Licensing for Clusters with vSAN Enabled

After you enable vSAN on a cluster, you must assign the cluster an appropriate vSAN license.

Similar to vSphere licenses, vSAN licenses have per CPU capacity. When you assign a vSAN license to a cluster, the amount of license capacity used equals the total number of CPUs in the hosts participating in the cluster. For example, if you have a vSAN cluster that contains 4 hosts with 8 CPUs each, assign the cluster a vSAN license with a minimum capacity of 32 CPUs.

The license use of the vSAN is recalculated and updated in one of the following cases:

• If you assign a new license to the vSAN cluster
• If you add a new host to the vSAN cluster
• If a host is removed from the cluster
• If the total number of CPUs in a cluster changes

You must maintain the vSAN clusters in compliance with the vSAN licensing model. The total number of CPUs of all hosts in the cluster must not exceed the capacity of the vSAN license that is assigned to the cluster.

License and Evaluation Period Expiry

When the license or the evaluation period of a vSAN expires, you can continue to use the currently configured vSAN resources and features. However, you cannot add SSD or HDD capacity to an existing disk group or create new disk groups.

vSAN for Desktop

vSAN for Desktop is intended for use in VDI environments, such as vSphere for Desktop or Horizon ™ View™. The license use for vSAN for Desktop equals the total number of powered on VMs in a cluster with enabled vSAN.

To remain EULA compliant, the license use for vSAN for Desktop must not exceed the license capacity. The number of powered on desktop VMs in a vSAN cluster must be less than or equal to the license capacity of vSAN for Desktop.