A period of up to 90 days during which a new ESX 9.0 host, vCenter or other component, or one upgraded from version 8, operates without a licence. An ESX host's countdown begins when it first boots, rather than when it is added to vCenter.
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In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Evaluation mode in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- vCenter
Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.
- Azure Machine Learning component
Reusable building block for a pipeline, versioned and self-contained, much like a function: it declares a name, inputs and outputs, and bundles the command, code and environment it runs.
- Licence
What entitles one particular user to the services a subscription offers. Each product licence is made up of several service plans (one per app or service), and before giving it to someone an admin has to record that user's usage location.
- FIRST
A DAX function available only inside visual calculations. It fetches the value at the start of one axis of the visual's matrix, which makes it handy for comparing each point with the first; its opposite is LAST.
Related terms
- over-use
A condition where a licence's consumed capacity is above what has been allocated. Until that is corrected, it cannot be assigned to further vCenter instances, and any vCenter it already covers takes on additional ESX hosts in evaluation mode only.
- service inheritance
A licensing rule in VCF Operations HCX where the Service Mesh between two sites takes whichever entitlement is broader. An Evaluation Mode site linked to a VCF-licensed one therefore receives the complete service set.