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SuperSpike
Contributor
Contributor

vSphere 5 Licensing

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?

@Virtual_EZ
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allenb1121
Contributor
Contributor

We are retiring 2 CPU systems with 128GB of memory.  Our current config is 4 Opteron 6176 CPUs with 512GB of memory.

VMware must have based this assessment on 2006-2007 numbers.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

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cmacmillan
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

It's hard to say what View 5 licensing will look like, but the current View licensing is host agnostic (i.e. assumes Enterprise Plus) and is licensed on a per VM basis. Today's View license model allows for virtually unlimited hosts (restricted to 8 per Composer cluster) so it would be logical that tomorrow's View will similarly allow for unrestricted memory sizes. Best practices with View discourages mixed-use ESXi hosts (i.e. View add-on licenses).

Collin C. MacMillan, VCP4/VCP5 VCAP-DCD4 Cisco CCNA/CCNP, Nexenta CNE VMware vExpert 2010-2012 SOLORI - Solution Oriented, LLC http://blog.solori.net If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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RogerThomas
Contributor
Contributor

People trying to defend VMWARE seem to think that 72GB or maybe 96GB is the correct size for a 2 processor box to do pricing around. Other are rightly pointing out that few systems are now built with such small amounts of memory - try instead 144GB, 192GB or even 256GB.

The real issue is going to be what happens over the lifetime of VMWARE 5.0 (forget even a 5.1 release). 32GByte dimms has not shown up in the market as the next CPUs from AMD and Intel will just support more 16GByte dimms.

And I can't answer the question about the cost of a 1TB server but a 512GByte server with 4 CPUs and a fair disk array is about $35,000 using SuperMicro kit, which means that it will cost less than the VMWARE licences needed to use it?

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

i know of the view licensing...

i toke the example of a small windows 7 VDI as example...

becasue first of all, if all machines are the same, you can overcommit al lot.

second then don't use a lot of memory.

a server with 1 gig of mem does't really make sense.

but if those figures that are already conservative on VM's per core

conservative on mem alocation per server

and even then the numers don't add up to the licensing...

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gmitch64
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

> And I can't answer the question about the cost of a 1TB server

A 4 CPU, 1TB Dell R910, with a couple of boot disks is $85,000 list at the moment - you can probably factor in a 20% discount.

vmware licences (enterprise plus) at list, 22 required, $4,369 per CPU, so $96,118

So the cost of the vSphere licensing EXCEEDS the cost of the hardware.

G

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cmacmillan
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

#1  actually no, the restriction on multi-core affected unit system scaling, the restriction on pooled vRAM only affects deployment price.

#2 again, no. The assumption in the "big memory" argument is 0% oversubscription. The fail-over configurations in my example just relied on a 10% memory oversubscription based on the maximum licensed memory and RAM configurations. If you want to design for 50% memory oversubscription that's still your choice.

Collin C. MacMillan, VCP4/VCP5 VCAP-DCD4 Cisco CCNA/CCNP, Nexenta CNE VMware vExpert 2010-2012 SOLORI - Solution Oriented, LLC http://blog.solori.net If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

I do, not everyone has a huge enterprise with 1000GB of memory. I have 3 2-CPU 72GB machines that run 90% of the company that I work for. Even being such a small shop it still gets blown out by the new licensing model, which is kinda funny actually. Would just be 1000 times worse at a larger company.

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

I feel a bit sorry for the engineers at VMware who has worked for so long with the new version and the day after launch almost nobody is discussing the new features, only the strange changed license model..

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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mikeyes
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I will add to the thread and say this is crazy.  Unless VMware changes this they will lose alot of customers because of cost.  I don't like the idea of running HyperV but HyperV is pratically free.  I will not pay as much or more for VMware license costs than my hardware costs just because VMware got greedy.  If VMware screwed up and made ESX 4 licensing too low that is their problem.  They can't suddenly jack up prices by this volume and expect people to just write a check.

And I am really sick of the "do you really use it question".  If I buy a server with 192GB of ram in it then I would like to be ABLE to use 192GB of ram whenever I feel like it.  The license model yesterday would let me do that.  I am not going to buy 192GB of ram (because that is the cost effective price point) and then license 96GB of virtual ram and decide to tack on more VMware license cost later as soon as I need to access more ram.

BAD move VMware.  Guess I might as well start testing HyperV and Xen Server.

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

heil to the engineers for the great features,

to bad nobody is going to use them, as they will go to hyper-v or xen based on cost.

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cczcp1
Contributor
Contributor

I feel exactly the same Mikeyes, like you I dont want to have to check out the competition (Hyper-V) but I'm left with little choice.

