
VUL + VA = ???
Backup vendor Veeam is almost certainly going to ditch per-socket licensing. Senior veep for product management Anton Gostev has floated the idea for months in user forums, but last week revealed that the change is now all-but a fait accompli. "All in all, it is looking like Veeam will in the end go ahead and stop selling …
Depending on the workload, a 2 socket 1.5TB RAM machine can host a huge number of VMs - in my case about 120VMs. Moving from per socket to per vm licensing would blow my backup lic costs out of the water. Fortunately, I have permanent sockets, so will hold on to them as long as possible. All of the alternatives are already on either per core, or per VM licenses.
Funny that HW costs used to be the limiting factor for server deployments. The limiting factor is now license costs. Backups, monitoring, AV, OS, DB, etc are pushing the costs. Each is asking for $5-$50 per month per VM. If you don't have grandfathered socket agreements in place, you can easily end up paying >$1000 year/vm just in license fees.