vSphere 5 Licensing

[SuperSpike]

I took a minute to read the licensing guide for vSphere 5 and I'm still trying to pull my jaw off the floor. VMware has completely screwed their customers this time. Why?

What I used to be able to do with 2 CPU licenses now takes 4. Incredible.

Today

BL460c G7 with 2 sockets and 192G of memory = 2 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses
DL585 G7 with 4 sockets and 256G of memory = 4 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses

Tomorrow

BL460c G7 with 2 sockets and 192G of memory = 4 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses
BL585 G7 with 4 sockets and 256G of memory = 6 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses

So it's almost as if VMware is putting a penalty on density and encouraging users to buy hardware with more sockets rather than less.

I get that the vRAM entitlements are for what you use, not necessarily what you have, but who buys memory and doesn't use it?

Forget the hoopla about a VM with 1 TB of memory. Who in their right mind would deploy that using the new license model? It would take 22 licenses to accommodate! You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor.

Anyone else completely shocked by this move?

[maxel]

Thtas the point..why use memory overcommitment anymore? It's useless now...

Andy Schmid schrieb:

John,

It feels like the only assessment VMware did regarding the new licensing model is how much it will increase their revenues and profits.

My biggest selling point for choosing VMware over the competitors is the great memory over commitment techniques (TPS, compression, ballooning, etc)

Now that value is greatly diminished - hey it's great TPS can allow you to oversubscribe by 15-20GB, but because of that you'll have to buy another FULL license (even though you don't have another CPU) AND support.

Why isn't there at least the option to purchase more vRAM at a reduced cost? Or separate the CPU and memory licenses and sell it in different increments?

If higher consolidation ratio = higher licensing costs,,, what's the point?

[stevieg]

John, this 'we expect almost everybody to come out a little ahead' is most likely spot on. It's also the problem.

Under the new model, within 12 months we will need to invest significantly in VMware licensing as we grow. We have the actual capacity for much of our needs but under the new licensing we'll only be a little ahead.

I know this because we have capacity management software that can predict these trends, report on our current allocation and incidentally helps us right size where we can.

We have intentionally bought VI software with Hyper-V roadmaps or support - but to be honest, it would have taken something big to make us consider actually changing platforms; we have invested heavily in licensing, training and certifying our staff and don't want to throw it away.

However when we are going to be faced with asking for extra cash, raising chargeback pricing to internal customers and having to justify VMware's costs verses it's competitors I will struggle under this new model. As great as vSphere is, the Hypervisor is a commodity (especially if you don't have Enterprise Plus licensing).

The ball's in your court - we have options.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

[Frank_Heidbuche]

dear john,

may i ask witch customers were contacted to validate this kind of licensing?

i'm a presales consultant doing sizings for vmware everyday.

and well i understand verry well what the memory pooling is about.

well i can tell you that not even 1 case of all the sizings i did for our customers would mean equal or only a small increase in licensing costs.

it's almost always a 1,5 to 3 times increase in licensing costs.

so i wonder what use cases are you talking about, that would validate this kind of licensing?

we where just penetrating the belgian market and bringing virtualisation to the belgian SMB companies.

and being very succesfull at it.

well this has just been cancelled totaly by this change.

i don't know any company that is willing to pay this kind of increase in licensing.

pls do explain how vmware ever got this licensing idea...

because well we the customers and partners don't get it...

[DSTAVERT]

Sorry John, but a license model which takes 21!! Enterprise plus Licenses to run one! 1 TB VM must have an failure...

If you have a VM that requires 1TB vRAM VMware licenses can't be a very big part of the equation.

[embusa]

This licensing just doesn't line up with aggressive conslidation.  I don't get it.

[chanaka_ek]

Hi John,

Thanks coming onboard to listen. I am a VMware & Storage consultant and have been rolling out VMware & SAN solutions to primarily SMB customers.

