Hi, I've been reading up on this for quite a few hours and would like to get confirmation here. I have
- a physical host: dual CPU, 8 core per CPU
- multiple VSphere 5.0 Standard Edition licenses
- VCenter 5.0 Enterprise Edition
I want to allocate VM's with 12 vCPU and I expect to consume two Standard Edition licenses - one for each CPU, in order to achieve a total of 12 vCPU. When I try to do this using VCenter I get error "Virtual machine has 12 virtual CPUs, but the host only supports 8. The number of virtual CPUs may be limited by the guest OS selected for the virtual machine or by the licensing for the host."
I think that this is a licensing restriction because on the same host, the evaluation VSphere allowed the deployment of a 12 vCPU VM using RHEL 6.3. I later checked the vCPU feature on the evaluation copy and it was 32-way so this proves that it is not an OS or physical host problem. I think I downloaded an evaluation of "Standard" rather "Enterprise" but I'm not certain.
I've read Compare VMware vSphere Editions and the column "Standard" has row CPU: "per 1 CPU" and row vCPU: "8-way". This makes me think that for every new license I should have a CPU with up to 8 cores. i.e. by consuming two licenses, I can use 2 CPU and up to 16 cores.
I've also read the EULA VMware Multi-Core Pricing and Licensing Policy and it says
Software Licenses with six(6) cores per Processor
It doesn't say "Software Licenses with six(6) cores per host"
The following extract from the EULA is the only evidence that I could find to support the conclusion that for Standard Edition, the maximum number of vCPU per host is 8 (regardless of the number of licenses consumed);
Combine multiple VMware software licenses on a single host. Licensing Policy allows combining licenses of same software on single processor.
Can anyone confirm the limitation and is there something more obvious that I've missed at Compare VMware vSphere Editions. The difference between per host and per processor is huge, I'm surprised that it is so ambiguous.
Thanks,
Diarmuid