So, not sure how many of you have seen this but vSphere 5 was announced today along with a new pricing model. The new model is basically priced on a RAM usage basis – core limitations are eliminated (along with the vSphere Advanced licensing tier) and replaced with a RAM allowance per CPU socket. Those are as follows: 24GB per Standard socket license, 32GB per Enterprise socket, and 48GB for Enterprise+ socket. RAM allotments are across an entire cluster on a common vCenter, so if you have a cluster with 128GB memory in use you better have enough CPU licenses for that. The one benefit is since core counts and installed RAM aren't restricted anymore you can install whatever hardware you please; however, you need at least enough licenses to cover all your sockets (like before) as well as now enough licenses to cover all the RAM your VMs are currently using.

In essence, VMware has probably vastly increased the licensing cost for a lot of us. Over here I'm now looking at being able to only use 88% of my installed RAM without additional licensing cost. There's a lot of amazing new features in vSphere 5, too – 64TB datastores, new storage IO control, etc – but be aware that vSphere is now a vastly more expensive solution.