Last few weeks a lot of talk has been about the new VMware licensing for vSphere 5. Many reported how this would work against VMware’s principle of running as many VMs on one host as possible. After the dust had settled, people started checking their own situations and found that things weren’t as bad as they looked in the first place but for some the new licensing policy would still mean a substantial cost impact.

When reading all the comments, people weren’t complaining about the vRAM model, but mostly about the entitlements. A vSphere 5 Enterprise license would give you a 32GB vRAM entitlement per CPU and 48GB vRAM on Enterprise Plus. Many thought this was much too low.

Well, there is some great news. I picked up on a rumor which will make a lot of people happy. Personally, I never thought VMware would change the licensing policy and especially not in such a short time. A big company like VMware would need weeks and maybe months to change their plans, but I stand corrected. VMware used the customer feedback and changed the vRAM entitlements. My compliments!!!

The new policy:

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlement

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlement

Max vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAM

VMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB ( <- my assumption)

VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GB

VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GB

The amount of vRAM that counts against your vRAM license pool will be capped to 96GB per VM !!! In other words, even if you assign 256GB or the new 1TB limit of RAM to a VM, it will only count as 96GB for your license.

See: http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/impending-vmware-vsphere-50-license.html