It used to be per instance of the OS. If you have 3 Windows VMs and 2 Windows physical machines then you need 5 licenses. (Actually, for a while they allowed 2 VMs per license, so you'd actually only need 4 licenses in that example and you still had license enough to install another VM).
Now they're doing it by CPU core count...except they don't explain very clearly whether they're concerned about physical CPU cores or virtual ones. I have my ESXi hosts oversubscribed with VMs assigned twice as many cores as actually exist. Further, VMs migrate inside of host clusters as needed, so one day there might be 12 VMs on host A and 2 on host B, another day there might be 8 and 6, etc.
I know that we can't ask them to sell based on how much it costs them, but for fuck's sake, core count has no bearing on their costs or even their revenue except if I replace two servers with one more powerful one -- but what of higher clock speeds and other performance enhancements? Are they going to start charging for that shit? This is ridiculous.
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