A somewhat surprising popular topic at the moment considering the amazing features announced by VMware this week is vSphere 5 Licensing, I have seen a lot of people talking about this and a lot of confusion and misunderstanding of the new licensing model announced by VMware in vSphere 5. Hopefully this post and my script below will help people work out what their v5 License entitlements will be.

vSphere 5 License Overview

vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license (whether deployed to a host or not) will entitle the purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across a vSphere environment and through linked mode vCenters to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model.

vSphere Advanced is now being removed from the license editions, anyone who currently has licenses for vSphere Advanced – and is active on Subscription and Support – in v4 will automatically be entitled to Enterprise in v5 free of charge, the following vRAM entitlements will be given per license type:

There are a few key things to remember about this:

• vRAM is pooled per license type to create a pool
• Make sure all license keys you have purchased are entered into vCenter
• All Licenses (whether deployed or not) add Pooled vRAM capacity
• Make sure existing vCenter servers are linked – vRAM licenses are pooled across linked mode vCenters giving a total vRAM per license type.

More information on these changes can be found in the Licensing, Pricing and Packaging white paper here.

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If you don’t know what “vStorage APIs for Array Intergration” (VAAI ) is already then I suggest you look it up or at least talk to your storage vendor or VMware about VAAI as this is a great feature added by VMware in vSphere 4.1.

This basically offloads some of the features back to your storage array enabling your vSphere hosts to have more resources and time put aside for what there primary purpose in life is…. “Hosting VMs” and lets face it, the storage array is going to know how to do storage type functions more efficiently than the hosts.  I would suggest reading this post from “Virtual Geek” to get a better understanding of these 3 features which are part of VAAI.

In order to test this we recently needed a way to enable and disable VAAI, this is an easy task on a host, each of the three features have a setting in the “Advanced Settings” configuration tab of the host, these are:

DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedMove
DataMover.HardwareAcceleratedInit
VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking

These are set to 1 by default which means they are enabled, to disable them simply set them to 0.

So with a simple piece of PowerCLI we can easily see their current configuration status:

Get-VMHost MyESXHost | Get-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name DataMover*, VMFS3.HardwareAcc*

We can also easily disable these features for our host:
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