With the proliferation of multi-core processor servers, many companies who invest in Business Objects as their business intelligence solution wish to use VMWare to host their installation.  From a server perspective, this is often more desirable than having dedicated servers for an App as the initial cost and on-going maintenance will be cheaper with the VMware environment.  It is also the typical setup when outsourcing application/data center hosting to a 3rd party.

However, there are some licensing issues regarding the use of VMware that you need to be aware of.

First the good news, with the Named User License, you should be fully compliant with SAP's licensing model when using VMware for your Business Objects Enterprise installation.

The CPU License is a little murkier.  Technically, you need to hold as many CPU licenses as there are processors/cores on the server running VMWare.   This means that you must hold a CPU license count matching or exceeding the number of "cores" for the total server, not just the number of processors being used for the VMware instance hosting your BOE installation.  If the server is a quad-core processor, and your BOE VMware instance is only accessing 2 processors, a 2 CPU license will not be sufficient.  You will need to hold a 4 CPU license to be in compliance.

This means, that even if you are only dedicating 1 or 2 CPU's to your BusinessObjects server, if your hardware is running a Quad-core processor, you would be out of compliance with only a 1 or 2 CPU license.  You would need enough CPU licenses to cover every processor/core in the server, to be compliant.  Another option would be to dedicate one CPU to your BOBJ server running a 1 CPU license, meaning that if that CPU is down, so is your BOBJ server.  Of course, this defeats the point of using VMware in the first place.

Crystal Server and BusinessObjects Edge do not have this little licensing gotcha, as they are both available with a Concurrent user license.  These may be better options, price-wise than the full Business Objects Enterprise CPU license.