So let me give you a real world example which is very common in SMB enviornments. They (SMBs) usually have a (comparetively) small ESX farm, not necessarily a (cold standby) DR cluster. So usually all they have is a single production ESX cluster consisting of, say around 5 ESX servers (at least to begin with). Their primary motive is to virtualise as much as possible and gain higher and higher VM densities per ESX box fully utilising the brilliant over commitment features. Primarily, this overcommitment is for memory as we all know windows gets very annoyed if its told that it doesn't have enough memory. So VMware's ability that enable the admins to tell a bunch of Windows VMs that they have this much memory (so windows runs happy) and behind the scene running memory reclamation techniques to cheat (or deprive) that VM of actual physical memory assigned to it is a win-win situation for both Windows, VMware and SMB sys admins. (kudos to VMware for this innovation)

However as this allows SMBs to run so many VM's with over provisioned memory, the total vRAM used across the entire cluster is often more than the pMEM available. This new licensing model is infact penalising such setups simply due to the over commitment.

Take the below example,

• 3 ESX servers, each with 72 GB pRAM & 2 hex core CPUs (HT enabled)
• 9 SQL VMs, each with 16GB of vRAM running on the ESX cluster
• 9 IIS servers, each with 4GB of vRAM  running on the ESX cluster
• 12 windows app servers (of similar characteristics) each with 4GB running on the ESX cluster
• There are no memory reservation in place

This gives us a total vRAM assignment of (9x16) + (9x4) + (12x4) = 144+36+48 = 228GB

This is working fine within the cluster as lot of VM's have similar characteristics and TPS reduces the actual pMEM utilisation significantly and mild ballooning keeping the rest happy.

Now some facts (based on VMware indicative pricing)

• Cost of the vSphere enterprise license at present = $3,495.00 per cpu  (same on vSphere 4 & 5)
• Cost of the vSphere standard license at present = $994.00 per cpu (same on vSphere 4 & 5)

The license costs under vSphere 4 licesing - Enterprise

• Total Number of CPUs = 6
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = 2875 x 6 =  $17,250.00

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Enterprise

• Total vRAM requirment = 228 GB
• Number of vRAM allowed "per CPU" = 32GB
• Hence the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = 8 ( 6 per cpu licenses for each of the cpu at 32GB per cpu and 2 additional per cpu licenses to cover the remainder as you cannot buys a fraction of a license)
• The new cost = $2,875 * 8 = $23,000.00

This is an increment of 133%

This is even worse if the licensing was in vSphere 5 standard. so lets look at that calculation

The license costs under vSphere 4 licesing - Standard

• Total Number of CPUs = 6
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = $994 x 6 =  $5,964.00

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Standard

• Total vRAM requirment = 228 GB
• Number of vRAM allowed "per CPU" = 24GB
• Hence  the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = 10 ( 6 per cpu licenses for  each of the cpu at 24GB per cpu and 4 additional per cpu licenses to  cover the remainder as you cannot buys a fraction of a license)
• The new cost = $994 * 10 = $9,940.00

This is an increment of 166% for just the licensing cost alone (without taking in to account the additional SnS costs)

See where im going with this..??

This will drive most of SMB customers out of VMware and Im gonna find it difficult to present an acceptable solution backed up by a business case on these figures (dont forget VMware licesing and SnS was already more expensive than competitors in the market) and though I'd still prefer VMware and would recommend so due to the brilliance and the maturity of their products, the cost consious SMBs will be forced to look at solutions like Hyper-V instead (i.e. Local givernment, Schools, Universities...etc who are virtualisation mad due to reduced carbon emmissions but dont necessarily have a massive IT budget and had already streatched their budget to afford vSphere 4).

Now I wouldn't wont that to happen and im sure you wouldn't either..

[icontrolyourpow]

VMware just put itself on the fast track to being the next Novell.

Unless we all want to be obsolete within a couple of years, it would be in our own best interest to focus our career efforts on alternative products from competing vendors.

[embusa]

This has to be MBAs coming up with ways to make money without talking to engineers.  This license scheme penalizes us for using the memory technologies that VMware set themselves apart with!

[atothek]

No kidding, are they trying to get customers to look at alternatives or stick with vSphere 4.x?  I work for a small to medium size company and I am pretty certain this new pricing will mean our owners will not even consider vSphere 5 given the cost.

[gmitch64]

You have 72GB in a 2-way box

Who really has a 2 CPU system with only 72Gb installed in it these days? I mean really. Heck, even 18 months ago, I don't think we had any dual CPU boxes with this little RAM in them.

