Working out the VCF core count for VCSP

As an existing VMware VCPP partner you now face the challenge of joining a VCSP partner under a white-label model, unless you can deliver the 3500 cores yourself. We offer you that white labelling.

Working out the core count

We at soulTec are in touch with a lot of service providers at the moment, and the same question keeps coming up:

How many cores do I have to license?

VMware wrote a script for this that you run in vCenter. It gives you the VCF core count you need. One important note: under the new licensing model a physical CPU socket counts as at least 16 cores, even if it only has 8 or 12. So in that case the core count in the vCenter inventory will not match the script’s number. The script and the instructions for running it are here.

Worth knowing: a host with no powered-on VM is not counted by the Usage Meter, as long as that host is not part of a vSAN cluster.

Optimising the core count

Another point that keeps coming up for discussion is whether some CPU cores can be saved. For that we recommend installing VMware Aria Operations in trial mode. Within a few days, based on the telemetry it collects, Aria Operations tells you whether you could shut a host down in the cluster, or, in the worst case, that you are undersized and need more hosts.

Start a “what-if” analysis in Aria Operations:

Pick the cluster and the model of the host to be removed, and you get this report:

In this example we cannot remove a host. We are undersized and would have to add one to the cluster. The longer Aria Operations can collect data, the more accurate the calculation gets.

The Aria Operations guide is here.

Next step

Interested in VCSP white labelling? Get in touch and we will help with the sizing and put together a quote for you.