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gallagauge
Contributor
Contributor

esxi 5 free hypervisor?

I saw that there is a new version of esxi (version 5).

Will there be a version 5 of the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor or is this product going to stay at version 4.1?

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

Where did you find the information about the 8 GB vRAM limit?

In this chart, which is for vSphere Hypervisor 5, it says that a virtual machine could use 1 TB of RAM.

See the bottom:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/compare.html

However, there are errors in the chart, for example claims that Storage vMotion and Storage DRS would work, but clearly not since they are vCenter technologies.

This also seems a bit strange:

"Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages, compress memory pages" .. great features of course, but not much use if the total configured memory limit is 8 GB.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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RogerThomas
Contributor
Contributor

Urs wrote:

RogerThomas wrote:

vlho wrote:

8GB vRAM max for freeware ESXi?

I'm shocked...

Little question: 8GB vRAM max. per CPU or per physical server?

That will be 8GB per physical server, but there does not seem to be a limit on the number of CPUs :smileyconfused:

No, definitively it is 8 GByte per virtual machine, not per ESXi host.

It has a socket/core limitation, but I was unable to find the number quickly. I am running a two socket, four core each machine.

Are you thinking of 4.1 rather than the new 5.0 release?

No that is 8Gbytes of vRAM as stated at the end of this page

   http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

vRAM is the entitlement of pooled virtual memory used across all active virtual machines on the system (or that is how it is at least defined on the other versions of ESX 5.0).

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rickardnobel
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Champion

One of the two tabs next to each other is wrong then. The FAQ tabs says 8 GB vRAM total and the Compare tab claims 1 TB/vm. Which is correct?

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

RogerThomas schrieb:

Are you thinking of 4.1 rather than the new 5.0 release?

No that is 8Gbytes of vRAM as stated at the end of this page

   http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

vRAM is the entitlement of pooled virtual memory used across all active virtual machines on the system (or that is how it is at least defined on the other versions of ESX 5.0).

Yes, I am thinking of 4.1 and I would be greatly disapointed, if VMware would lower the limits. There is already a growing market of other solutions.

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RogerThomas
Contributor
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Rickard wrote:

One of the two tabs next to each other is wrong then. The FAQ tabs says 8 GB vRAM total and the Compare tab claims 1 TB/vm. Which is correct?

The 1TB/vm is the maximum amount that the VSphere 'engine' can now manage if you have the correct licensing in place. While the 8GB is the limit set within the licensing terms of the free edition of the hypervisor. The 8GB limit may not be enforced but if you go beyond it you break the T&Cs.

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rickardnobel
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RogerThomas wrote:

The 1TB/vm is the maximum amount that the VSphere 'engine' can now manage if you have the correct licensing in place. While the 8GB is the limit set within the licensing terms of the free edition of the hypervisor.

But the chart is to compare the free vSphere Hypervisor against Microsoft and Citrix. Since there is no license you could not have a "correct licensing"? Smiley Happy

If the 8 GB vRAM is correct than the claim on the compare tab is a lie. If we look at the competitors in the chart we see that Hyper-V "only" has 64 GB/vm and Citrix 32 GB/vm.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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Walfordr
Expert
Expert

Hopefully there is a typo on that FAQ page like there were on the VSA presentation - support for RAID5.

I hope that the listed entitlement is per CPU. 8GB per CPU would not be that bad.

All the other vRAM entitlement that I see listed are per CPU.

Case in point:

"Each vSphere Enterprise Edition license entitles to 32GB of vRAM. 4 licenses of vSphere Enterprise Edition provide a vRAM pool of 128GB (4 * 32 GB)"

vSphere 4.1and prior

Per CPU with Core and Physical Memory Limits

vSphere 5.0 andlater

Per CPU with Pooled vRAM Entitlements

Licensing Unit

CPU

=

CPU

SnS Unit

CPU

=

CPU

Core per proc

Restrictionsby vSphereeditions

•6 cores for Standardand Enterprise, Ess, Ess+

•12 core forAdvanced and Ent. Plus

<

Unlimited

PhysicalRAM capacity per host

Restrictionsby vSphere edition

•256GB for Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. Ess, Ess+

•Unlimited for Enterprise Plus

<

Unlimited

vRAM entitlement per proc

Not applicable

Entitlementby vSphere edition

•24GB vRAM forEssentialsKit

•24GB vRAM forEssentialsPlus Kit

•24GB vRAM for Standard

•32GBvRAM for Enterprise

•48GB vRAM for Enterprise Plus

Robert -- BSIT, VCP3/VCP4, A+, MCP (Wow I haven't updated my profile since 4.1 days) -- Please consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.
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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

Robert Walford wrote:

I hope that the listed entitlement is per CPU. 8GB per CPU would not be that bad.

Well it would still be very low. The kind of environment that would run vSphere Hypervisor would be very small customers and not likely multiple CPU sockets in these hosts.

