Okay so I finally talked to VMWare about this. Here is the story. There is conflicting information even within VMWare with respect to the sales department as well as the field technicians. This is the way it is: Because it has never been specifically written to exclude the seperating of a license pack amongst two physical machines then there is nothing they can do about it. On top of that, it cant be determined in VC either. It is not a supported configuration through VMWare however and any sales representative you talk to WILL tell you this is not allowed since its more money in VMWare's pocket.
Reviewing the license agreement you will NOT be held accountable in such a situation since far to much is left open to interupretation. Without a specific written clause that states "under no circumstances is a single license pack allowed to be split amongst two physical servers, each with one (1) single processor without breaking the agreements set herein" or to that extent it will not hold up in a court and as such, good luck faulting someone for it, especially when the product you use to manage the software can not distinguish the difference either. Its very easy to plead ignorance especially with no set defined answer from the company themselves.
Compare VMWare's license agreement with that of Microsoft's OS agreements and you will see the difference Im refering to. A real gray area yes, and personally I think if VMWare was to enforce this, well actually I know...they would be losing LOTS of customers to other upcoming technologies like Virtual Iron. Not as pretty sure, not the same features and ease of use per say, but more then ideal for LOTS and LOTS of customers wanting to start into virtualization, for a fraction of the cost. It would suit many customers just fine for their needs.
As I have stated before such a case is greed. They dont make the money on the hardware so it dosent matter to them. If a customer is only going to buy one license, regardless of whether they buy two machines, VWware is not making any more money on the sale so its pointless. The customer would then simply say "well Im buying only one license pack so I guess I will just a buy a single server with two processors instead of one and beef up other redundancy offerings" Yes excluding advanced functionality but you understand what I am saying. On top of that, they would probably less likely to spend the extra on standard or enterprise for the additional functionality like vmotion or HA/DRS.
Its pretty simple really.
