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SuperSpike
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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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tietzjd25
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DANCHUFT wrote:

Joe Tietz wrote:

DANCHUFT wrote:

I too was excitedly reading through the new vSphere 5 specs until I stumbled upon the new licensing model  :smileyshocked:

We currently have 2 Socket 128GB RAM Blades running Ent Edition. For us to move to vSphere 5 we would have to double our current license count! Being an NHS Trust I can't see the funding being approved for the migration to vSphere 5 any time soon.

To penalise people who are achieving high consolidation ratios, which was one of the main drives behind virtualisation seems to be a major own goal by VMware. I wonder if the increase in revenue from the extra licensing costs will outweigh the amount of people who will surely abandon vSphere in favour of HyperV in today's financial climate?

I going to harp on this

4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

In our Live Cluster we have 5 Blades, 2 Sockets 128GB Ram in each giving a total of 640GB RAM across the 5 Blades. We allow for one complete Blade failure so 640GB -128GB = 512GB potentially in use at 100% capacity across the 5 Blades.

If we upgrade to vSphere 5 with our current allocation of 10 license (5 x 2 socket Blades) it will only entitle us to use 320GB RAM across the 5 Blades. So yes I see your point, to license us for the remaining 192GB would only be another 6 licenses not 10. It still means that we would need to buy another 6 sockets of Enterprise and Support just to upgrade to vSphere 5 though....

Your right. It sucks that going to cost more money. The response I am seeing here darwfs that Microsoft Lic change in 2009, last I checked they are still doing rather well.

But again VMware to get vaule the belive there product is worth had to do somthing.  Could the entitlements be higher.... I think so on Srd, ENT and ENT+

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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rjb2
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John,

We certainly wish we could be talking about the technical aspects of the new version, and I'm sure you'd like to be doing that as well, but VMWare's decision has placed the focus squarely on the pricing issue - we don't need another thread at this point. It is quite clear now that VMWare has alienated a lot of loyal customers; many of whom have been advocating for your product both within their companies and among their peers in the field. I guess we can assume that the risks were calculated and that the cost of the casualties would be less than the gain to be had by such an aggressive price increase.

I am amazed by the number of articles, blog postings, and responses that have been generated all over the web as a result of this decision. VMWare obviously had a lot of loyalty, or this decision would have gone virtually unnoticed. It is also clear that customers already felt that they were paying a premium price for a very good product, and contrary to your assumptions, there are a large number who would now have to pay significantly more to continue with VMWare. We are one of those customers.

Change is inevitable, but in addition to setting the vRAM entitlements too low, VMWare failed to provide a soft landing for their existing customers to transition gracefully to the new model. Instead, it appears that you are squandering a lot of customer good will, and are forcing otherwise happy IT professionals to spend their valuable time on a very negative topic.

I have tried to respond in a sincere and non-emotional way to this situation after thinking about it for a day, but it doesn't feel any better this morning, and there is little chance that we will reach the point of acceptance unless there is some recognition by VMWare that adjustments will need to be made to support the customers who have helped make VMWare successful up until this point.

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Frank_Heidbuche
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i used to do Vmware and Citrix Xenserver

but 3 years ago i went Vmwar only.

then the xenserver product was OK, but lacking in a lot ow ways.

mainly networking to make it really suitable...

and slow management

with this license change i yesterday started looking  again at xenserver

as it seems distributed switches... replication and SRM functionality are all comming up in V6

it may not be a vmware...

but for me it's damm close to what vmware ESX 3.5U2 was.

and well if needed i can live without the features that came after those releases for the most parts.

i'm also shocked of the pricing??? 5000$ per server for the most advanced version...

that's not mutch...

i'm hitting myself on the head now, placing all my eggs in the vmware basket...

i'll go dual hypervisor again, and let the customer decide what they like best...

bad thing is, 2 existing vmware customers i went to today...

are switching to Xenserver as they don't like the new licensing for there 2 new servers.

and once this is done, they'll switchover the old ones 2.

this only 2 days after vmware launched this new licensing...

i can tell you this...

customers are scared of the Vmware mentality

and when customers are scared...

they'll put there money somewhere else...

even if this product is less advanced as vmware.

as the matrix has put it : Choice, the problem is choice.

