vSphere 5 Licensing - vRAM pooling over multiple (not-linked) vCenter instances?

[peetz]

Hi all,

is the pooling of vRAM entitlements limited to a single vCenter instance, I mean - if you have multiple vCenter instances, does that mean that you also have multiple vRAM pools?

Or is the licensing component in vSphere 5 now able to be used by multiple vCenter instances?

What about linked mode?

This might relax people that maybe have a legacy farm with 2- to 4-core-CPUs and not-so-much-RAM per CPU on the one side (with a plenty of unused vRAM entitlements), and another modern farm with 6- to 12-core CPUs and 128GB+ RAM per CPU (with the desperate need for more vRAM entitlements) on the other side ...

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[bilalhashmi]

The vRAM pool can span across multiple vCenter that in link mode.

According to the lic pdf "As long as the total consumed

vRAM across all virtual machines managed by a VMware vCenter

instance or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances is less or

equal to the total available vRAM, vSphere is correctly licensed." Page 4    http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Follow me @ Cloud-Buddy.com

[peetz]

Yes, but think of a situation where you don't want to use linked mode, but have several separated installations - maybe in a multi-national enterprise - that are also managed by different entities and people...

In such a situation it would be good to either

a) have a globally usable licensing service with CPU and vRAM entitlement pooled all over the enterprise, or at least:

b) to be legally entitled to over-subscribe vRAM-entitlements in one environment if you under-utilize the pool of another environment to the same amount (Practically this can easily be possible, because vRAM pool entitlements are not technically enforced).

Probably, only a VMware guy can answer this question, but it's an important one for large enterprises.

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog