Your colleague has accidentally allocated more vRAM than your company are licensed for. What will happen to your virtual machines?
A.
all VM’s will be powered off
B.
VMware will be notified
C.
nothing will happen
D.
new VM’s cannot be powered ON
What will happen to your virtual machines?
Your colleague has accidentally allocated more vRAM than your company are licensed for. What will happen to your virtual machines?
Has anyone found any official documentation regarding this specific scenario?
Depends on the version. Essentials will prevent you with hard limits but standard and up do not impose limits so nothing would happen (you would be out of compliance though)
Compliance is measured using average usage for the year, so you can be above allocated max for a while and still be in compliance.
Based on this: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2000935
I think the answer is C. If the customer was using an edition w/a hard limit, the coworker would not have been able to exceed the vRAM license capacity. Since he was, we can presume that they are using an edition that uses a 12 month rolling average of vRAM for compliance. Since it is a rolling average, there is no reason for disallowing VM’s to be powered on. Thus, nothing will happen.
Twelve months down the road, however..
The answer is correct . it is D . if the vRAm is over committed – no new Vm’s can be powered on – http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source-software/vsphere-5-licensing-opens-door-open-source-037
An important feature of the new licensing model is the concept of pooling the vRAM capacity entitlements for all processor licenses. The vRAM entitlements of vSphere CPU licenses are pooled — that is, aggregated — across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance (or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances) to form a total available vRAM capacity (pooled vRAM capacity). If workloads on one server are not using their full vRAM entitlement, the excess capacity can be used by other virtual machines within the VMware vCenter instance. At any given point in time, the vRAM capacity consumed by all powered-on virtual machines within a pool must be equal or lower than the pooled vRAM capacity.
The questions is unclear because you need information of the vCenter Edition to answer the question. For vcenter Essentials “D” is correct; for vCenter Standard “C”.
The answer can be found in the official VMware Licensing PDF ( http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf ), FAQ section at the end of the document:
Q: How am I compliant with this licensing model? Is there a
“hard stop” at my vRAM limit?
A: To be compliant, the 12 month rolling average of the daily high
watermark of configured vRAM must be equal to or less than
the available pooled vRAM capacity. VMware vCenter Server
will not impose a hard limit (with the exception of VMware
vCenter Server for Essentials) on configured vRAM, but will
provide alerts that configured vRAM is approaching or has
surpassed available pooled capacity. The VMware policy is
that customers should buy licenses in advance of use.
it is should be C
VRAM limit is no longer apply to the latest release of ESX 5.1.