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tietzjd25
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Derek Balling wrote:

Joe Tietz wrote:


I going to harp on this

4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

And I'll harp on this: That's a red herring for most environments.

Let's look at my environment - I've got 16 blades, 144GB per blade, 2 sockets of Ent+ CPU licensing per unit. That gives me 1,536GB of vRAM capacity across my entire environment. Now, let's throw out two of those blades. They're redundant warm-spare blades for maintenance and service capacity. (N+2 so even more redundancy than you're thinking I should have). So let's assume I'm only *using* 14 of my 16 licensed blades. Let's assume of those 14 blades' memory, I'm only running them at 80% usage. (Which bear in mind is highly unlikely, in a number of environments, given the OVERcommit hype of 4.x, but let's just say that I'm being EVEN MORE memory conservative than I need to be).

14 * 144 * .8 = 1612.8GB, an overage of 76GB, which means I now have to go buy two CPU of Ent+ licenses just to do what I was already doing the day before.

And I'm a small shop who's not running REALLY dense installs. I have colleagues who are running quad-sockets with 512GB or 768GB of memory per server. A dozen of those, even including the vRAM-license capacity sitting idle in the warm-spare units, gives a licensed capacity of (4 * 12 * 48 = 2304GB), but (10 * 768 * .8 = 6144GB of actual allocated vRAM, meaning they'd need to buy **80** extra sockets of Ent+ licensing (in addition the 48 sockets they presently own) just to get legal under the new doctrine.

In other words: N+1 is a red herring, and I really wish you, and every other person who harps on it, would please just give that a rest.

Please don't take offense on what I saying here. But 2 extra lic for enverment that size should not be issue. If friend is using those number of memroy he is the reason why VMware needed to put new lic requements in.

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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DANCHUFT
Contributor
Contributor

rjb2 wrote:

John,

We certainly wish we could be talking about the technical aspects of the new version, and I'm sure you'd like to be doing that as well, but VMWare's decision has placed the focus squarely on the pricing issue - we don't need another thread at this point. It is quite clear now that VMWare has alienated a lot of loyal customers; many of whom have been advocating for your product both within their companies and among their peers in the field. I guess we can assume that the risks were calculated and that the cost of the casualties would be less than the gain to be had by such an aggressive price increase.

I am amazed by the number of articles, blog postings, and responses that have been generated all over the web as a result of this decision. VMWare obviously had a lot of loyalty, or this decision would have gone virtually unnoticed. It is also clear that customers already felt that they were paying a premium price for a very good product, and contrary to your assumptions, there are a large number who would now have to pay significantly more to continue with VMWare. We are one of those customers.

Change is inevitable, but in addition to setting the vRAM entitlements too low, VMWare failed to provide a soft landing for their existing customers to transition gracefully to the new model. Instead, it appears that you are squandering a lot of customer good will, and are forcing otherwise happy IT professionals to spend their valuable time on a very negative topic.

I have tried to respond in a sincere and non-emotional way to this situation after thinking about it for a day, but it doesn't feel any better this morning, and there is little chance that we will reach the point of acceptance unless there is some recognition by VMWare that adjustments will need to be made to support the customers who have helped make VMWare successful up until this point.

I think that about hits the nail on the head for me. Disastrous PR week for VMware IMO.

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

for me they can fire someone or more over this idea.

i never saw a product release get this mutch negative feedback even before the product was availeble for testing.

you think vmware is big and smart enough to not do stupid thing like this.

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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

JDLangdon wrote:

odonnellj wrote:

The worst thing to do is to start negotiating vRAM levels. The whole concept is absurd and should be scrapped and an apology given.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't vRAM the amount of RAM that is allocated to a VM upon bootup?

If that is correct then upon bootup, my VM with 16GB's of RAM assigned to it is using 16GB's of vRAM.  What happens to my licensing cost if I limit this same 16GB VM to 2GB's upon bootup and use 14GB's of SWAP space?  Did my licensing cost just go down?

