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?

[wdroush1]

rvantipalli wrote:

It is good to refer to the below link to understand vSphere 5 licensing in detail and why VMware has moved to vRAM licensing.

http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/07/understanding-the-vsphere-5-vram-licensing-model.html

42 pages showing we know the vRAM model, and you guys are still posting this? :smileyplain:

If anything the numbers gone over in various blogs suggest we understand the vRAM impact better than VMWare does.

[AlbertWT]

Yes, that's a good idea, are you going to use Survey Monkey ?

[bilalhashmi]

Guys,

With all the heat in this thread.. something to lighten up the mood a lil.. I have started a new section in my blog called the vCartoon in which I will capture the what happens in the week of the virtual world. With the licensing fiasco, enjoy the first vCartoon and lighten up your Monday... Hopefully VMware will come back with a revised plan to make us all happy soon..

http://www.cloud-buddy.com/?p=522

Follow me @ Cloud-Buddy.com

[Symlink101]

Like you, SuperSpike, I was astounded by the new pricing model.  It still feels a little surreal - I really find it hard to believe VMWare would be this stupid.  There is no way I could justify the price increase.

Fortunately, my company started 2 VM projects at the same time.  1 VMWare and 1 Microsoft.  I was feeling quite cocky that VMWare was my project, but at least I have the comfort that I can use in-house experience to switch to Microsoft when the time comes, perhaps when 4.x is nearing end of life.

[GaryHertz]

Just some quick thoughts.

"VMware's new licensing scheme isn't a problem.  They just need to, (choose one or more), increase the vRAM entitlement, change it to pRAM, drop the pCPU requirement, (insert your choice here)."

My choice is "they give it away free".  The new licensing model is one license per pCPU with a limit of 24-48 GB vRAM depending on product level. An additional license is required for each 24-48GB of vRAM.  Please don't say it works based on your own personal tweak.  Evaluate it based on what it is. Defending it based on a change you make so the numbers come out better is just admitting that the new model is wrong.  My choice of "give it away free" is just as valid as any alternative you have to justify the new model its just a little more extreme.

"Our new model will simplify licensing"

I think this is my favorite claimed benefit of the new scheme.  I challenge anyone to tell me how the new model simplifies anything.

4.x model.  I buy one license per socket.  If I have more than 6 cores/socket I need Advanced or Enterprise Plus. Pretty complicated.

5.x model.  I'm glad I don't need to know how many cores/socket I have in my servers, who knows that?  vRAM is so much easier.  Let's see, I have six 2 socket servers with 192GB of memory. I plan on reserving one server for HA and reserving 64GB per server to be safe. That leaves me with a total usable memory of 640GB. I'm buying Enterprise licenses which gives me 32GB vRAM per license.  $50 to the first person that can tell me how many licenses I need to fully utilize my memory. (Hint: 20 is the wrong answer.)

"We've removed cores/socket restrictions"

I can't wait to deploy my new host with a 16 core CPU and 24GB of memory.  vRAM entitlements on each CPU license restricts the number of cores. Its just a sneaky way to do it.  With the new vRAM entitlements I can easily argue that the core/sockets are more restrictive under the new model.  How many people are going to deploy a 6 core cpu with 24GB of memory.  I bet not many.

"VMware is the best platform on the market so you would be foolish to switch to anything else."

I've got news for you.  Nobody buys the best product on the market.  They buy the best product on the market that is within their budget.  VMware is free to set their prices at anything they want.  The outcry you are hearing is because they just priced themselves out of a lot of current customer's budgets.

"CPU power is increasing so VMware needs to increase their pricing to keep pace with the new technology."

I'm glad Intel and AMD don't use this pricing policy.  If they did they would price their CPUs based on the price/performance of a 8088 processor.  I don't even want to think what the price of 8GB of memory would be based on the price of a 16Kb chip from 1981 would be.  Yes that's kilobit not kilobyte.

"You just need to right size your VMs."

How can VMware possibly know how well my servers are sized?  Am I possibly sizing my servers so poorly that I can reduce my memory requirements from 256GB to 128GB?  64GB? 24GB?  Just think what I could do in 4.1 by right sizing my servers!  Maybe right sizing only works in 5.0.

