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vSAN Licensing

Like all other VMware products, using a vSAN in production environment requires a license that you can assign to each vSAN Cluster. vSphere provides a centralized license management system that you can use to manage licenses for vSAN clusters.


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.


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. 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. 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.


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


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.


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.


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