Quick and Dirty – Save your VMware license count on Oracle Ravello

Background

Whilst deploying bare metal ESXi host workloads on Oracle Ravello, I always thought it odd that you could only specify single core processors per server which results in a 4 CPU system consuming 4 socket license for VMware. When you are limited to 16 socket licenses with vExpert license keys, this quickly gets consumed. But there is a way around this….

The fix

I highlighted in this blog post how to make ESXi 6.7 run on Oracle Ravello. Below is a continuation of editing the advanced CPU settings on the bare metal machine.

Now, let’s presume we would like a host with 2 x 8 core processors which will equate to 16 cores usable, not 16 sockets that we would previously assign to the bare metal machine.

First, assign 16 CPU’s to the machine as below:

Then select the advanced config option.

and set the CoresPerSocket option to 8.

Save and update and then power on the host.

Voila.

Just remember this is still going to burn through 16 CPU hours per hour it is running 🙂

Ian