Benefits of vSphere 5.0 Licensing

The new vSphere 5.0 licensing model provides

• Simplicity – Removes two physical constraints (core and physical RAM), replacing them with a single virtual entitlement (vRAM). Customers now have a clear path to license vSphere on next-generation hardware configurations.

• Flexibility – Extends the concept of resource pooling from technology to the business of IT by allowing aggregation and sharing of vRAM entitlement across a large pool of severs.

• Fairness – Better aligns cost with actual use and value derived rather than hardware configurations and capacity.

• Evolution – Allows customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license-management practices and processes.

vSphere Standard Edition provides an entry-level solution for basic server consolidation to slash hardware costs while accelerating application deployment. Each Standard Edition license entitles 24GB of vRAM.

vSphere Enterprise Edition is a robust solution that customers can use to optimize IT assets, ensure cost-effective business continuity and streamline IT operations through automation. Each Enterprise Edition license entitles 32GB of vRAM.

vSphere Enterprise Plus Edition offers the full range of vSphere features for transforming  datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructures, for running today’s applications right

alongside the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.  Each Enterprise Plus Edition license entitles 48GB of vRAM.

Note that all hosts in a vRAM pool must be licensed with the same vSphere edition or, in other terms, vRAM entitlements are pooled by vSphere Edition. It is possible to manage mixed environments

of hosts licensed with different vSphere Editions from the same vCenter, however this will create multiple vRAM pools. vRAM capacity can only be shared among servers licensed with the

same vSphere Edition.