you can still use Enterprise, but the remaining cores per, will be masked out after 6.

Obviously the licensing scheme will have to change at some point when the low end hardware will be coming out with 8+ cores in the coming years.  I don't think Intel will phase out its quad-core as fast as AMD apparently is so I suspect the licensing scheme wont change until Intel phases out its 4 core CPUs.

Like Troy said you can still buy the hardware and ESX just wont use the remaining Cores, but then again why pay for that hardware when you wont use it.    

Depending on your vendor, probably around 600-800$ I believe

I haven't tried this myself, but you can combine CPU licenses to cover the 6+ cores - http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html.

Hello Taylorb

Here you have a link to the vmware pricing site but you can select a partner in your region if you want to understand better the differences.

Hi,

I know this is off topic but something to think about before purchasing uber servers for VMware is the scaling up vs scaling out argument. While you could run your entire environment from 2 of these servers, would you want to? If you only have the two and one goes down then you drop 50% of your environment whereas if you have more less spec'd servers then you might only drop 33% or less of your environment. Another thing to contemplate is maintenance - I work on a N+1(+1) rule so if I have host out for maintenance and lose a host production continues. Another reason is to do with maintenance contracts, not sure what others do but we don't purchase additional hardware maintenance for our hosts. By having additional hosts in the cluster we can afford to have a ESX server down for an extended period while parts are replaced during work hours.

Just something to think about.

Kind regards,

Glen

Hi TaylorB,

Sorry this was referring to this comment -

I was just checking out a DL585 G7 and you can configure that with 384GB of RAM and 48 Cores for under $40k.  Two of those with ESX could pretty much run most mid sized companies!

Not the DL385's.

Kind regards,

Glen