When you assign a vSphere license to a host, the amount of capacity consumed is determined by the number of physical CPUs on the host and the number of physical cores in each physical CPU. If а CPU has more than 32 cores, you need additional CPU licenses.
Starting with vSphere 7.0, one CPU license covers one CPU with up to 32 cores. If you attempt to assign a license that has insufficient capacity or does not support the features that the host uses, the license assignment fails. For example, if the host is associated with a vSphere Distributed Switch, the license that you assign must support the vSphere Distributed Switch feature.
To license an ESXi host, you must assign to it a vSphere license that meets the following prerequisites:
There are three main licensing models for vSphere: