All USB Drives are not equal?

[Harvin]

Hi,

we are considering to buy a VMware Virtual Center.
We have two servers running VMware Standard edition.
Do you believe it will be worth it? Or do we have to
upgrade our VMware licenses to Enterprise before upgrading
virtual center to make it worth it.

It would be nice to have but expensive for your setup vs feature set. With Std Ed you can not get the features that really make it worth while. For example VMotion requires Enterprise Ed and a SAN. Take a look at the free versions of FASTSCP and RootAccess at www.veeam.com. They will allow you to copy (non-running) VM's. You use that to to simulate templates in VC and copy them between the two servers. I think that duplicates the biggest things you would get from VC in your setup.

[beng]

G'day Shankyrhodes,
Harvin is correct that VC is expensive for what it does.

What features are you looking for?

If you are able to shutdown VM's for short periods while you work on the ESX, then an OpenE iSCSI is all you need.
So long as the VM is on the shared iSCSI target, you just shutdown the VM, remove it from the Inventory, browse the datastore on the other ESX, and import the vmx config.

VC would allow you to cold migrate (ie shutdown) VMS from one ESX to the other if you have a shared data store (ie DSS iSCSI) and it is also nice for templates. (Though Harvins solution is also fine if you don't do them often).
It also gives you longer trending for performance, and I think that would be abuot it in your scenario.

Rgds Ben