My chances of pursuading the Exchange lads to virtualise their hardware are now practically zero..... hell, same goes for me trying to expand our current cluster. If the VMware bods refuse to budge on this soon, I'll have to shelve plans to bring more staff up to VCP standard too Smiley Sad.

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stevieg
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I agree with Rickard - and the worst thing is we were all ready and waiting to get excited about these features that have taken so much work and we've been paying software maintenance for.

Smiley Sad

Steve

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rahlj
Contributor
Contributor

I like how we are being told that it will force us to size our VMs better or that we are lucky VMWare has been so nice in the past with licensing.

REALLY? 

I thought when you develop a loyal customer base you rewarded that? 

How much has VMWare saved in advertising from the numerous blogs and word of mouth people have praised VMWare with?  How many times has someone said they were considering Citrix or MS and people have jumped in on the VMWare side and said that person was CRAZY for not going with VMWare? 

All I see on the Internet is singing the praises of all of the great features Vsphere 5.  I could care less about features if I cant use the product.  Look at all of these awesome features BUT WHAT EVER YOU DO, DONT LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN! 

This isnt a perceived issue,  its a real issue and to be told that its fair is ridiculous.  Build more with less.  Over commit.  So we do all of the "best practices" and then we get punished for it.  Or we have to listen to people say that we should be giving back some of our cost savings to VMWare. 

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chanaka_ek
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

the thing is a large number of IT consultants and architects around the world seems to be following this thread and actively contributing to it. What VMware also need to realise is that it is us lot that actually sell things for VMware despite their fancy marketting (its not like an MD or a finance director of a company listen to vmware marketting and say hey, that sounds great, lets get VMware in).

Its usually us that propose these types of up and coming technologies like virtulisation and go to board meetings to justify the already expensive costs, often against the will of the anti virtualisation traditionalists trying to convince them vmware is really good and despite the expense it will be worth it in the long run.

Thats how VMware get sales at the end of the day... and if we genuinely believe these new licensing terms makes it no longer worth while to invest in vmware, they are loosing their most effective, 1st line or marketeers. That is not going to be good for VMware now is it??

So I sincerely hope they would look at this closely. They are usually supposed to be very partner focused so any resellers or outsoursing parters contributing to this thread (and through other means would really add weight)

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Full_Halsey
Contributor
Contributor

Where is the one for one upgrade for current customers with PAID support???????????  Charge for upgrades when you add not just to stay current!!

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership

Hello,

So to determine if you need more license you need to consider how much memory you actually use, not what you assign. For example, I know most people only allocate about 50-70% of any one node due to HA requirements. So when you do the math you may be using only 25% of the available memory on any given node. So the vRAMUsed is most likely less than your vRAMEntitlement for a license.


CORRECTION: It is vRAMAllocated not Used. So you need to due the math based on your 50-70% allocation across all your nodes in a cluster or pool.

I found/was told about an interesting powershell 2.0 tool that will help with this:

http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/

When I ran this against my systems I found that I was entitled to 3x what I actually used (2.5x what I had allocated) I think this model may actually work but there is quite a bit more to think about. This may also push VMs that overallocate memory to come more in line with what they actually use. Which will actually help with performance in many ways.

I need to run this tool on a few of my SMB customers to find out how much of an impact there is to them as well. I would also like to see the results within some Enterprise customers.

The key will be, that you actually now need to make some plans. Just upgrading is not necessarily the way to go, plan and do your homework before proceeding, you may find what you have is more than enough.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

Communities Moderator, VMware vExpert,

Author: VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security,VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise 2nd Edition

Podcast: The Virtualization Security Podcast Resources: The Virtualization Bookshelf

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

is vmware actualy even listening?

all i hear is we are fault and they are right.

is vmware even thinking of changing this mistake...

or should we really start looking at Xen of hyper-V

i have 2 more designs to do tomorrow,

and well i can't propose vmware to these 2 customers with these licensing.

any advice...

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echtweg
Contributor
Contributor

At first: I'm using VMWare Products since 2004 (started with ESX 2.5) and I realy realy like the products and forced to use it as much as possible. Of course not everything was perfect (I still remember the time bomb bug very well) but what you're going to do now is realy bad!

Every year we pay about 20-30t EUR subscription to VMWare to get the new releases and now you release an Update which we can't use without buying new licenses. For our testing environment we have to buy more than doublce of the licenses..sorry that's not a fair deal.

Luckily we didn't already extended our subscription (will end in december).......with that crappy license-model we have to overthink our complete infrastructure.....and I don't think that it will be based on VMWare products again....

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

any advice about FT?

will it use up also 2X the memory from the Vram pool?

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Full_Halsey
Contributor
Contributor

That's what I'm hearing. Just because I and a lot of other posters are VCP's or better doesn't mean we have correctly deployed virtual environments and we just plain stupid. 

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