I presently have ESXi Essentials licenses, and 6 hosts. 3 are at HQ, 3 others at individual remote sites. The ESXi licenses allow me to use vCenter, but it's limited to 3 hosts in vCenter inventory. So I use vCenter to manage the 3 hosts at HQ, and I use the Windows client to manage each individual remote site. It's starting to get tedious doing this, especially with patching. I would ideally like to manage all HQ and remote hosts from the same vCenter. From what I can tell, I'll need to purchase vCenter Standard to do this, which runs $5K, plus a year of maintenance. Can I get a confirm on this? Or is there a less expensive way?
Second question - even if I purchase vCenter Standard, I still need to have licenses for the hosts, right? I would probably stick with ESXi Essentials.