You are preparing the budget for a new virtualization host that will run a hypervisor licensed per core. The server will be built with two 16-core processors (32 physical cores in total), but you expect to allocate only 24 virtual CPUs to guest VMs. According to a per-core licensing model, which quantity must you count to determine how many licenses the company must purchase?
The number of processor sockets, regardless of core count
The total number of physical CPU cores installed in the server
The maximum number of simultaneous users of the hosted workloads
The total number of virtual CPUs that will be assigned to VMs
Per-core licensing requires that a license be assigned to every physical CPU core present in the server that is running the software. Microsoft and other vendors explicitly state that all cores in all processors must be covered, regardless of how many sockets are installed, how many virtual CPUs are created, or how many users connect. Consequently, the administrator must license 32 cores (2 × 16), not 24 vCPUs, two sockets, or a user total. The other options correspond to per-VM, per-socket, or per-user models, none of which apply to per-core licensing.