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We have a vSphere cluster of 4 ESXi servers licensed for Standard. We want to purchase some Advanced licenses so that we can use the Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere, but we don't want to upgrade the entire cluster to Advanced if we don't have to (it's ridiculously expensive).

Does anyone know if you can run Advanced features on just a few specific servers in a vSphere cluster without having to upgrade the entire cluster?

zippy
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  • look very carefully at FT before you purchase. 9 out of 10 people do not understand what it does and why to implement it. FT has implications you should understand. Usually clustering plus HA provides more uptime. – Jim B Jun 10 '11 at 04:59

2 Answers2

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You can have varying license levels within a cluster. Obviously, things like FT will only work between hosts that are licensed for those features.

You will not be able to turn on cluster-level features like HA, DRS, DPM, etc., unless the entire cluster is licensed for those features.

EEAA
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Within vCenter you can create a second cluster and have one for advanced and one for standard. This way your guests can run on any host in the cluster and get the same functionality. You can manually migrate them between the clusters should you need to. You might (probably should) divide your datastores between the clusters as well.

J.Zimmerman
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