with low spec to just run the witness node? Do I need vSAN license for the host just running the witness node?
Thank you
I believe the EULA states no more than 3 servers per site for the ROBO ESXi license.
My questions are
When deploying ROBO under standard or advanced licensing do I need to license a “socket” for the witness or is it really just 2 sockets of licensing required at a minimum?
What is the minimum licensing level with vRO to use the management pack?
The ROBO witness appliance is not licensed, it comes with a license included as you cannot run any workloads on it.
For vROPs the VSAN management pack already works with Standard.
see Duncan http://tech.zsoldier.com/2015/09/vsan-cost-effective-architecture-for.html
I see, but not sure what your question is 🙂
I have a question concerning “Stretched Cluster” vs. “Rack Awareness”:
Since we have s strict requirement from our customers (public safety) to have two redundant racks (and not three) in the same building, we are planning to achieve that with the VSAN Stretched Cluster feature for 25 VMs with the witness installed on another site (actually also a VSAN Stretched Cluster).
Can you provide any calculation basis for the witness appliance network bandwidth needed? I assume that it depends on the actual storage I/O traffic wihtin the data domains.
For ROBO it says 1,5 Mbit/s, for a stretched cluster 100Mbit/s but how is the calculation done? From my technical point of view, the ROBO and the Stretched Cluster feature use the same synchronization mechanisms between witness domain and data domains, right?
An answer would be helpful since we will deploy up to 12 VSAN clusters in one of our next projects and I need to think about the possible concepts now.
I am also in contact with VMware Germany but I still have not the right answers 😉
Let me drop you an email Johannes. I can help you with this.
Just to Clarify things a little bit with the ROBO kits and licenses. My company is in the middle of converting from the “old” ROBO license kits to the newer ones.
Under the currently provided ROBO kit licenses you can run an infinite number of ESXi hosts at a site as long as your total VM count doesn’t exceed 25 turned on and running machines (templates and powered off machines don’t count against your 25 total). So you could have 75 ESXi hosts running 25 vm’s and be 100% legal. if for some reason you were to accidentally violate the license (say be turning on a 26th host), the vm would run fine but a license violation message would be logged internally on your vCenter. Also it’s a violation of the license to use more then 1 ROBO kit at a site, so you can’t just spin up a second ROBO kit on some more ESXi server in order to run more then 25 vm’s.
The one thing I’ve been unable to figure out is what the vmware definition of a Site is.
Hope that helps someone.
The VSAN calculator doesn’t really apply for ROBO builds. Will there be (or is there already) a tool for sizing a VSAN ROBO deployment with 2 hosts?
Hi, Quick question for an expert. My scenario is 2 computer rooms connected at 10Gbps. I cannot use the rack awareness feature . VSAN nodes are hybrid ( SAS+SSD). If I read this article properly, I will need to buy the enterprise license to achieve a stretched cluster right? Using the WAN link to host an external witness is not an option ( WAN link is not reliable ).
The enterprise SKU is more designed for all flash solution…you will need to pay extra$$ for options that you can’t use with hybrid VSAN nodes . This extra expense will make our project to switch to VSAN very expensive just to get the stretched cluster.