Effective April 1, 2008
This is a notification of policy clarification for customers and partners with regard to the licensing of VMware ESX and VMware Infrastructure Suites (VI).
Effective immediately, customers may install VMware ESX and VI licenses on single processor, physical hosts that are included on our Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). This includes servers with two sockets that are populated with a single processor. Each processor may contain up to four cores. Please note that licenses of VMware ESX and VI are still sold in minimum increments of two processors. With this announcement, VMware is clarifying that a two processor license grant may now be split and used on two, single processor, physical hosts.
In order to install licenses in single processor increments, a customer must use the Centralized License Server model for installing and managing VMware license files, as described in the VMware Installation and Upgrade Guide.
When using this licensing model, a single license file is stored on a license server, which manages your entire license pool and makes licenses available to one or more hosts.