It appears VMware is at it again.

I wanted to upgrade a 5.0 ESXI box to 5.1.  I booted off the DVD and the upgrade ran without issues.

When it came time to add the license; I received this nice little message:

An error occurred when assigning the specified license key: The System
Memory is not satisfied with the 32 GB of Maximum Memory limit.
Current with 72.00 GB of Memory.

Which left me wondering what’s up with this as 5.0 had no problem and left me with 32 GB useable memory.

I spoke to VMware about it and was informed when they found people did not like paying to use their
RAM and had to remove their silly vram scheme, they added this feature as IMHO a “sour grapes” move.

The only way to install 5.1 is to disable the extra RAM in Bios which in my case was not possible with
a HP DL 360 G7 or pull DIMMS.  This is a rather annoying move by VMware as my company tends to
purchase servers with large RAM.

I am not sure what VMware seeks to accomplish with this move as I suspect this will move more systems to Hyper-V.

It will only be a matter of time where they end this foolish stunt.