Considerations about the vSAN License or Subscription

You can review and manage your vSAN license, or view your vSAN+ subscription.

vSphere provides a centralized license management system that you can use to manage licenses for vSAN clusters. vSphere+ provides flexible subscription options for vSAN+ clusters.

vSAN License

Use the vSphere License Service to manage licenses for vSAN clusters.

• Make sure that you obtained a valid license for the vSAN cluster. The license should be different from the one that you used for evaluation purposes.

  After the license or the evaluation period of a vSAN expires, you can continue to use the current configuration of vSAN resources. However, you cannot add capacity to a disk group or create disk groups.

• If the cluster consists of all-flash disk groups, verify that the all-flash feature is available under your license.
• If the vSAN cluster uses advanced features such as deduplication and compression or stretched cluster, verify that the feature is available under your license.

• When adding and removing hosts to the cluster, consider the CPU capacity of the vSAN license across the cluster.

  vSAN licenses have per CPU capacity. When you assign a vSAN license to a cluster, the amount of license capacity used is equal to the total number of CPUs on the hosts that participate in the cluster.

  For more information about vSAN licensing, see the VMware VSAN Licensing Guide. To assign a license to your vSANcluster, see Configure License Settings for a vSAN Cluster.

vSAN+ Subscription

If the vCenter Server instances that you plan to subscribe to vSphere+ manage vSAN clusters, you can either continue to use vSAN license keys or purchase a vSAN+ subscription. Do not use a combination of vSAN+ subscriptions and vSAN license keys within the same VMware Cloud account Organization. Combining vSAN+ subscriptions and vSAN license keys results in the entire vSAN deployment being converted to vSAN+ subscription metering and billing, where the license keys would be ignored. This could result in unexpected subscription usage. To view the subscription usage for a cluster, see View a Subscribed Feature for a vSAN Cluster. For more information about vSAN+ subscription, see "Purchase Subscriptions" in the Getting Started with vSphere+ Guide.