I been involved in many vCenter Heartbeat conversations since joining Technical Marketing, one question that always comes up is around licensing for vCenter Heartbeat and vCenter Server itself.
For vCenter itself, you need no additional license, your standard vCenter license you already own is all you need.
vCenter Heartbeat requires a license for every vCenter instance you wish to protect. This includes every vCenter component, no matter how you may have them distributed, including the SQL database. (Heartbeat doesn’t support Oracle)
For example, if you have a single vCenter you want to protect with vCenter Heartbeat and have all core vCenter components, SSO, Web Client, Inventory Service and vCenter on a single server (our recommendation), and a separate SQL server you also wish to protect with vCenter Heartbeat you need only a single license.
What if you have Auto Deploy and/or Update Manager on other servers, as long as they are registered components of the vCenter Server you’re protecting already it’s still only a single license.
Add a second vCenter Server to your environment that you also want to protect, this will require a separate vCenter and vCenter Heartbeat license.
