Cheapest license for standalone ESXi

Hi Community,

can't answer the simple question by myself. We have powerful standalone server with only 1 VM that requires 24 vCPUs. Unfortunately ESXi free license has limitation of 8 vCPUs per VM.

I was thinking about buying vSphere Essentials license, but in its datasheet i found the following statement "VMware vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multiprocessing enables the use of ultrapowerful virtual machines that have up to four virtual CPUs".

So, what are my options now?