I realize this discussion is old and the licensing skus have changed but we're having a hard time understanding something and you guys seem to know your stuff.
We have a 3 node vmware cluster. We have 3 RHEL VMs we want to license. You'd think we could purchase the 1-4 VM license. However our sales rep's RHEL person is saying that if those VMs are ever spread across multiple nodes in the cluster (instead of all 3 sticking together on the same host), such as in vmotion, then we'd have to buy enough licenses for each node in the cluster to handle that situation. This seems ludicrous because now you're going to pay for more RHEL licenses just to sit there for when you spread the load among nodes.
To us what seemed more likely and reasonable is the pooling you're referring to. Where as long as your nodes are up to 2 sockets, the total number of VMs licensed across various licenses your purchase cannot be exceeded by the total number of RHEL VMs in your environment regardless of which node they happen to be on.
In their reasoning if we vmotion 2 vms to one node and the other to another node while we do maintenance on the first node, we'd be out of compliance for licenses unless we bought extra licenses.
Am I wrong or are they?