No it's Memory used, not memory allocated.

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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c33jbeckwith
Contributor
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rjb2 wrote:

John,

We certainly wish we could be talking about the technical aspects of the new version, and I'm sure you'd like to be doing that as well, but VMWare's decision has placed the focus squarely on the pricing issue - we don't need another thread at this point. It is quite clear now that VMWare has alienated a lot of loyal customers; many of whom have been advocating for your product both within their companies and among their peers in the field. I guess we can assume that the risks were calculated and that the cost of the casualties would be less than the gain to be had by such an aggressive price increase.

I am amazed by the number of articles, blog postings, and responses that have been generated all over the web as a result of this decision. VMWare obviously had a lot of loyalty, or this decision would have gone virtually unnoticed. It is also clear that customers already felt that they were paying a premium price for a very good product, and contrary to your assumptions, there are a large number who would now have to pay significantly more to continue with VMWare. We are one of those customers.

Change is inevitable, but in addition to setting the vRAM entitlements too low, VMWare failed to provide a soft landing for their existing customers to transition gracefully to the new model. Instead, it appears that you are squandering a lot of customer good will, and are forcing otherwise happy IT professionals to spend their valuable time on a very negative topic.

I have tried to respond in a sincere and non-emotional way to this situation after thinking about it for a day, but it doesn't feel any better this morning, and there is little chance that we will reach the point of acceptance unless there is some recognition by VMWare that adjustments will need to be made to support the customers who have helped make VMWare successful up until this point.

I could not agree more.  VMware had two ways to go, make licensing less expensive and bring more potential users into the market, or make it more expensive and potentially alienate their user base.  They chose the secondd approach.  My personal opinion is they chose wrong.

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

I just wonder....

is there a reason they announce this now...

in the middle of the holidays...

months from VMworld...

it makes me think...

maybe they knew it would generate a lot of negative feedback...

so announce it, in the most calm month...

so people are less negative over it, when vmworld starts.

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medic29
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Contributor

The pooch is screwed on this one...  Either ESXi 4 will remain in place as long as can be worked with or MS/Zen will be the best option for the money spent.

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RogerThomas
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4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

Sorry by why do all the supports of VMWARE seem to think that just because people have consolidated work loads they have also moved to HA based clusters?

Within my enironment I do not run HA or even a central cluster - why do I need to? I can use SQL mirroring for ms failover is the main node goes down and all my work loads are also built as active/passive systems or resource pools with automatic failover/distributed workload.

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derekb13
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Joe Tietz wrote:


Please don't take offense on what I saying here. But 2 extra lic for enverment that size should not be issue. If friend is using those number of memroy he is the reason why VMware needed to put new lic requements in.

If you think it's "not an issue", can I have them send the invoices to your attention, and you'll pay for them? Cuz, y'know, it shouldn't be an issue, right?

It is an issue, though. Y'know why? Cuz I'm paying for SnS, and I expect "the hardware and software I paid for" to continue working after the upgrade. Not to suddenly have to say to management "Yeah, y'know that stuff that's been working just fine? Yeah, I need more money because they are insisting I buy more licenses to keep it running. No, no, nothing really changed significantly, they just want to reach deeper into our pockets."

Here's what the response will be: "Pound Sand."

And VMware didn't NEED to put any new lic requirements in. Look at their financials, my friend, they're a publicly traded company, so it's easy to do. Record profits, sales through the roof. They don't NEED to do this, they're not going to go bankrupt tomorrow if they don't do this. They're simply getting greedy. Plain and simple.

But the bottom line is: Your N+1 argument is, frankly, poodoo, and you and everyone else needs to just stop reiterating it, because it's ONLY valid in an environment that only has one live server and one standby server. Everyone else is probably going to need more licenses.

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DANCHUFT
Contributor
Contributor

Has anyone read this excerpt from the licensing PDF;

I have received an alert from VMware vCenter that I have

exceeded the available pooled vRAM, but the product did

not prevent me from deploying a new virtual machine.

What is going on?