If a CPU now could host 8 to 12 cores then it would be quite a waste to install several physical processors but still only use 16 GB of RAM for the virtual machines.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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Walfordr
Expert
Expert

I agree that it is still low (very low), but would be better than a hard entitlement of 8GB.  I currently have 3 ESXi 4 hypervisors running sparse dev environments (to prove the technology of course).  They are loaded with over 32 GB RAM and utilizing 90%.  So out the box with vSphere 5 Hypervisor I would be past my entitlement vRAM.

I think this is an effort to push us to purchase licenses for the hypervisor.  They know that lots of people are running it in a production environment and they are loosing money on it.  After all their plan for releasing it was to "[enable] IT professionals to become familiar with the technology and prove its value in their own companies."

I am not compelled to upgrade to hypervisor 5 for our dev environment. I will not have enough resource to prove the technology behind vSphere hypervisor 5.0...

Lets hope they fix this.

Robert -- BSIT, VCP3/VCP4, A+, MCP (Wow I haven't updated my profile since 4.1 days) -- Please consider awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.
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golddiggie
Champion
Champion

RogerThomas wrote:

It exists as VMware vSphere Hypervisor,

It's rather key limitations are

1) You can not make changes to an environment with anything other than the GUI - so no CLI.

2) VMware vSphere Hypervisor includes a VRAM entitlement of 8GB

Item 2 is a bit of a joke, how many people use ESXi with only 8GByte of RAM!

It's a rather poor joke at that. I'm only running 7 virtual servers on my current ESXi 4.1 host, but I'm using 10-12GB of RAM (16GB in the host)... I'm looking to increase the host memory (or add another host) so that I can run more VM's and/or have HA.

Is that 8GB per socket/CPU or total?? IF per CPU/socket, then it's not as bad. It's still a bad joke, but it's not too hard to get around (and have a decent amount of VM's running in a home lab)...

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

golddiggie wrote:

Is that 8GB per socket/CPU or total??

From the small amount of information that seems to be available it is 8 GB of the now infamous "vRAM", that is the total amount of RAM that you could give to your VMs together.

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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medic29
Contributor
Contributor

Although this may significantly defeat the purpose of new features in v5, but can anyone speculate on the vRAM being disabled and v4 individual physical server memory allowances be used? I have a PE 2950 with 32GB installed available as a dogfood server and would love to put v5 on when it is available for a test drive. But if only 8GB will be available I can't see the logic in even considering it.

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swamisant
Contributor
Contributor

Please provide me a link with details for ESXi free. Specifically 8GB vRAM limit.

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

swamisant wrote:

Please provide me a link with details for ESXi free. Specifically 8GB vRAM limit.

The free version of ESXi  is called "VMware vSphere Hypervisor" as a product and the information could be found here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

in a small final question at the bottom of the page:

"How much vRAM does a VMware vSphere Hypervisor license provide?

A vSphere Hypervisor license includes a vRAM entitlement of 8GB."

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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KingsX
Contributor
Contributor

Goodbye vmware! I'm off to XEN or Hyper-V

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GVD
Contributor
Contributor

I'm not ready to say goodbye, but yes, I do think this will mean that a lot of "testing the water" setups will now be ignoring VMWare's solutions. 8 Gb might be OK for a brief test drive, it is by no means sufficient to do a prolongued test in a real working environment.

Quite frankly, all our codemonkeys have more RAM in their laptops than this Hypervisor allows the VMs to use (combined!).

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

It is still somewhat unclear if there is almost unlimited RAM available (up to 1 TB per virtual machine) or 8 GB of vRAM in total.

VMware says both things: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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RogerThomas
Contributor
Contributor

Rickard wrote:

It is still somewhat unclear if there is almost unlimited RAM available (up to 1 TB per virtual machine) or 8 GB of vRAM in total.

VMware says both things: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

Considering the fact that even where you purchase the top of the range version of ESX 5.0 you only receive a grant of 48GB of vRAM I would go with the 8GB limit Smiley Happy

To licence a ESX server to 1TB you are looking at 21 top end enterprise licences with list at about $110,000 before SnS fees.

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medic29
Contributor
Contributor

I just found this link for an article more or less explaining vRAM.  One of the sentences which jumped straight out was - if no more vRAM is available, the VM will not be powered on.

Well... if this stays true for an 8Gb limit then yeah I would say the only thing the v5 DVD will be good for is target practice.

Although if the v5 install follows the same method v4 uses, then running it in unlicsensed mode for however long (60 days?) may be a workaround to not limit 'Free mode'.

http://thinkcloud.nl/2011/07/13/vmware-licensing-vram-entitlement-explained/

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GVD
Contributor
Contributor

It's only logical, medic29. If the Essentials and Essentials Plus has a hard limit (the other licenses do not), then the free Hypervisor will also have a hard limit. It would cause an even larger riot if the free version had more rights than the Essentials...

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