Perpetual license

vSphere Essentials Kit for Academic Users

VMware vSphere Essentials Kit delivers the industry-leading virtualization platform for small businesses at an affordable price. Small businesses can virtualize their physical servers and centrally manage these servers, reducing hardware costs and increasing operating efficiency with a low upfront investment.


  • Provide business continuity and always-available IT
  • Reduce IT footprint and simplify management
  • Save on IT hardware costs
  • Improve service levels and application quality

This kit includes 6 CPU licenses of vSphere Essentials (for 3 servers with up to 2 processors each) and 1 license for vCenter Server Essentials.

The vSphere Essentials Kit consists of the following:

  • vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi)
  • vCenter Server Essentials
Product Overview Essentials Kit Essentials Plus Kit
Overview Server virtualization and consolidation with centralized management Server virtualization and consolidation plus business continuity
Centralized Management vCenter Server Essentials vCenter Server Essentials
License entitlement 3 servers with up to 2 processors each 3 servers with up to 2 processors each
Features vSphere Hypervisor vSphere Hypervisor, vMotion, Cross Switch vMotion, High Availability, vSphere Replication