>>> John Troyer <communities-emailer@vmware.com> 7/13/2011 2:04 PM >>>

John Troyer replied to the discussion

"vSphere 5 Licensing"

To view the discussion, visit: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1790115#1790115

[RogerThomas]

Sorry John but you are missing out the fact that many people do not use all the advanced features thrown into ESX. I have no need for advanced VMWARE features such as HA clusters using costly shared storage. My key environment has a MSSQL database that is currently allocated 96GBytes for the Active node, 96GBytes for the Mirror and 96GBytes for a replicated copy. This gives me complete failover without the cluster and with 4.1 it can be done using basic low cost licences. Going to version 5 would cost far to much just to licence the RAM I already have as it is all active all the time.

At the end of the day I can stick with 4.1 and wait for XenServer or Hyper-V to up their memory limits per VM. I can't even see a reason to even eval 5 when I start to look at alternatives as I know it's not a long term option.

[Frank_Heidbuche]

well john i just ran the new licensing strategy against to latest 40 vmware design at 60% mem utilisation on the cluster i did for my job.

there where designs in there for enterprise class customers with a max of 256gb mem and smb customers with the smallest 48GB mem per server.

so i think i can cover the whole range.

even acounting a N+1 scenario for the customers i know using it.

using different classes of licensing.

none fits this 1 in 20 cases you talk off...

i have 40 of 40 designs with a significant increase...

so i would like to see a use case where to new licensing is interesting for the customer.

you are talking about server that run, that add Vram in the pool like DR sites...

i don't know if you ever check this...

but who runs a DR site that is doing nothing???

everybody uses this also, for test or dev.

so forget those licenses...

so you remain with the HA license...

well this would work...

but you can cancel this by looking in to all the small appliances you need to run vsphere...

VC server, Vshield manager, Trendmicro Deepsecurity, backup appliances, ....

well if i count all these vmware based appliances for the addon products i need a additional license...

so i can trow away the HA license i gain..

so back to nothing...

[ChipE201110141]

I am dumbfounded.  We will now be looking at other solutions 😞

-Chip-

[maxel]

You're right, if i will have plans to run a 1 TB Machine, VMware licenses will not be a very big part of the equation, because i will not think over to vmware in this case now.

Why?

21 Enterprise plus Licenses = one very huge physical server

DSTAVERT schrieb:

Sorry John, but a license model which takes 21!! Enterprise plus Licenses to run one! 1 TB VM must have an failure...

If you have a VM that requires 1TB vRAM VMware licenses can't be a very big part of the equation.

[cmacmillan]

#1 benefit is uncoupling license from multi-core. For workloads that are thread-bound - not memory bound - this is a tremendous plus over vSphere 4.x licensing.

#2 looking at SME clusters of 1 - 3 hosts (vSphere Essentials/Standard), the memory license at 24GB/socket does make some sense in an HA environment. Given a trio of 2 socket, 64-72GB hosts, the fail-over capacity is 1/3 of the total - or 128GB-144GB (matching the Essential's limits). This also implies a 67% memory loading factor which is consistent with good HA construction in small clusters.

#3 looking at SME clusters of 6 hosts (vSphere Enterprise), the memory license at 32GB/socket bumps pool size to 384GB and fits well with 72GB hosts allowing for minor memory oversubscription (about 10% worth) in case of a single host failure.

#4 looking at SME clusters of 10 hosts (vSphere Enerprise Plus), the memory license at 48GB/socket sets the pool size at 960GB and fits well with 96GB hosts, again allowing for minor memory oversubscription (about 10% worth) in case of single host failur.

#5 the requirement to buy additional "socket" licenses to add vRAM entitlement speaks to the pool's capacity and not a specific host. This make incremental growth of virtualized environment into a "large memory" configuration a "spend as you grow" proposition - not a day one consideration.

All-in-all, the new licensing model actually fits pretty well into today's market. Again, the scale-up, very large memory configurations seem to be "penalized" by the vRAM licensing constraint, but this approach seems to make scale-up versus scale-out "licensing neutral," removing a licensing "penalty" from the scale-out model.

