I don't think this will cause us a problem in the short term, but VMware should consider raising the entitlements for each edition by 50-100%. We don't have high-memory-density servers, so as long as we keep allocation low enough to provide N+1 redundancy, we'll be fine. But it's a safe bet that a hardware refresh will have us taking a long look at what we choose to purchase in order to extend our current "investment" in VMware.

No, what I'm really unhappy about is that some of the coolest features in v5 are still only available in Enterprise Plus; there's no a la carte licensing to add nice features, so the purchasing decision that VMware seems to be steering towards "consumption" might be overridden by other factors, which is really pretty annoying. I'd like to see an Equallogic-style feature license (everything included, regardless of feature) with the consumption metrics (pCPU, vCPU, vRAM) as the tiering for Entry, Standard and Enterprise SKUs.

I really dislike the entitlements, It feels harmful and wrong to me even if most end users will never hit the limits. New systems are being planned with kvm on redhat (or clones of like centos) Management tools are a bit thin in the kvm side but that is only a mater of time. For others in small needs check out proxmox linux distro as a comparison. I use it on few instances as well.