A: Only vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus implement hard

enforcement of vRAM capacity. VMware vCenter Server

Standard will not prevent you from exceeding the available

vRAM capacity; it will only signal that the licensing of the

environment is out of compliance. VMware licensing policy

is that customers should buy licenses in advance of use,

so we recommend monitoring the vRAM consumption and

extending the available pooled vRAM capacity before

exceeding it. In this example, to become compliant you should

immediately add enough vSphere licenses to cover the high

watermark of consumed vRAM capacity.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

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rickardnobel
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Champion

Jon Tackabury wrote:

Currently we are using ESXi (free) and have been trying out the Essentials kits to allow use to use VCB to make our backups easier to manage. This was going to cost us around $1k-$2k total for both hosts. If we upgrade to VMware vSphere 5, ESXi only allows for 8GB RAM, which is crazy.

It is still somewhat unclear if there is a 8 GB vRAM limit on the free version.

VMware is saying both that, but on same time claims a single VM running on the free vSphere Hypervisor could use up to 1 TB of memory!

See this: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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JustinL3
Contributor
Contributor

rjb2 wrote:

John,

We certainly wish we could be talking about the technical aspects of the new version, and I'm sure you'd like to be doing that as well, but VMWare's decision has placed the focus squarely on the pricing issue - we don't need another thread at this point. It is quite clear now that VMWare has alienated a lot of loyal customers; many of whom have been advocating for your product both within their companies and among their peers in the field. I guess we can assume that the risks were calculated and that the cost of the casualties would be less than the gain to be had by such an aggressive price increase.

I am amazed by the number of articles, blog postings, and responses that have been generated all over the web as a result of this decision. VMWare obviously had a lot of loyalty, or this decision would have gone virtually unnoticed. It is also clear that customers already felt that they were paying a premium price for a very good product, and contrary to your assumptions, there are a large number who would now have to pay significantly more to continue with VMWare. We are one of those customers.

Change is inevitable, but in addition to setting the vRAM entitlements too low, VMWare failed to provide a soft landing for their existing customers to transition gracefully to the new model. Instead, it appears that you are squandering a lot of customer good will, and are forcing otherwise happy IT professionals to spend their valuable time on a very negative topic.

I have tried to respond in a sincere and non-emotional way to this situation after thinking about it for a day, but it doesn't feel any better this morning, and there is little chance that we will reach the point of acceptance unless there is some recognition by VMWare that adjustments will need to be made to support the customers who have helped make VMWare successful up until this point.

In addition to my previous post http://communities.vmware.com/message/1790602#1790602, the comments by rjb2 fit inline exactly with my thoughts on this who fiasco.

-J

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AXI
Contributor
Contributor

Sorry, its memory allocated

"entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere

configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory

configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created,

it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM)

available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each

vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity

entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM

configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM

entitled to the user. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity

can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can

configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine.

The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet

customer workload requirements."

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

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Frank_Heidbuche
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Contributor

ye, another thing to monitor.

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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I guess the only other point of view I can offer is I have done over 50 deployments in the last 3 years in SMB market. Off top of my head less then 10% of them will have buy more licenses.  As many of them are not going to buy anything over 4 GIG memory chips because of the cost of 8's and 16's are so high.

I see this figure this will hit large enterprise harder, I could be wrong. We will have see how it all shakes out.

Again this lot less expensive then when Microsoft change there virtualization license..... And many I mean many corporations don't license that correctly.

VMware will not like this comment but it's clear in documents.

The only hard limit is in ESS and ESS+!!! If your running other versions it's just a SOFT limit! So like many corporations that correnlty get around MS license will most likely do the same for VMware.

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

one think i find amusing...

you can run a 1TB VM, but then limiting everything on memory.

thats like buying a bugatti veron, and then rewrite the limit in there to let it run at 80KMh when the think can do 418Kmh

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jontackabury
Contributor
Contributor

It is still somewhat unclear if there is a 8 GB vRAM limit on the free version.
VMware is saying both that, but on same time claims a single VM running on the free vSphere Hypervisor could use up to 1 TB of memory!

From that article, it sounds like ESXi will support 1TB of RAM, but only allow you to allocate 8GB to running VMs. Not very useful at all.

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