I bet you all heard about the big news yesterday where VMware announced vSphere 5. Despite a lot of applauding for the great new features, there also a lot of noise on twitter about the new licensing for vSphere. VMware has decided to move to vRAM licensing without any maximums on the amount of RAM or the number of CPU cores. This PDF explains it all.
Biggest concern of the twitter community was that licenses would cost much much more for the new vSphere 5 than they did for the “old” vSphere 4. There are many theoretical scenario’s that can be thought of that show the new licensing model as much more expensive and existing customers wouldn’t upgrade to the new vSphere 5. I decided to call a number of my customers and ask them for the specs of their environment and then to a little math for them comparing the old and the new licenses.
Remember that if you are an existing customer with a valid support contract you get a FREE upgrade of your CPU license to vSphere 5. Current vSphere 4 advanced customers, will get vSphere 5 Enterprise license since there is no more advanced edition in vSphere 5.
Below you’ll see the math I’ve done and I was surprised to learn that NONE of them will require more licenses when upgrading to vSphere 5. Converting all their current CPU licenses one-to-one will license their current environment without extra cost. These customer have been running vSphere 4 for a number of years now and slowly switched from 16 GB to 32 GB to 96GB hosts.
I do admit though that vSphere will cost you more when you go above the 32GB per CPU (or 48GB per CPU for Enterprise Plus). But even then there are a number of things to keep in mind:
- New Standard license is $200 more expensive but now includes vMotion and Data Recovery compared to the old Standard license
- Old Advanced customers get a free upgrade to Enterprise which gives them Storage vMotion and DRS
- Don’t just compare physical RAM to vRAM but keep at least an 85% ratio.
- This is the time to take a closer look the difference between VM RAM usage and VM RAM assignment.
Example 1:
4 dual CPU hosts each with 56GB RAM (224GB total) and a total of 8 CPUs. Running 6 Citrix XenApp Servers with 26 GB RAM each and one ‘normal’ VM of 4GB RAM. Total vRAM assignment is 163GB.
Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:
4 hosts x 2 CPU = 8 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 8 x $ 2875 = $ 23,000
New ESXi 5 licensing with Enterprise licenses:
4 hosts x 2 CPU = 8 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 8 x $2875 = $ 23,000. This entitles me to address 8 x 32GB = 256GB RAM.
Example 2:
8 dual CPU hosts each 49 GB and 2 hosts of 56GB ( 544GB total) and a total of 20 CPUs. Running a wide range of VMs with a total vRAM assignment of 442 GB.
Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:
10 hosts x 2 CPU = 20 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 20 x $ 2875 = $ 57,500
New ESXi 5 licensing with Enterprise licenses:
10 hosts x 2 CPU = 20 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 20 x $2875 = $ 57,500. This entitles me to address 20 x 32GB = 640GB RAM.
Example 3:
18 dual CPU hosts varying in RAM sizes of 96GB and 48GB RAM but a total of 1350GB of physical RAM. I couldn’t get the exact figure of assigned RAM.
Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:
18 hosts x 2 CPU = 36 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 36 x $ 2875 = $ 103,500
New ESXi 5 licensing with Enterprise licenses:
18 hosts x 2 CPU = 36 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 36 x $ 2875 = $ 103,500. This entitles me to address 36 x 32GB = 1152 GB RAM.
Since I don’t have the exact number of vRAM for this customer, I’m going to work with %. In my previous examples the amount of vRAM was between 70-80% of the total physical RAM available. When we now look at the entitlement of 1152 GB RAM we see that this is 85.3% of physical RAM. Even they can just upgrade their current licenses to vSphere 5 without having to pay extra.
Example 4:
44 dual CPU hosts, totaling 3048 GB RAM. This customer too couldn’t give me the exact number of assigned vRAM.
Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:
44 hosts x 2 CPU = 88 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 88 x $ 2875 = $ 253,000.
New ESXi 5 licensing with Enterprise licenses:
44 hosts x 2 CPU = 88 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 88 x $ 2875 = $ 253,000. This entitles me to address 88 x 32GB = 2816 GB RAM. The entitlement on vRAM is 92% of physical available RAM.
Example 5:
14 dual CPU hosts, totaling 788 GB RAM, 182 VMs using 482GB of vRAM.
Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:
14 hosts x 2 CPU = 28 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 28 x $ 2875 = $ 80,500.
New ESXi 5 licensing with Enterprise licenses:
14 hosts x 2 CPU = 28 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 28 x $ 2875 = $ 80,500. This entitles me to address 28 x 32GB = 896 GB RAM. This is over the amount of physical RAM present.
Other posts on this subject:
- VMware is not evil – my opinion on their new licensing model by vTexan.
- vSphere 5.0 Licensing Causes Frenzy by Brian Norris
- A Look at VMware Licensing & Environment Growth by Bob Plankers
I dont have a single host with less than 128GB of ram on a dual or quad socket system. I’d say that a good portion of vmwares customers are in that boat, thus the twitter flood from a whole lot of people who are about to end up paying twice what they pay now. Scale up is now price restrictive, scale out will be just as costly if not more because of the cost of physical hosts, connectivity, switch ports etc.
The thing is, its still a per proc license, either make it vRAM only or CPU only, not this half assed hybrid that screws over the customers who have gotten far better than the advertised “5:1” consolidation ratios from the licensing document.
I agree with Gabriel’s comments. Most SMBs must scale out rather than scale up and this still costs a lot of money.
I’ll have to sit down and really do the math with some real world quotes in front of me before I’m sold on what model will be the most economical. Scale out means more hosts, more connectivity, more cooling, more power, more floorspace, more eggs.
Scale up means far higher consolidation ratios, fewer eggs (more risk?), fewer hosts, less ports, less power, less cooling, MORE LICENSING.
So what is the sweetspot? Dual socket 96GB boxes, maxed on vRAM allotments? I’d much rather see 64 or 96 per socket at least for my environment where all of my hosts are 128GB of RAM and have utilization rates around 65-75%.
The new model benefits the larger cloudtypes for whom chargeback makes them money, this isnt the case for the vast majority of standard IT shops who can’t necessarily do chargeback, or that chargeback is still sucking money from the same pool everyone has access too.
And this totally hoses a VDI environment where memory is frequently over-allocated. I just left a job where they were running 1400 WinXP vms. It’s a school district with various labs and thin client/vms in classrooms. Less than 50% of the VMs are in use at any given time, so over-allocation isn’t an issue. Now, they’re penalized for all those stagnant VMs that have ram allocated, but aren’t constantly in-use by the end-user.
They’ll be on 4 until they replace the entire system.
Though on a bright side, if you have a hot standy for SRM failover you dont need to double your licensing since we are not paying per socket anymore.
You don’t get it. Because you have some customers who are not affected does not make it good. It is still an restriction that was non existant in vsphere4. The customer benefits in no way from this. They should remove the per processor license and go VRAM only. The hybrid is just stupid.
I have to agree as well. I’ve been pushing for scale up vs scale out. I’ve been arguing Dell r710 dual 6 core 72GB or 144GB hosts. Our production cluster has 5 hosts, with 72GB as above. Right now we have 10 sockets of Enterprise, good for 320GB of RAM – and we have 360GB physically. If we opted to go to 144GB (18x8GB) for 720GB, which granted is down the road, we would need potentially 23 Enterprise licences not 10. Also, vSphere 4 really touted memory compression and overcommitment vs. Hyper-V – we believed it, proved it, and agreed with it. So now on our overprovisioned hosts, which work just fine, we’re going to hurt a lot because we bought into the abiltity to compress/share/overcommit memory, which was a feature. I’m so glad I’m the guy who told management that was a good idea :( We have a Dev server here with 72GB of RAM and dual 6 cores that runs very happily with Standard as it needs no advanced features – but has 88GB of vRAM assigned. To use Standard now, I’d only be able to run 48GB total on that box, or buy another 2 Standard licences. Not a big deal for Standard, but its still more than it used to be. Also, while the ‘pool’ is by vCenter managed install as I get it, and includes Linked Mode configs, the pools are ‘by edition’ as I read it. So if I had excess Enterprise vRAM pool space, I coudln’t use it for the above Standard licenced host, as it is in a different pool.
Add to all of this – we’ve started buying Windows 2008 R2 Data Center for unlimited virtualization per host. Which means I already have the option of going Hyper-V on the host. Increasing the licencing like this, is going to push us to Hyper-V, and that sucks.
