[spydum]

Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).

[Despite]

To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores.

But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.

[wmf]

is 24GB vRAM per license low?

Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.