If you haven’t heard yet, VMware has changed how licensing for vSphere products works for the upcoming version 5 release. The different editions (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus) no longer limit CPU core or physical RAM amounts. Instead, each CPU license comes with a certain amount of vRAM entitlement. This entitlement is counted by how much RAM is assigned to the VM guest. The vRAM allocations are globally pooled when using vCenter, meaning the vRAM is not strictly bound to any physical CPU but shared amongst all licensed hosts. The table below shows each edition’s entitlement:
- Standard vRAM Entitlement = 24GB
- Enterprise vRAM Entitlement = 32GB
- Enterprise+ vRAM Entitlement = 48GB
So, using Enterprise as en example, 2 CPU licenses would allow for up to 64GB of virtual RAM (vRAM) to be assigned to guests. It is not required to have hosts built at the same physical RAM (pRAM) counts as you are licensed. Also, this model does not change current 4.x license agreements and capacities current customers already have.
This change means we are shifting our license model from being bound to physical hardware configuration to the virtual guest configuration.
The Essentials packs are still available and come with 24G-vRAM per CPU entitlements.
The free ESXi hypervisor is still available and comes with 8GB of vRAM allocation.
Those interested in how their current allocation might change their license requirements can run an unofficial PowerCLI script from PeetersOnline: http://bit.ly/qCPvoB
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