Someone explain VMWare's proc licensing to me...

[GobBluth]

Apparently, from what I gathered from their whitepaper, an VMWare enterprise licenses is for one physical processor with 12 cores. Does that mean you can allocate them anywhere you want within that same vCenter?

Right now I have 2 hosts running one monster server and I want to bump the processors up to 4 quad cores but my licensing does not allow me to do that and another licenses is quoted at ~$14K.

WTH? Can someone explain this to me?


-GB

 

[Gunbuster]

Change over to Hyper-V on server 2012 and not worry about it?

 

[tomt4535]

It's licensed by the physical CPU sockets in the system. If you are buying new today, you would purchase as many licenses as you have physical CPU sockets in your system. A license is required for every CPU in every host inside your vCenter. The different editions allow you to do different things. They used to have a fairly complicated licensing scheme with vRAM entitlements and physical CPU core restrictions, but that is all gone now. The current list price for 1 CPU Enterprise + 1 year of support(required) is $3,594. 4 physical CPUs in the host server, that's $14,376. Sounds about right to me.

 

[Idontcare]

VMware is not ran by dummies. They are going to look at why you use their product (it saves you money over that of buying all the extra hardware to run as many separate instances as you intend to run), they are going to look at why customers want to do that versus spending all that money on hardware (space savings at $/ft^2 real-estate value, power savings and building AC savings, personnel savings, hardware support and maintenance contract savings, etc) and they are going to conclude "if we price this product at X-dollars per processor core then the customer is going to have to choose between paying $Y to us for our product or pay 1.5 x $Y to their various hardware suppliers and overhead entities".

From there you end up with IT managers running the numbers and concluding to their bosses "if we pay $Y to VMware then we stand to save 50% on our budget in the long run".

Everybody wins, but you aren't going to walk away with getting something for nothing. If the world worked that way then Microsoft would have been bankrupted by Linux long ago. Free is free for a reason, if it was worth something then it would be priced as such.