When you install ESXi, its default license is evaluation mode. You can assign a vSphere license for 10 CPUs to any of the following combinations of hosts:ĭual-core and quad-core CPUs, such as Intel CPUs that combine two or four independent CPUs on a single chip, count as one CPU. You can assign and reassign the CPU capacity of a vSphere license to any combination of ESXi hosts. If you attempt to assign a license that has insufficient capacity or does not support the features that the host uses, the license assignment fails. For example, if the host is associated with a vSphere Distributed Switch, the license that you assign must support the vSphere Distributed Switch feature.
When you assign a vSphere license to a host, the amount of CPU capacity consumed equals the number of physical CPUs in the host. Each vSphere license has a certain CPU capacity that you can use to license multiple physical CPUs on ESXi hosts.
If you already obtained a free key for ESXi 6.0 or 6.5 and you want to upgrade to 6.7, you can proceed to use the old key. Other limitations like the 32GB Memory or 2 CPU Socket limit are no longer in place.
The binaries you will receive as "Free Hypervisor" are 100% identical to the paid version but with some software limitations.
The license key can be created for free at VMware's website. VSphere 6.7 has been released and as known from previous versions, VMware provides a free version of their Hypervisor ESXi for everyone again.