If they had just increased the 6 core option to 10 or 12 core, that would have been just fine. This destroys the “scale up” argument for VMware….
So what? We now get taxed because we use memory-overcommit? I thought that was one of the selling points of vSphere.
The larger problem isn’t whats going on now, but what will happen when next year and SandyBridge comes out with loads of RAM options, then we gonna feel the pain…
If they want to charge for RAM-usage, rather make it a sliding-scale with RAM costing less the more you use rather than this usage-tax we see now.
All of our new hosts are dual-socket 192 GB RAM, plus we have about 8-9 different vCenters. This looks like it is going to be a huge headache to me and harder to cost justify. This might be the nail that forces us down the Hyper-V path.
This seems to be a cash cow for VMware. With 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010, the amounts of memory assigned to VMs tend to increase quite a bit. Add a couple of SBS machines, and the amount of assigned vRAM tend to sky rocket.
Also, the new licensing really makes over allocating and using ballooning unnecessary. I have customers that have HUGE boxes (over 200GB memory in them), they will need to increase licensing in order to keep up.
Also, on a side note.. Only 32vCPU? I mean, why such a low limit? One of my customers need over 96vCPU in their VMs.. .(
You are paying per socket, you pay for both the CPU _and_ the RAM.
Our new setup is 128GB per host so we will be getting hit by this as well. Im seriously considering Hyper-V..
I dont think it would have been so bad if they did pRAM or made the numbers higher.
I have to agree with you on this one. Nearly all pushers of VMware, including VMware engineers, sales reps etc.. have been pushing the scale up approach for years. I’ve been told numerous times by VMware representatives directly that when you buy a server, you should buy it as close to fully loaded of RAM as possible because it’s not a matter of ‘if’, it’s a matter of ‘when’ you’re going to need more memory. This certainly hasn’t changed from my perspective.
Organizations which mange to achieve high consolidation ratios and where RAM is the limiting factor are going to be hurt by the new licensing model. When you look at it form that perspective, the new licensing model really seems more like a new revenue stream for VMware and nothing more.
Hallo Gabrie, is elke 2de licentie zoals genoemd niet een vSphere 5 licentie?
vMotion was included in Standard licenses since 4.1. This is not new.
Great how all your examples have 138GB RAM at most. Sorry, but many shops today have way more on one dual socket host, and memory amounts aren’t going to decrease. And you are only comparing Enterprise/plus licensenses. Can you borrow a few bucks for additional Standard licenses for my 96GB hosts? It’s only going to cost twice as much! (~90% Memory of that is really assigned).
Also, you are totally missing the point there that even when your customers don’t use all of their vRAM entitlement yet, which is rarely the total of what they could use, they are now restricted to that number in the future. A restriction that simply didn’t exist in the past and is now forced on everyone.
While many might not lose anything directly YET, they will once they upgrade their hosts and/or put more VMs on them, which will result in more assigned vRAM.
I really hate to say this, because I used to love VMware, but they fucked this one up pretty bad.
Yes, VMware is taxing the people who put a lot of Virtual Machines.
Example #1: Why do you have 4 hosts??.. Why did not put only 2 servers with 128 Gb Ram??..
Corrected Old ESXi 4 licensing with Enterprise license:2 hosts x 2 CPU = 4 CPU licenses Enterprise Edition = 4 x $ 2875 = $ 11,500
Explain why you did not consolidate more?.. I see no reason.
While I am still good from licensing perspective *currently* only because we have been with VMware for so long and had extra licenses due to ELA and older server with less memory, every one of my new blades are 2 sockets with 144 GB of memory. I don’t believe I am that unique in this situation, and if one was just beginning to drink the Kool-aid or relicensing their environments they would have to purchase 5 sockets not 2.
I know most people have some N+1 overage in their environments, but I don’t know anyone purchasing 2.5x the hosts to cover the potentially powered on hosts to equal the additional VRAM tax. Just because existing customers have purchases enough licenses to cover the inefficiencies of older less powerful systems, that does not lessen the impact to new customers just starting.
Duplicated post
As far as I know View is still going to be licensed per user so it would be uneffected.
