There have been a lot of updates in VCE VxRail’s new 3.5 update this week. Though there are a lot of lesser known facts around licensing and Horizon interragtion in this release. Here are some of the most important changes in my opinion.
Software:
- Every VxRail 3.5 comes bundled with VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 (ENT edition), vCenter Server 6.0 U2 (STD edition), and vRealize Log Insight 3.3.1 (vCenter Server STD edition).
- The main difference between VxRail 3.0 and 3.5 from VMware licensing standpoint is that with VxRail 3.5, vSphere licenses are no longer sold with VxRail. vSphere licenses must either be obtained separately, when a VxRail is purchased, or existing licenses can be leveraged using the VMware Loyalty Program (see VLP section).
- VxRail now offers support for NSX. The Virtual SAN software that is bundled with VxRail include vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and can support NSX.
Horizon:
- There are two use cases for Horizon on VxRail: VDI dedicated workloads or mixed workloads (VDI and data center workloads).
- For dedicated VDI workloads, you need to purchase the desired version of Horizon software (Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise) for your target number of users.
- To run VDI in a mixed workloads environment you must license vSphere ENT+ (licensed per processor) and the version of Horizon required for your workloads (Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise).