vSphere 5 New Licensing Model

With vSphere 5 unveiled last month, a new licensing model was been introduced.  VMware claims that this new licensing model provides “Simplicity”, “Flexibility”, “Fairness” and “Evolution”.  You can find out more about their claims from the VMware’s website and judge for yourself.

Anyway, the new licensing model is similar to the current one because it still licensed on a per-processor basis.  What is the difference is the “Pooled vRAM Entitlements”.  This has caused some confusions initially (so much for simplicity).  vRAM is the RAM assigned to a virtual machine and should not be confuse with the physical RAM.  In vSphere 4.1 and earlier, there are limitations on the number of core per processor and amount of physical RAM.  In vSphere 5.0, these have become unlimited.

With the “Per-Processor with Pooled vRAM Entitlements” new licensing model, each processor license entitle you an X amount of vRAM depending on the edition.

	Essentials	Essentials Plus	Standard	Enterprise	Enterprise Plus
vRAM entitlement per processor	24GB (144GB Max)	24GB (144GB Max)	24GB	32GB	48GB

So how does it work?  Take for example, if you have 2 physical host.  Each host has 4 processors.  You buy a total of 8 processors Enterprise license.  In this case, you are entitle 8 X 32GB = 256GB of vRAM.  You can create as many virtual machines just as long as the total amount of vRAM assigned to all the virtual machines does not exceed 256GB (pooled between the 2 hosts).  Let’s say if all your virtual machines are given 4GB of vRAM, you can have up to 64 virtual machines.  If all your virtual machines are having 16GB of vRAM, you can only have 16 virtual machines.  It doesn’t matter which host are those virtual machines residing because the vRAM is pooled between the 2 hosts.

What happens if you exceed the limit?  According to VMware, no hard stop has been imposed (with the exception of VMware vCenter Server for Essentials).  However, you will receive alert informing you that the consumed vRAM had surpassed available pooled capacity.  In layman's terms, buy more processor licenses (even you don’t have the physical processor) or upgrade edition (e.g. Enterprise to Enterprise Plus to gain 16GB more of vRAM per processor).

There is also change in the maximum number of vCPU per virtual machine since my last blog “VMware vSphere Maximum vCPUs Per VM”.  The new  maximum number of vCPU per virtual machine is as follow.

	Essentials	Essentials Plus	Standard	Enterprise	Enterprise Plus
vCPU Entitlement	8	8	8	8	32

I am still trying figure out how this new licensing model can benefit me as a customer.

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