VMware Product Licensing

Mulit Core Pricing & Licensing

This policy defines a processor for licensing purposes as up to six cores per processor. For example, this means that a customer who purchases a two-socket server with each socket populated with a hexa-core processor is only required to purchase 2 processor licenses of VMware Infrastructure 3 or related products for that server. This allows customers to take advantage of increased processor performance for virtual environments without a corresponding increase in licensing cost.

Please note that this policy applies to VMware Infrastructure server products licensed on a per-processor basis (e.g., ESX, VirtualCenter, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware HA, Consolidated Backup) and physical servers on the systems compatibility guides for specific product versions.

Single Processor Licensing

customers may install VMware ESX and VI licenses on single processor, physical hosts that are included on our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). This includes servers with two sockets that are populated with a single processor. Each processor may contain up to four cores. Please note that licenses of VMware ESX and VI are still sold in minimum increments of two processors. With this announcement, VMware is clarifying that a two processor license grant may now be split and used on two, single processor, physical hosts.

In order to install licenses in single processor increments, a customer must use the Centralized License Server model for installing and managing VMware license files, as described in the VMware Installation and Upgrade Guide.  When using this licensing model, a single license file is stored on a license server, which manages your entire license pool and makes licenses available to one or more hosts.