"I can't understand why everyone is focusing on the new licensing scheme.  v5 has such great new features, we should be discussing that."

Your right, we should be talking about all the great new features.  Too bad the new licensing model is so bad nobody cares about them. Speaks volumes.  Hope VMware understands that better than you do.

[hellraiser]

"CPU power is increasing so VMware needs to increase their pricing to keep pace with the new technology."

I'm  glad Intel and AMD don't use this pricing policy.  If they did they  would price their CPUs based on the price/performance of a 8088  processor.  I don't even want to think what the price of 8GB of memory  would be based on the price of a 16Kb chip from 1981 would be.  Yes  that's kilobit not kilobyte.

I fully agree that using this as an excuse is ridiculous. At the end of the day, vSphere is a hypervisor - there are many other hypervisors on the market, and I've yet to see any of them penalising a user based on the amount of RAM they need to install. I fail to understand why VMware need to change this licencing scheme, seeing as they are already raking in cash left right and centre - surely with the competition closing in on them and more and more people turning to Hyper-V or Xen, it would be wise to keep your userbase happy? After all, given the choice between paying through the nose for vSphere,  and 2008 Datacentre licences to run my VMs, and just paying for Datacentre and using Hyper-V with no restrictions on RAM or additional licence fees if I choose to expand which would you go for? Sure, vSphere is the better product which is why I use it now, but with the restrictions they're putting on in the form of massively increased licence costs it makes sense to only use it for the mission-critical stuff, and to offload the less important VMs to something like HyperV or Xen.

Both Novell and Palm thought they were the best and could treat their customers with contempt - look what happened to them VMware, and learn from it before it's too late.

JD

[ftempel]

I now have to refocus my attention from designing, building and migrating infrastructures to stupid stuff like licensing. Ever sat in a speeding car and had the parking brake yanked at full force? That's how it feels like. This licensing bombshell impacts everything I'm working on, ranging from adding memory to a cluster, replacing a cluster with new hardware to implementing Windows 2008 (with higher memory demands and allocations). I don't have to come to management to explain this, management has come to me for an explanation, how's that for impact?

Yes, I've ran the numbers. Not using a non-working script, but by reading the "simple" licensing document and doing the calculations by hand. I'm fairly safe with the current configuration even though I get to upgrade a 8-node 4-socket/node cluster to Enterprise+ to stay compliant in a v5 world (that or reintroduce a new vCenter server). Too bad within a month that configuration will not be the current one anymore and I get to pay dearly for that change now.

The annoying part is that we already pay for three virtualization products: KVM (RHEL licensing), Hyper-V (datacenter licensing) and VMware. The latter is the only one which doesn't come "free" in a licensing contract, and just got more expensive to keep using as we did. I'm out of excuses to keep paying for VMware. Good enough just became a key argument in the discussion.

[roglar]

It is quite painful to see VMware losing years of goodwill in just a few days.

Only this thread with over 600 comments from unhappy customers and over 31,000 views - and where is the "damage control" from VMware? About 5 answers from VMware officials pointing to some powershell scripts made by end users of the web..

[JDLangdon]

Bilal wrote:

Guys,

With all the heat in this thread.. something to lighten up the mood a lil.. I have started a new section in my blog

Why do you insists on using this forum as a means to generate traffic for your personal blog?

[rjb2]

wdroush1 wrote:

It's like buying a car, and then suddenly they add a govenor that limits it to 20mph unless you pay more, sure, you can just drop 20mph everywhere and not increase costs, but you're missing like 66% of your available car.

Polls will say customers will pay exactly the same, victory will be claimed, ignorant hilarity will ensue.

Right, the cars we bought can no longer drive on the highway without paying a toll.

[odonnellj]

mikeyes wrote:

There have been a few things thrown out that I would like to confirm or deny.

1.  It has been stated that VMware will only allow v4 customers with maintenance 30 days to upgrade to v5 once it is released.  If the customer does not upgrade they will have to pay an additional amount to upgrade to v5 even if they are under maintenance.

2.  It has been stated that if a customer purchases a v5 license and exercises their downgrade rights to run that license as a v4 license on a v4 ESXi server that those v4 ESXi servers will utilize the vRAM limitations.

