VMware vCenter Protect is available within two different product bundles.
VMware vCenter Protect Essentials: This is the basic product offering that includes patch management, asset inventory, and a limited number of scripts for IT management.
VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus: This is the full-featured product offering that includes patch management, asset inventory, antivirus & antispyware, power management, configuration management, and full ITScript capabilities.
There are several different editions of VMware vCenter Protect. Each edition provides a different level of capabilities. To determine which edition you are running, select Help > About to view program details.
This section provides a synopsis of each available edition.
This is the full edition of the program. With VMware vCenter Protect you can scan for missing patches, deploy missing patches, and view the results of these actions. You also have access to all the other features provided by your program license (VMware vCenter Protect Essentials or VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus).
The Audit edition allows you to perform agentless scans for missing patches and to evaluate the status of your machines. It does not allow you to deploy patches to your machines, nor does it provide access to the power and asset management functions or the agent-based threat management capabilities of VMware VMware vCenter Protect Agent.
VMware vCenter Protect is available on a trial basis. This enables you to test all the capabilities of VMware vCenter Protect, but only for 45 days. You are also limited to 50 license seats. When the trial license expires the program will only allow you to scan and deploy to the local machine.
VMware vCenter Protect Limited is what you receive if you download the program from the Web site and do not enter a license key. It takes up where Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) 2.x leaves off by analyzing the patch status of those Microsoft products no longer supported by MBSA. As its name suggests, VMware vCenter Protect Limited is not a full-featured version of the program. It scans only a limited set of legacy Microsoft products. It does not allow you to deploy patches to your machines, nor does it provide access to the power and asset management functions or to the agent-based capabilities of VMware VMware vCenter Protect Agent. For more details, see What is The Limited Program?.