At first I thought they were going into the wrong direction but as I started learning the “why” and motivator to this change I realized it has value.
If you consider in the future you will have hosts with less physical CPUs (sockets) and more cores, it definitely means less licenses.
But what about the vRAM pool concept ?
I believe everybody likes to have some room for growing or even temporary high utilization. So, it’s note unusual that you have 20% of your total amount memory reserved for future utilization.
Also as memory might be the less expensive component these days, you tend to buy as much as possible.
So instead of licensing all the physical RAM you have available, you will have to license just what has been utilizes for your VMs. (vRAM pool takes into consideration the amount of allocated vRAM on each powered on VMs)
Yeah, just powered on VMs, that means you will pay what you use.
It’s better to pay attention now on how much of memory you allocate to any given VM and monitor it’s utilization to right size it accordingly, or you will be just wasting your money on licenses.
I’m not here to debate if it’s right or wrong, it’s just different, but to be honest it seems a lot fairer to me.
I encourage all of you to read the VMware vSphere License White Paper.
You now might be wondering, how do I know how many licenses do I need when upgrading to vSphere 5 ?
Good news !! VMWARE released a tool to help you identify your vRAM pool needs and amount of licenses you will need.
It’s called vSphere Licensing Advisor and can be downloaded here.
Here’s a video from http://www.virtu-al.net/ that shows you how it works
VMware License Advisor from Alan Renouf on Vimeo.