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?

[JDLangdon]

Justin Devereaux wrote:

Yeah, I'm slightly concerned about the whole VCP thing - I'm a VCP3/4 and was thinking of going for the VCAP-DCA (and of course the VCP5), but if VMware are going to press ahead with this stupid licensing system, then I would imagine a VCP certification will be about as valuable as a Novell one in the coming years. Think I might hold off on the VCP5 and learn some Hyper-V in the meantime...

JD

While there is nothing wrong with learning some Hyper-V, you can't be serious about the VCP certification value dimminishing because of a licensing change.

[c33jbeckwith]

If have not "studied" the new licensing model completely, but if what I hear is true, it is a game changer and the primary winner will be Microsoft and Hyper-V.  Like many on this forum, I have sung the praises of VMware in the past and deployed to many customers.  If this is VMware's way of rewarding its users, it looks like it is time to prop up a Hyper-V test farm and get used to it.  

[hellraiser]

That would depend - if the licensing change triggers a shift whereby people leave VMware and move to a Hyper-V solution then the certifcation's value will decrease, due to there being less demand for it.  Going by how many unhappy customers are broadcasting their dismay across the internet, this is definitely something to be wary of.  After all, how many people use Novell networks nowadays?

JD

[JDLangdon]

Justin Devereaux wrote:

That would depend - if the licensing change triggers a shift whereby people leave VMware and move to a Hyper-V solution then the certifcation's value will decrease, due to there being less demand for it.  Going by how many unhappy customers are broadcasting their dismay across the internet, this is definitely something to be wary of.  After all, how many people use Novell networks nowadays?

JD

People didn't stop using Novell because of a licensing change.  This was brought on because using Microsoft server products allowed for a tighter intergration with Microsoft dekstop products and application suites.

The only people who are going to be effected by this license change are the Fortune 500's and smaller who have invested in blade technologies.  Larger companies who have invested in larger servers (4 sockets) and who are already licensed as Enterprise and/or Enterprise Plus probably won't care either way.

[derekb13]

JDLangdon wrote:

The only people who are going to be effected by this license change are the Fortune 500's and smaller who have invested in blade technologies.  Larger companies who have invested in larger servers (4 sockets) and who are already licensed as Enterprise and/or Enterprise Plus probably won't care either way.

Blade users are going to be affected because the blades don't have enough CPUs to get enough vRAM entitlement to cover their installed memory.

The 4-socket type 4U servers you describe will be affected, because those servers are generally deployed where you want a metric crapton of memory, and even 4 or 6 sockets isn't enough entitlement to cover all the memory you might load into one of those beasts.

I think you might be vastly underestimating how many people this affects.

[hellraiser]

Dell R710:-

Max number of CPUs - 2

Max RAM - 192GB

Assuming Enterprise licencing for vSphere 4.1 I would need 2 licences for this. Moving on to vSphere 5.0 I get the following:-

CPUs = 2

RAM = 192GB

=2x (192/32) = 12 licences for Enterprise

=2x (192/48) = 8 licences for Enterprise Plus.

Seeing as the R710 is one of the most popular ESXi hosts, and that the majority of ESXi hosts are memory rather than CPU constrained, it will affect a lot more people than you think.

JD

[AlbertWT]

Justin,

So does that means instead of being able to use the existing 2x Enterprise Plus License now I have to get 8x Enterprise plus license v5 ?

That is ridiculous 400% increase, how does VMware justify the cost of virtualization can safe money.

[JDLangdon]

Albert Widjaja wrote:

Justin,

So does that means instead of being able to use the existing 2x Enterprise Plus License now I have to get 8x Enterprise plus license v5 ?

That is ridiculous 400% increase, how does VMware justify the cost of virtualization can safe money.

That depends on how much RAM you have.  If you have 336GB's of RAM in your server, then YES, you will need 8 Enterprise plus licenses.

[JDLangdon]

Derek Balling wrote:

Blade users are going to be affected because the blades don't have enough CPUs to get enough vRAM entitlement to cover their installed memory.

The 4-socket type 4U servers you describe will be affected, because those servers are generally deployed where you want a metric crapton of memory, and even 4 or 6 sockets isn't enough entitlement to cover all the memory you might load into one of those beasts.

That's what I said, people who invested in blade technologies will be effected.  Companies with larger 4-socket servers will not be effected as bad unless they have gone above and beyond 132GB's of RAM per host.

[GVD]

"The only people who are going to be effected by this license change are  the Fortune 500's and smaller who have invested in blade technologies."? Really?

We are a SME with 12 employees, and we are hit by this licensing shift as well.

On top of a bunch of physical servers we have 3 servers in the datacenter that run our 'Production' and 'QA' environment. Essentials Plus is perfect fit for it. Or at least was. We can still use E+, but now it does no longer provide any room for growth anymore (we are not CPU heavy, but memory is an issue). Upgrading past E+ would mean cost suddenly multiplies more than threefold.

