One of the items that I wanted to gain some clarity on, was the new edition of the vSphere Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) Editions which have been announced at VMorld 2014. Hopefully this post will go some way towards clarifying what you do and don’t get.
Licensing Types
vSphere ROBO will come in two flavours, Standard and Advanced.
| Item | vSphere ROBO Standard | vSphere ROBO Advanced |
| Licensing | 25 Virtual Machine Pack | 25 Virtual Machine Pack |
| Features | High AvailabilityvMotion
vSphere Data Protection vSphere Replication vSphere EndPoint Fault Tolerance Storage vMotion |
High AvailabilityvMotion
vSphere Data Protection vSphere Replication vSphere EndPoint Fault Tolerance Storage vMotion Distributed Switch Host Profiles Auto Deploy |
Licensing Limitatons
- Maximum of 25 VM’s Per Site, deployment options include:
- 1 Site with 25 x VM’s
- 25 Sites with 1 x VM
- No vCenter
- Need to purchase vCenter Standard separately
What About vSphere Essentials Editions?
vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus is going end of life in the next couple of months. I assume that if a customer is in support they will be upgraded to vSphere ROBO standard or Advanced with a ‘free vCenter Standard license’.
When this information is released, I will update this post to reflect the details.
Thoughts
Often clients won’t pay for vSphere Enterprise Plus for ROBO, which means that vSphere Standard is the de-facto choice. This results in higher operational costs as you don’t have access to Host Profiles or Virtual Distributed Switches.
Having the ability to purchase 1 x 25VM pack to cover a number of ESXi Hosts across sites, will be much more cost effective with the list price of vShere Standard being approximately £1,000 versus £2,700 for vSphere Advanced Edition (1 US Dollar = 0.60 Britsh Pounds).
What I think would be even better is if VSAN was included in the package!
VMFocus 
It looks like it is only essentials and essentials + for RoBo will be going end of life rather than the standard Essentials and Essentials+ packaged bundles.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/08/introducing-vmware-vsphere-remote-office-branch-office-editions.html