I’ve been a keen user of the VMware vSphere and previous
versions of their bare metal hypervisor for a number of years now.
When I first get hold of the product, I usually build a test
lab, purely so that I can install and play with the product in an environment
that I’m not going to break, and if I do, it’s not a business critical system that
will bring the company crashing down.
With VMware vSphere 7.0, VMware have allowed the product to
be installed and used in full Enterprise Plus mode for 60 days.
As the evaluation is a full edition of Enterprise Plus, you
can use all of the features that makes the product the market leading
virtualisation platform, these features include vSphere vMotion, vSphere HA,
vSphere DRS, etc.
The 60 evaluation starts when you first turn on the ESXi host.
At any time during the evaluation period, you can convert the product to a licensed
mode from evaluation mode, but the evaluation mode has only decreased by the
time it was in evaluation mode.
For example, I install ESXi on 1st April 2020 and
convert to Standard license on 7th April 2020, that means I have
only used 7 days of my Enterprise Pus evaluation.
Now let’s say that I really need to test vSphere Distributed
switches, unfortunately these are not available with Standard edition.
If we set the product back to evaluation mode, we’ll be able
to explore the entire feature set for an additional 53 days.
