Vcenter appliance license

Navigating VMware's site can be tricky. This article gives you the exact URLs, to help you be absolutely sure you got all the right bits and pieces, before you get started with installing anything. These release notes cover 3 products, with the 2 you'll need to get started on a typical home lab bolded.

The vCenter Server download that I'm ignoring in this post is more for folks that wish to install vCenter manually on top of a Windows Server, now a bit old school, since the VCSA VMware vCenter Server Appliance has come so far in scale and capabilities, and speed of deployment.

You don't need to know Linux at all to configure and use it, as I demonstrate on video here. See also configuration maximums. Plenty of time to read the release notes during the download of those 3 files, which total 2. If you have a slower connection, you may prefer to chose the Akamai DLM option for all the downloads, explained here. Visit this site, and click the Download button: my. You're then challenged to login with credentials. Choose new or existing account, because either way, all these downloads listed below are available for free.

Licensing is a separate issue. Once you've logged in, you'll see the download buttons, the one you want is the first item listed. You should assign a vCenter license before the trial period expires.

Lon in to vCenter as an administrator or other user that has the Global. Licenses privilege. Go to the Configuration tab, and click Licensing in the Settings section to configure vCenter Server licensing. On the Licensing page, you see the current license assigned to your vCenter, such as an Evaluation license or other license. You can also see information about the product, number of used instances, license expiration, and licensed features.

The license name is displayed in the list of available licenses in vCenter. Click the i icon to see the features that are available for your license. If the license is valid, you should see the appropriate message in the Assignment Validation section at the bottom of the window.

Hit OK to save the settings. Now you can go to the Existing licenses tab and verify that your license has been assigned. On this page, you can see all the licenses that you have added to your vCenter Server before.

In my example, 60 days have passed since the installation of vCenter, and the Evaluation license is inactive. You can select any available license in this list, then hit OK to apply this license, save settings, and close the Assign License window. This blog post has covered VMware vCenter Server licensing to understand how vCenter is licensed and the differences between vCenter editions.

Organizations having small virtual environments might choose vCenter Server for Essentials or vCenter Server Foundation. Organizations having large virtual environments, including a large number of ESXi hosts with higher demands such as clustering, high availability, fault tolerance, and live migration, should consider using the VMware vCenter Server Standard license that includes all available features.

There are two authentication sources where passwords are configured to expire by default. This behavior can be configured:. SSO Users eg. The process is identical in vCenter 6.

The method is officially supported by VMware and documented in KB Don't forget to backup your vCenter Server Appliance. The Appliance has an embedded backup scheduler that allows you to create backups without 3rd party tools:.

You can download the certificate from the vCenter Website:. You can install additional software on the vCenter Appliance. Be careful as it might result in an unsupported stat when you install additional software without been advised by VMware GSS.