Pricing for vSphere and vCenter 5.5

[dbarry007]

My company is a restaurant with approximately 70 locations, plus 2 corporate offices.  We need to purchase ESXi 5.5 for 2 servers for each of the 70 restaurants (which will expand by 7-10 restaurants per year for the foreseeable future) and 5 total servers for the corporate offices.  We would also like to use a single management tool to manage all the hosts and VMs.  Math is 145 installations of ESXi 5.5 and a single installation of vCenter 5.5 (assuming vCenter can manage this many installations).  ESXi installations will increase by 14-20 per year.  Does anyone have a cost-effective way of using VMWare for virtualization in this instance or are we in for a huge hit to the IT budget?

[schepp]

Hi welcome to the communities,

the Windows installation of vCenter can manage up to 1.000 hosts and 10.000 powered on VMs, so you should be good (data can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere5/r55/vsphere-55-configuration-maximums.pdf )

Costs depend on the license version you aim for, depending on the features you want to use: vSphere Editions, What is vSphere? Leading Virtual Infrastructure | United States

You should contact the VMware sales team to discuss the best and most cost effective setup for your needs

Regards

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - I agree with Tim's suggestion of contacting VMware sales or looking for a local VMware partner that can assist you in your move to VMware. By working with a partner they can assist you in conversion of you servers as well look at your POS system and to see if you would gain cost savings and efficiencies by virtualizing your POS terminals -

[King_Robert]

www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

[dbarry007]

Thanks everyone - I figured as much, but wanted to check with the community first to see if anyone had a similar infrastructure.