We are a church so our finances are meager. However, we do believe in virtualization for our church network. We have a couple of VCP4 church members who are helping us with our virtualization project.
Currently, we are using ESXi5 hypervisor with 2 Dell PowerEdge Servers hosting our 6 VMs. However, we are hoping to create more later. While this is small, we believe that having the Essential PLus kit would certainly aid in the administration and management of our Vmware environment. Our primary concern is that our technical help is voluntary so we need to reliably keep our Hosts and VMs up and running. In the hypervisor environment that is not so easy. With vMotion and HA/DRS it would be a great benefit.
The problem is costs.
I have seen postings with HP and Lenovo branding selling vSphere Essentials Plus kit version 5 for as little as $900 to $1300. Our servers are all Dell PowerEdge and have VT technology. We have the necessary Quad Core Processors with 8GB of memory (and, with luck we will be able to boost it to 16GB). So, the question is: Are these postings (and, one is on Amazon) legitimate and can we use these HP and Lenovo branded Essentials Plus kits on our Dell Hosts?