Licensing VMware vSphere Standard/Enterprise and Enterprise Plus

'''Licensing VMware vSphere Standard/Enterprise and Enterprise Plus'''

All of the Vmware vSphere editions are licensed on a per-processor basis with each physical processor (CPU) in a server needs to have one vSphere processor license key assigned to be able to run vSphere.

1 license = 2 CPUs.

A support and subscription (SnS) contract is required for every edition purchase.

'''vSphere 4 in comparison to higher versions'''

With the introduction of vSphere 5 Vmware introduced new licensing rules.

In the past vSphere 4 had limitations regarding the numbers of cores per processor and the amount of physical memory in a host which vSphere 4 could be deployed.

vSphere 4 can only be deployed on machines with 6 cores for standard and enterprise editions and 12 cores for advanced and enterprise plus editions. There were also RAM restrictions of 256GB for all vSphere 4 editions other than Enterprise Plus which had unlimited RAM restrictions.

Thankfully in vSphere 5 versions and above Vmware reduced complexity and removed these restrictions and allowed for unlimited core counts on hosts and no RAM restrictions.

vSphere 4 was also sold in 1 processor increments rather than 2.