VMware vSphere hotplug

Hotplug of virtual hardware is attractive feature of VMware ESX 3.x/4.x. In case of ESX 3.x it is limited to hotadd of virtual disk to a running virtual machine only. With next generation of VMware vSphere hypervisor you are able to hotadd of memory or CPU to a machine if guest operating system supports it.

I was surprised during vSphere evaluation how it pretty works. I used to hotadd of virtual disks to my machines quite often. But when I upgraded 3.5 infrastructure to new vShpere 4.0, I became disappointed because it stopped working.

The reason why is simple. Hotadd feature is available from advanced edition only and I was upgrading to standard edition which doesn't contain license for it. You can check it in my previous post VMware vShpere 4.0 editions . Below is an error message which is complaining about missing license:

I think it wasn't a right decision to shift the feature to the higher editions. I think it would be better to leave things where they were because people are used to using them. And I hope that VMware will push back at least hotadd of virtual disk in some future release of vSphere.