VMWare Licensing

I assume you're referring to vSphere/ESX. ESX is licensed per *physical* CPU socket, regardless of cores. So, if you have a 2 CPU socket-dual core box, you don't pay for 4 CPUs, but only 2.

Hope that helps.

Regards,
~coolsport00

2 types of licensing in general.  

1.  Bundles for SMB customers which give you vCenter and up to 3 ESX hosts (total 6 sockets) You do not have the same capability as standalone licensing such as vmotion, DRS, etc.. and you can't go past 3 ESX host nor upgrade.  This is good for customer that do not have SAN infrastructure.

2.  Ala carte  - You purcase vCenter and ESX host (per proc) licensing separately and depending on the license you can get different options.  The licenses can be upgraded to higher versions.

you have 3 options
1. VI Foundation
with that you get: Consolidated Backup, Update Manager, VC Agent

2.VI Standard
You get High Availability option with this licence
works for most SMBs as long as you don't need DRS and VMotion

3. enterprise
you get DRS DPM  VMotion and Storage VMotion  
(great for datacentres and multi office setups)

so it really depends on what your clients need. VMware licences are not cheap so chose wisely.

VMware vSphere is the name of the entire VMware product suite that comprise VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0, vCenter 4.0 and other products related to vSphere.
vCenter is the central management component which comes in 3 flavours -
vCenter for Essentials which can manage upto 3 ESX Hosts,
vCenter Server Standard which can manage 3 Hosts
vCenter Standard which can support 300 ESX Hosts (if installed in a x64 Operating system).
vCenter is licensed on per instance basis unlike ESX which is licensed on per CPU basis irrespective of the number of cores.
ESX/ESXi is divided into 4 main editions, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.
If you want a detailed analysis of the editions, you can take a look at the vSphere Comparison chart
For SMB segments, VMware vSphere has 2 products, Essentials and Essentials Plus.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html 
 
 

Also, there is now only 1 25-key license file/string (similar to MS's lic keys), whereas in older versions of ESX (3.5 and below), you had separate licenses for different features. It is also handled within vCenter instead of in a separate license file server install on virtual center.

VMware's quote on licensing:
"VMware vSphere Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus - These editions are licensed on a per processor basis where a processor is defined as a populated socket with one or more physical processor cores.  The number of processor cores licensed by the software depends on the edition.  VMware vSphere Standard and Enterprise define a processor as up to 6 cores while VMware vSphere Advanced and Enterprise Plus define a processor as up to 12 cores."

And, as mentioned above, you have Small Business options with 'Essentials' edition, but the pricing is the same...based on per Core/socket.

~coolsport00

Great diagram. Thank-you