vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing: Working out what you will need

The here.

OK, so there are already a ton of blog posts out there on this topic which cover the pros and cons of this change. A couple I found useful are below:

Initially I thought this licensing change might be a bit of a problem for us, but thought I would wait for the dust to settle and spend some time figuring out what the impact could be.

The day after the announcement there were already two PowerCLI solutions available to help calculate the impact:

I didn’t have much time to research these solutions too far before attending the London VMUG 2 days after the vSphere 5 launch. However, they were both showing that we would potentially need to increase our licensing significantly to be able to upgrade. Whilst at the VMUG I struggled to find anyone else in a similar scenario; most others seemed to be in one of the following two licensing positions:

  • I’ve got enough, with some headroom to spare
  • I haven’t quite got enough, so will either need to buy some more or upgrade some to Enterprise Plus

So this week I have spent some time properly researching the subject, during which time Luc has updated his function to split out the different license types and the below was also published:

A combination of the updated function from Luc, Alan’s script which produces a comprehensive HTML report and more time spent researching it has now confirmed that we are in the ‘I’ve got enough, with some headroom to spare’ camp, so a lot better position than I thought.

I am really pleased about this since it now means I can go back to focusing on the technology advancements rather than being concerned about whether it might be affordable or not.

PS When running Alan’s script watch out for a limit in the 32-bit version of PowerCLI which might trip you up.