Great news to hear that ESX 3 will be available this month. In anticipation to the release, a number of interesting whitepapers have been released. Check them out here.

You should definitely read this because it describes the pricing, packaging and licensing in more detail. For most of our customers, the choice will be obvious: VMware Infrastructure Enterprise will be the way to go. It includes all ESX 3 features, VMFS, Virtual SMP, VMotion, HA, DRS and Consolidated Backup. It does not include a VirtualCenter management server. A separate license is required for that (per server). VMware Infrastructure in general is licensed per two CPUs and they allow you to distribute that over physical servers how you want.

Ok, I got some reading to do now....