Good question! The templates won’t affect the licenses in any way, shape or form. You consume your licensing only when you add the vESX hosts to the vCenter. For example, you can have 100 vESX templates/libraries that are un-deployed, while you are having 10 vESX hosts deployed and active. In this example you are consuming only 10 licenses from your vCenter, not 100. Remember, these 100 vESX hosts are either templates sitting as files on your storage, or just VMs sitting in your physical ESX host (which again won’t count as real ESX hosts).

As a matter of fact, I see now that this “vSphere In A Box” approach for doing your labs will save you a huge deal of your NFR licenses due to the great flexibility you are having.

Hope this helps

Hany

How does thin provisioning templated ESX vSphere 4 servers work with the licensing side of things? I'm just worried about using up loads of licenses when doing this..

My plan was to install either Workstation or ESXi 4.0, then setup 2 x ESX 4.0 servers clustered to test all the various HA/FT etc features.. If I need to blow this all away will recreating them use additional NFR licenses?

Sorry if these questions are basic, I'm just trying to get my head around how this works, last thing I want to do is use up all my companies NFR's due to lack of knowledge.

Thanks for your help,
R

its almost as if some hardware ID is passed through from the physical host to the VM'd ESX nodes

Any ideas?

I’m very interested too in exploring the ESX functionality as a hypervisor rather than just running a bunch of nested VMs on it. What you said about the root-cause analysis is another great reason to run a vESX.