vSphere Enterprise licensing Plus Throw Back Thursday [2017 Update]!

So the last time I posted about vSphere Enterprise licensing was in 2010!  At the time, Enterprise licenses were not available for net new purchasing.  You could however upgrade your existing Enterprise licenses to vSphere 6 enterprise licenses.   Sever years later, still the same!    Oh and also the same, Client confusion.    So today I was asked about it and did a little research to refresh my own memory and came across an updated KB article (from 2016) here:

End of availability of vSphere Enterprise, vSphere with Operations Manager (vSOM) Standard and Enterprise edition
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2143987

 

This confirms (again?) the end of availability of Enterprise for new vSphere license purchases. Oh! and a fancy new chart as well.

Unfortunately the 50% upgrade discount just expired a few weeks ago (sorry!).

So what do you get with new Enterprise Plus licensing?

DRS, DPM, Storage DRS, Storage I/O Control, Network I/O Control, SR-IOV Support, NVIDIA GRID vGPU support, Proactive HA, Distributed Switches, Host Profiles and Auto Deploy.  Go cheap and get vSphere Advanced and you don’t get any of them.

 

So that’s the short and long of it.