vSAN licensing / packaging

I’ve seen many questions on vSAN packaging over the last months so I figured I would share a table that shows what is possible with which license. A lot of the confusion is around the “ROBO” use case, and I want to make it crystal clear that you can deploy a 2-node ROBO configuration using Standard, Advanced or the special “vSAN for ROBO” 25VM pack that will be made available. Anyway, when it comes to functionality the table below should make it crystal clear what is included with what.

Before anyone asks, “stretched clusters” refers to the vSAN stretched cluster workflow / feature. Two data center rooms in the same building leveraging external witness capabilities through the stretched cluster workflow requires “Advanced”. Three datacenters stretched across campus distance using “fault domains” does not require Advanced, but can use Standard.

Also note that “vSAN Advanced” is included in the “Horizon Advanced” and the “Horizon Enterprise” Suites. If you have either of those, I highly recommend testing vSAN, I am seeing more and more customers taking advantage of it, a great storage platform which performs extremely and is really simple to manage is included in your suite, why not use it?!

The below table shows what the current licensing/packaging looks like for vSAN 6.6. Note that for vSAN 6.5 “all-flash” is now available in all licensing levels. In vSAN 6.6 “QoS” has been dropped down to Standard, and “Local Site Protection for Stretched Clusters” and “vSAN Encryption” have been added to Enterprise. For pricing, please contact your partner or a VMware sales rep.

	vSAN Standard	vSAN Advanced	vSAN Enterprise	vSAN for ROBO Standard	vSAN for ROBO Advanced
SPBM	X	X	X	X	X
Read/Write SSD Caching	X	X	X	X	X
Distributed RAID	X	X	X	X	X
Distributed Switch	X	X	X	X	X
Snapshots / Clones	X	X	X	X	X
Rack Awareness	X	X	X	X	X
Health Monitoring	X	X	X	X	X
vSphere Replication *	X	X	X	X	X
Two Node Robo Configuration	X	X	X	X	X
Two Node Direct Connect	X	X	X	X	X
All-Flash	X	X	X	X	X
Quality of Service	X	X	X	X	X
Dedupe and Compression		X	X		X
RAID-5/6		X	X		X
Stretched Cluster			X
Local Site Protection for Stretched Clusters			X
vSAN Encryption			X

* vSphere Replication is new with a 5 minute RPO, this was exclusive certified for vSAN. In some material you will see this being referred too as vSAN Replication.

Full licensing white paper can be found here,

Some vendors license their application per processor, also in a virtualized environment. So if your VM has 4 vCPU’s your vendor will want you to buy a 4 processor license for the application. But you can avoid this by telling the VM that it has cores instead of processors. In others words, instead of having 4 processors you would have 1 processor with 4 cores:

Power off the VM
Right click on the VM and select “Edit Settings…”
Select the “Options” tab
Click on “General” (in the “Advanced” options section)
Click “Configuration Parameters…” (in the pane on the right)
Click “Add Row”
Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the “Name” column
Enter a value (try 2, 4, or 8) in the “Value” column
Click “OK”
Power on the VM

The VM will now appear to the OS as having multi-core CPUs with the number of cores per CPU given by the value that you selected. For example, if you create an 8 VCPU VM and set “cpuid.coresPerSocket = 2” it will be recognized as 4 dual-core CPU’s by the OS while it’s actually utilizing 8 physical cores.

Keep in mind that this feature is currently unsupported!