Assuming in your blog post where you mention “New ESXi 4 licensing” you mean ESXi 5 / #vSphere 5 licensing – you dind’t really show any reasoning as to why VMware would change their licensing model. It doesn’t makes sense (to me) for them to add the vRAM complexity just to “fix” the limitations THEY set with the ESXi 4 licensing. Hoping someone will make sense of it in the future. Nice write up. Thanks for your efforts.
Sorry Gabe, but you are just way off base here. Way off. VMware is giving their customers the bird and you’re defending this crap? No other vendor charges for memory usage. If I’m not mistaken, Xen supports 64/128 GB of memory per VM 512 GB per host and is free while MS Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is free, supports 64 GB of memory per VM and supports a TB of memory. Even more gallling to read that VMware announced they “did this for their customers.”
So now they’re insulting my intelligence too. VMware is a four letter in my office.
This is really a disappointing post Gabe. I expected better from you. I need to step away from the computer now.
Well, I’m using DL 380 G6’s and G7’s with 144GB of ram using Enterprise licenses, Nonproduction is 90% committed, Production about 70% and DR about 65%. My cost to upgrade is $70k for what we are using today, $100k to fully utilize my existing hardware. What feature in vsphere 5 is going to bring me $70k in ROI? Sorry but I just started a RHEV eval and will probably beta test Windows Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0 because I simply can’t justify the increased costs.
I have six hosts, 192GB RAM in each. 310 x 3GB VMs totalling in 930GB vRAM. Currently that means 12 Enterprise licenses and my environment allows me to add at least 10 more VMs to satisfy HA. I will need 18 additional licenses to just support existing number of VMs. Or I need to upgrade to Enterprise+ and buy extra 8 licenses. In addition to that each new license costs more. That just means VMware costs 150% more for licenses and SnS for me.
For me it’s a nobrainer that we stay with vSphere4 and then hapily go to something else.
I have to agree with the majority of the users here. My hosts now are dual socket, 192GB, costing me 4 of my enterprise plus licensing (as opposed to 2). I am lucking in that we have extra licenses available, but if it weren’t for that I guarantee I would be looking hard at Hyper-V / VMM. In the vSphere 4 licensing model, VMWare was cost effective, but when you get into the Tier 1 Apps, VMs with large memory are not unusual. It actually makes it cost effective to go back to standalone servers vs. virtual servers in the large environments.
I hate to say it, but VMWare is concentrating solely on their shareholders at the expense of their customers.
View licensing hasn’t been released yet, but I’m sure your pound of flesh will be extracted.
I did my math, and it results moving to XenServer or Hyper-V….
VMware is not a reliable partner enymore…
Example 6:
3 dual CPU hosts each with 96GB RAM (288GB total, 6 CPUs).
VMware View environment with 120 active VMs with 1GB each, plus 60 spare with 1GB each in case of host failure. This puts me at 180G vRam. There are also support hosts involved as well, 6 View connection servers (2 security, 2 standard connection servers to support the security servers, 2 standard connection servers to support internal users) each with 4GB. That brings our vRam up to 204GB.
This is licensed with Essentials+. Essentials+ maxes out at 144GB vRam, which means I have to repurchase for this cluster if I want to upgrade to ESXi 5.
I know, we don’t know what the view licensing will look like. Doesn’t matter, I’m using Essentials+ with View Add-on. Why? Well, Essentials+ was $5000, and the ESXi component for View is $100 a seat, that is $12,000 for 120 users.
How does one fix this? We could add the ESXi on to View, at $12,000. Or we could go with ESXi Standard, we would need 9 CPUs (216G vRam)for a cost of $8955. Plus vCenter Foundation at $1495. This would be a total of $10450.
Or you could buy the acceleration kit at $10000 for 8 cpus, and add the extra cpu for a total of $10995.
Example 7:
4 dual CPU hosts each with 72G RAM (288GB total, 8 CPUs).
132 VMs, 213GB allocated. The new ESXi 5 licensing provides for 384GB of vRam. That makes this cluster OK to upgrade. But shouldn’t I still be upset that with ESXi 4 I had no RAM limitation, but with ESXi 5 I have a limit of 48GB per CPU license? I can’t say that as a customer I should be thanking VMware for this one.
vMotion is already part of the vSphere 4.1 Standard license.