[derekb13]

Or write a letter to VMware

http://www.autechheads.com/blogs/entryid/369/dear-vmware

But  seriously, we have to make our point and let VMware know it will result  in loosing marketshare if they stand by their licencing point. Peoply  who go away don't come back easily. I'm working with VMware products  since 2002 and I've never seen this much negative reaction after a  product launch! VI3 was amazing, vSphere-4 awesome....How do we remember  vSphere5 after a couple of years?

Or, even better... buy a share of stock (NYSE:VMW) and ask the Board of Directors what crack they're smokin'.

Enough people lining up at the podium for time to ask tough questions can always make for an amusing shareholders' meeting.

[Frank_Heidbuche]

who sells dual 6 or dual 12 core server with 72GB mem in them????

we don't.... ever....

the guideline we always used to (without capacity planning) calculate the correct memory sizing is.

vmware tells a max of 12 to 16 for VDI 1Vcpu per core.

i'm a bit concervatif and say a max of 10 1Vcpu Vm's per core.

The VM's are given 1Gb mem also as vmware recommends for a workstation.

so to utilize a 6 core cpu optimal i need about 60GB of memory.

this all following guidelines of vmware.

then using the memory technics i gain a bit of memory so i can have my utilisation around 70%

witch is also a best practisch of vmware... so no balloning or what ever is happening...

how does this ever fit in this licensing...

i'm already more conservative then the vmware guidelines, and even then this isn't enough to run even with 1 license not even the most expensice one.

[gmitch64]

> #3 looking at SME clusters of 6 hosts (vSphere Enterprise),

> the memory license at 32GB/socket bumps pool size to 384GB

> and fits well with 72GB hosts allowing for minor memory oversubscription

> #4 looking at SME clusters of 10 hosts (vSphere Enerprise Plus),

> the memory license at 48GB/socket sets the pool size at 960GB

> and fits well with 96GB hosts, again allowing for minor memory oversubscription

Everyone seems to keep bringing up these dual CPU servers with 72GB and 96GB.... In the real world, has anyone in the last 18 months bought an ESX host to run Enterprise or Enterprise Plus on, with this little RAM?

We're not a particularly big shop in the grand scheme, but all our 3 new ESX hosts have been 256GB RAM ones, and the 3 we were planning to purchase in the next couple of months would have been the same size.

[allenb1121]

Okay, here is a real world scenario for you:

7 Dell PowerEdge R815s with 512GB of memory each (448 usable with spare row configured), and 4 cpus

4 Dell PowerEdge R715s with 128GB of memory each and 2 cpus.

With vSphere 4.x, this takes 36 Enterprise Plus licenses and gives us access to all the memory.

Assuming we hold out 448GB of memory (the largest increment) in reserve for failover, we will have 3200GB of memory available for use.

After upgrading to vSphere 5.x, we will only be licensed for 1728GB NOT the previous 3200GB.

We will have to purchase 31 additional Enterprise Plus licenses to regain the ability to use all of that memory.

Before you ask this question again - YES we use all of our memory, allowing just a little more than N+1.  I find it hard to believe that people buy systems with large capacity and let them side unused - we add capacity as we need it.

Even if we did have large amounts of idle capacity, it is NOT fair to expect that we should pay extra for access to memory that we could access in the previous version, just because of an arbitrary license limit imposed with the new version.

For the amount of money required in extra license fees, we can license Citrix XenServer and pay for the extra hardware to cover the lower consolidation ratios it gives.

We are a longtime VMware customer (since 2.x), and have been extremely happy until yesterday.  We were also a HUGE Novell shop a decade ago.  It was licensing mishaps such as this that turned us into an Active Directory shop.  VMware, wake up!  Citrix and Microsoft are catching up with you in functionality and beating you on price.  That was the state of affairs with Novell vs. Microsoft in the late 90s...see where both of them are today in that space.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

[Rumple]

#1- so you are catering to 1% of all virtual workloads...since everything else is memory bound

#2- are you indicating that vmware's position is that we should only be oversubscribe 10%

But wait...isn't oversubscription one of the key marketing argument over using vmware vs hyper-v?