VMware vSAN powers market-leading Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solutions through native integration with the industry-standard VMware vSphere hypervisor and the VMware vCenter Server unified management solution. vSAN is quite capable of running nearly any virtual server and desktop workload. These workloads run in an ever-increasing number of environments: primary data centers, disaster recovery sites, remote offices, call centers, retail stores, commercial ships, and more. A one-size-fits-all licensing model does not cover such a wide variety of use cases so VMware offers vSAN in a few different licensing options.
UPDATE: The vSAN Licensing Guide has been updated. See the vSAN 6.6 Licensing Guide.
The vSAN 6.5 Licensing Guide is available to help customers and partners understand what licensing editions are available, the features included in each edition, the consumption types (per-CPU, per-VM, per-CCU), and the scenarios where they are commonly used. Notable changes to the licensing lineup include support for all-flash configurations with all license types, block access using the iSCSI protocol, and the addition of ROBO Advanced to enable all-flash space efficiency features such as deduplication and compression in a cost-effective, per-VM licensing model for remote office locations.
While it might seem a bit confusing at first, you will hopefully see that the intent was to keep licensing as simple as possible while providing flexible, cost-effective options for a wide variety of implementation scenarios. The vSAN 6.5 Licensing Guide begins with a quick introduction to vSAN and the license editions available with version 6.5. This is followed by several example scenarios along with a summary that highlights the main items to keep in mind when considering vSAN licensing.
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