That depends if you have full View licenses, or vSphere licenses with the View extensions (as I’ve just purchased…)
All our hosts are single socket 12 core running advanced with 100GB of RAM. Currently each one consumes only one license, under the new scheme each host would require 4 licenses! And that is today, imagine how much RAM per CPU socket we would target next year, most likely 200+ GB. VMWare are totally screwing its loyal customers on this one.
After doing some excel calculation I say there are sweet spots. For enterprise license if you host is less than or equal to 64 GB RAM, you are pretty safe in terms of upgrading to 5.0. But the moment you move above 64 GB RAM you have to extra purchase license or upgrade to Enterprise plus. Similarly for enterprise plus if you host is having 96 GB RAM or less you are safe and can upgrade to Enterprise plus without any additional purchase of license.
But when you actually have less RAM and more CPU you actually loose the advantage though this is rare case.
unless we have host of 64 GB RAM in case of Enterprise license and 96 GB RAM in case enterprise plus license, we have to buy additional licenses to meet vRAM entitlement. It is costly for all servers more than 96 GB RAM. It is sorry state of affairs
I can’t say I’m surprised. For years we have continued to extract more performance from each vSphere license. I know many of us have been in a position where it’s more cost-effective to replace a server than to purchase another license. In their minds, this is all lost revenue.
I hope they didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot.
We were planning to go virtual next year with 6x HP DL580 G7 each filled with 4x E7-4870 and 384GB RAM (at least – perhaps as much as 512GB).
vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus licensing for that using acceleration kit bundles is 3×33000 USD = 99000 USDvSphere 5 Enterprise Plus licensing for 6x384GB vRAM means 8 Enterprise Plus acceleration kits are required: 8×22000 = 176000 USD!vSphere 5 Enterprise licensing for 6x384GB vRAM means 12 Enterprise acceleration kits are required: 12×17500 USD = 210000 USD!Needless to say we are going to take a few extra looks at the alternatives XenServer and Hyper-V.
BTW: Citrix virtualization best practices states that 32GB of RAM and 8vCPUs (logical) be used per 64bit XenApp virtual machine…
Try the math with a 4 socket (24-core or higher) box and 256GB of RAM. In my case it doubles the licenses needed. 32gb/socket is a joke these days.
Have fun doing the math we need you to order twice as much hardware when moving to Hyper-V/Xenserver
VDI is NOT affected by this cost…. VDI will continue to per user….!!!!!
Come on Gabes. It’s not bad at the current scenario for most people, but they are still ripping people off, not allowing them to grow the same hardware without having to pay more. What about the people that have already purchased hardware like DL380G7 and 192Gb or 384GB of memory. It is bad , very bad what they are doing, they are taking a chance on customers and thinking they will stay, but in this case they are playing with a very sensitive area, their wallets. I think VMware has done a great job in the past years in terms of pionerring on new features for virtualization but that don’t justify them to put the price up. We pay Support and Subscription for that, for them go and research and bring these new features. I am very disappointed with them and also with the fact this is encoraging people to go and have a look on other technologies like KVM and Xen (don’t think Hyper-V can be compared really) and they will find (for the first two) that they can do the job well with much lower cost if you consolidate things under less number of servers. A shame day on VMware history. The day they broke the trust with their customers.
View itself may be uneffected, but the ESX licensing behind it all will be. Unless I’m off my rocker, you pay for your ESX license, and then you buy your view license seperately. Sure, VDI licensing may not be changing, but the underlying infrastructure is.
Nice example, made to “fit” the new model and show, that the new lic-model is even better.
Wrong!
What about all the Servers with 96 up to 144GB, Dual-hexacore? What about MO, cause some of the vServers are “on”, but for some reason “idle”……..We have Servers with 128GB pRam, allocated 256GB vRAM, cause a lot of the Servers are powered on, but just for testing or for our developers, which use them sometimes only 2-3 hours a day?And – eithe I pay per CPU -OR- per vRAM -OR- per RAM, anything else is ist just plain b*****t
Same thing if you use VMWare’s new model unfortunately…..
