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Comment by jjm | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though.

But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?

Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.

Those "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see what pain is).

Yep - we just bought 54 x 8GB DDR3-1333 Registered DIMMs for about 10K, and we can sell the 54 x 4GB modules we are replacing for about 2-3K on eBay. But since this is a VMware cluster, now I have to scramble to see what this is going to cost me in additional licensing before I upgrade. :(

You can buy a 24G PC from Dell's website now, it's nothing exotic anymore.

To me, 24GB per cpu seems very low for a VM host.

Really? Per 10-core cpu or per core?

By my reading of this pdf, each physical CPU requires a license and each license allows for 24-48GB of guest ram. It seems they're specifically trying to limit licensing by vRAM, rather than CPU because there are more cores in CPU's now.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).

To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores.

But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.

is 24GB vRAM per license low?

Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.

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