Update on VMware vSphere 5 licensing
The last days have been hectic in the vmware community with the announcement of the 5 release of vSphere (http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/overview.html), not so much on new features (which will be discussed later probably) that the new licensing model offered with VS5!
Indeed, as you can see from various post, like on the official VMware blog http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/07/understanding-the-vsphere-5-vram-licensing-model.html or on our favorite hypervisor http://www.hypervisor.fr/?p=3182, VS5 licensing introduced the concept of vRAM Pool with a limit per socket according to the different editions (including a limit of 48GB / socket for the Enterprise+ => not cool, especially for dual-socket servers with more than 96GB of RAM, a fairly common model).
Just look at the comments of the VMware blog post, some reactions are far from friendly ! Yesterday (just over two weeks after the official announcement), VMware has changed the licensing to re-evaluate the limitations posed by this new method. Since a picture is worth a thousand words:
As a lot of blog talking about it, we won’t talk more about it, but here is a list of links (of course not limited to!) that explain the new VS5 licensing :