You know what I think the problem is.. it’s not the RAM that you actually use.. it’s the fact that you might have planned to implement more RAM in the future and now suddenly with this new licensing scheme, you can’t any more. Well, at least not for free anyway. I think that’s the main issue.
In my opinion, it was a silly move for VMware to move to this two-track licensing scheme (CPU & RAM). It might have been more logical to pick RAM over CPU, as CPU mostly isn’t the limiting factor anyway.
Ah well, we haven’t reached the release date yet. Still some time to spare for VMware to rethink this decision :)
You’re off your rocket, while there is a View addon for vsphere available almost all deployments use the View per user licensing which includes unlimited hypervisor rights.
It’s that “planned to impliment” that is the issue. I realize VMware needs to make some money, but in our environment we’ve been buying Dell R710’s with 18x4GB and 2 sockets of vSphere Enterprise – with the expectation that when RAM ran out, we could simply replace with 18x8GB. No new licences, no new SnS, no replacing of a server, no rebuilds, etc. So yes, our vRAM in use TODAY will likely fit. But tomorrow’s won’t. If we had known the was the plan, we might have opted for different servers without the 18 DIMM sockets, and saved some money by planning to scale out.
Why Vmware is confusing us? According to old system you have unlimited ram license base of CPU, Now we have limited RAM base of CPU.
Remember one ESX update patch fiasco years ago that put our licensing in doubt and we couldn’t start our vms once stopped? – Well i recall that i tried vmware phone support that day and all lines where flooded including the ones outside my country. I only got support through local reseller…
That gave me the idea to us act as one:
I suggest to all with support contract or not to call country vmware phone assistance on the 29 July to tell to the operator what are our polite thoughts about the new licensing and how it affects our organization if not discontinued. Those on vacation can delegate task to coworker.
-what better customer dislike feedback vmware gets through their phone recording assistance system?
If you actively approve please post this message in all community forums where not available to pass the message.
Your calculation is based on dual CPU. How about a scenario with Quad CPU and 512 GB RAM?
Example 0:
– 3 x 2 CPU serevrs, 128 GB RAM each
– Staging site
– vRAM usage is about 512 GB
– Essential license (ESX4). $500
– new licensing schema – need 24 standard license.
Price increase – about 40x.
24 GB of vRAM per CPU is just a joke. It is ABSOLUTELY out of any consideration. IT can be used for FREE version maybe (8 GB per free CPU is a joke too).
Remember, in real life we all oversubscribe memory in DEV, STAGE, TEST, and desktop environments.
I may be off my rocket…. but I’ve seen the POs. They’re paying for the hypervisor and the view licenses seperately. Maybe the value added dealer ripped ’em off, but despite your protestations, they’re paying for both ESX and View seperately.
Please do some maths with 144GB RAM serves which is my case. Hello, this 2011 year. Server can have even much more then 256GB. 32GB or even 48GB was 3-4 years before.
vMotion was included with Standard in v4.1 and when 4.1 came out the price was increased by about $200. v5 didn’t add this feature, it’s just adding $200 to the price.
We have all dual socket 1U servers with 96gigs of RAM. I currently own 44 CPU’s of Enterprise (not plus).
To use the RAM I have now in those same servers, with 5.0 I will need to purchase Enterprise +.
Your example are just weird if you ask me. Hosts with 49 and 56gigs of RAM??????
“Remember that if you are an existing customer with a valid support contract you get a FREE upgrade of your CPU license to vSphere 5.”
It wasn’t free when you purchased your SnS.
While I don’t much care how VMware licenses their products, the number of people I’m working with who are re-evaluating their strategy is significant. This is causing me a lot of pain as projects are suspended and XenApp is now front and centre for large companies.
Also, note that usage based licensing is effectively a consumption tax. As RAM consumption rises, VMware get more revenue. But what have they delivered for that extra cash ? At least with tax rises,the government will spend it to provide more services but a corporation will prefer to give that cash to shareholders.
The price increase isn’t this year, it’s next year.
Hopefully VMware reads these posts and at some point reconsiders the strategy. Both the examples from VMware and the examples from this post all talk about minimum 2 used sockets per server.
I manage many single CPU hosts, a lot of them use much more RAM than 48 or the idiotic limit of 32 GB for standard. Still those CPU’s not very often have more than 50% load.