Xenserver "per-CPU socket" Licencing

[KYLEDLH]

So this may sound like a stupid question but the description of Xenserver licencing was a little confusing. While researching Xenserver for my college work, I looked at their licencing FAQ and under the question: "How many licences do I need?" the answer was:

"XenServer is licensed on a per-CPU socket basis. For a host to be considered
licensed all hosts in the pool must be licensed. XenServer only counts populated
CPU sockets."

Does this mean for a server that has 2 or more CPU's, you need to buy multiple licences?

 

[molletts]

Yes, you need one licence per CPU. As they say, unpopulated sockets don't count so if you have a dual- or quad-CPU board but only one CPU is fitted, you only need one licence.

(Thank goodness for Intel's new 22-core CPUs! 🙂

 

[KYLEDLH]

Yes, you need one licence per CPU. As they say, unpopulated sockets don't count so if you have a dual- or quad-CPU board but only one CPU is fitted, you only need one licence.

(Thank goodness for Intel's new 22-core CPUs! 🙂

Thank you for your reply!

 

[molletts]

It's worth pointing out that, if you just want to play around with XenServer to learn it, there's a free edition as well which includes most of the capabilities of the commercial version. There's a comparison table here: http://www.poppelgaard.com/citrix-xenserver-6-5