In the office, we also have a 'Development' server. It started it's life as a licensed ESX 3.5. When the free ESXi came out, we could move it to 4.0 and 4.1, thus dropping licensing cost. Now this server is outdated and will be replaced. We had a dual QuadCore Xeon with 36 GB RAM in mind. Now vSphere Hypervisor (the replacement for free) ESXi only supports 8 GB vRAM, thus making it useless for us.

There are two main options here:

1. Use Hypervisor/ESXi 4.1 and continue to do so for a two or three years and don't consider upgrading.
2. Investigate what Xen and Hyper-V solutions could fill our needs.

And it's point 2 where things really come into play. We already have the required Windows licensing to play around with Hyper-V, it comes at no extra cost to us. Xen also offers the basic functionality we would need for this DEV server.

With VMWare's recent changes, VMWare is pushing a lot of old & loyal customers (both large & small) to investigate alternatives. If eventually I like either Xen or Hyper-V in our DEV environment, I can assure you that we will re-evaluate our decision to use VMWare in the datacenter (Prod & QA)! Previously, I would have scoffed at the notion of using either, since I've been a fan of VMWare for years, but now? I'll surely investigate both.

Oh, and luckily for me, I don't have to go explain to management why licensing costs suddenly exploded. It often doubled or tripled for the sysadmins that I know personally (gee, I wonder where those 'unaffected' 90% are?). I think you just lost a lot of "champions" within a lot of companies, VMWare...

[c33jbeckwith]

GVD wrote:

I think you just lost a lot of "champions" within a lot of companies, VMWare...

Totally agree.  This was not a very well thought out licensing change in my view.  Hyper-V and Xen are already eroding VMware's market share, so what do you do?  Push the fence sitters over the fence to the competition.  I don't see the logic in their thought process.  I think they really under-estimated the impact.

[JDLangdon]

Justin Devereaux wrote:

=2x (192/32) = 12 licences for Enterprise

=2x (192/48) = 8 licences for Enterprise Plus.

I'm not disagreeing with you here that anyone with a 2-socket server will be hit hard but I'm not sure where those numbers are coming from.

From what I've read, in order to 192GB's of RAM you would need either 6-CPU Enterprise licenses or 4-CPU Enterprise Plus licenses.  Where does the extra licenses come from in your example?

[derekb13]

JDLangdon wrote:

That's what I said, people who invested in blade technologies will be effected.  Companies with larger 4-socket servers will not be effected as bad unless they have gone above and beyond 132GB's of RAM per host.

And my statement is: Who buys one of those ginormous 4- or 6-socket servers and only puts 192GB (or 288GB) in it? The whole selling point of those beasts, to VMware users, is their huge memory capacity. They support 2TB of RAM in a number of cases!

So my position is: You're wildly underestimating the number of people affected, both because of the huge number of blade users AND because the 4- and 6- socket server users are also almost certainly going to be boned.

[hellraiser]

You are correct, my cock-up on the maths side. You would need 6x Enterprise licences or 4x Enterprise Plus for what you would have originally only need 2x licences for. Either way, it's not a bargain.

JD

[FragKing]

I think he means he has two physical servers...  so 2x 6 or 2x 4...

[Frank_Heidbuche]

maybe vmware should start selling hardware.

some old dual core cpu servers with 24GB memory in them...

as i don't know where to buy these old boxes...

[Tugboat20111014]

The other thing to consider is even if you have a dual socket 64Gb server with 2 Enterprise licenses and think you are covered, you may not be.  If you make use of TPS to over subscribe memory you can blow right past the 64Gb limit and need additional licenses.  Lots of things to think about and consider.  While using memory for license counts may not be a bad idea, the amount allowed per license level is seriously low.  Before this we never would have given Hyper-V a second look.  Now my boss wants me to put it in our dev / test environment.  Already there are licenses we won't be upgrading and if it works out we may be putting it in production.  

[gmitch64]

> Companies with larger 4-socket servers will not be effected as bad

> unless they have gone above and beyond 132GB's of RAM per host.

Who the heck buys a 4 socket server with less than 132GB of memory? Especially for virtualization. Heck, we are buying 2 core servers with 256GB. If we went 4 core, we'd probably double that.

G

[odonnellj]

JohnTroyer, that was beautifully explained especially about the realities of "right sizing" vm's as some means of solving this problem.

[AlbertWT]

No, actually I have 61 GB on my 8 new blades, based on my approved budget I only need to buy 2CPU sockets x 8 unit = 16 Enterprise plus license on VSphere 4.1)

But as for vsphere 5 I’m not sure if I have to buy

61x8 / 48 = 10.1 license ?