On the 3rd of August new and updated license policies were released from VMware which affected both the commercial products and the vSphere Hypervisor (the free version of ESXi 5.0).
A welcomed change was the increase of vRAM from the first announced maximum of 8 GB, which should have made the free product of very limited use.
The new rules increases the amount of physical memory supported in the host to 32 of GB RAM and a vRAM entitlement of 32 GB, to allocate to the virtual machines.
This means that on a small server with, say, 24 GB of physical RAM you could start virtual machines with a total of 32 GB of virtual RAM allocated to them and make use of the excellent memory saving techniques of VMware such as Transparent Page Sharing and similar. Even if this kind of small host most likely will only use one physical processor with multiple cores, there seems to be no limit on the amount of physical CPUs supported.
The changed vRAM rules makes the free vSphere Hypervisor an attractive choice for the smallest businesses and a good first step into virtualization.