Can someone please confirm or deny these with actual links from VMware's site or whitepapers?

This really needs to be emphasized.

If true, the fact that I have 30 days to make a descsion to upgrade is outrageous. I've been paying SnS for years so I can upgrade if I want to at some point, not be forced to as soon a new x.0 release comes out. I like to let things get a few patches out before commiting. Now I have to make a commitment on the future of almost 300 Enterprise licenses in a very short time frame. Do we stay, do we upgrade? Hurry, hurry, time is runnig out!

Then to really force you, it doesn't matter if you upgrade or stay at 4.x because if you want more 4.x licenses, you're really playing by 5.0 rules anway.

Shameful.

[bckirsch]

Okay with all of the positives and negatives posted here there is one aspect that might have gotten lost here.  I know when I buy a new farm it's a huge capital spend that has everything rolled into it to be put on the books over the next 3-4 years.  Well I can't just go back to my exectives and ask for thousands more for additional licenses because we are growing the farm now.  They will ask why wasn't that put in the price up front.  So buying as we grow is not an option.  Not too mention EVERYTHING else we use like Windows Data Center, vFoglight, Powerpath & Nexus is licensed by socket.

Sorry guys but I think you blew it...and yes shortly after this I did sign up for a Hyper-V course starting next month.

[sergeadam]

The 30 days to upgrade, if true, doesn’t bother me too much. I can just do the upgrade for the amount of CPUs I have and not install it.

It’s the downgrade that could be a problem. As more projects come on-line, it forces me to rush my evaluation of the competition. If buying 5.0 licenses and downgrading them to 4.1 leaves me with the 4.1 license entitlement, I have 3 years to properly assess my direction. It also means I have 3 years to ease into the new model if need be.

[shaofis]

Downgrading licenses still has the memory limits applied. Once you upgrade there is no going back.

30 days to decide is crap also... I should be able to upgrade my licenses at any point as long as I am current on SNS... they shouldn't be forcing us to upgrade now.

[s1xth]

In regards to the upgrading in 30 days, I have never of this and as far as I am concerned, is completely false and is just a rumor or misunderstanding.

This has never been the case in past vSphere releases and the new EULA would be for licenses going FORWARD. You can continue to run 4.1 until EOL and there will be new license keys for 5.0

[AlbertWT]

Sorry to hear that Brian, I also tend to think the same way to start to try Hyper-V now.

[sergeadam]

Question is, how are they going to enforce the memory limit on 4.1?

[rjb2]

There is a v5 licensing webinar TODAY and attendees will be able to participate in live Q&A via text with VMware product marketing managers. This could get really interesting.

Here are the dates and link to register:

http://www.vmware.com/go/vsphere5-licensing-webinar

Monday, July 18th at 10 a.m. Pacific

Monday, July 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific

Thursday, August 18th at 9 a.m. Pacific

[bckirsch]

Just a little something I made when I was trying to compare the costs...it really looks like Enterprise Plus is the best way to go with farms of any real size.

[sergeadam]

Mark Hodges wrote:

Overall I think most of us would be totally fine with one of 2 options:

A - tie the licensing to the amount of Physical RAM in the servers and make it a standard increment across the board (128Gb maybe?) with different price points based on the edition (since if someone wants to run 2 servers with local storage and have no HA and load the servers to the walls with VM's..well..all the power to you...when one host falls over, you will probably reconsider your licensing level.  All Incremental increases cost the same.

B - Make it a base license cost per Host w/ first 256Gb vRAM included and then incremental vRAM costs are an incremental price point (say 30% of the full base (since there is no need to put S&S on additional ram).  Base price is determined upon the edition you want.

Even if the base price is a bit higher then now...at least we have more control of costs...and can budget for it easier since we purchase more vmware licenses when we but the physical RAM or buy a new host...

Tie pricing to pRAM. It's something we can explain to management.

Base price host cost with pRAM allocation, I'd say 64GB. Tie it to pCPU if you want. This is what we pay SnS on.

Sell fixed pRAM increments (32 or 64GB), not tied to pCPU, with no SnS.

That would truly minimize the effect on your customers.

Density has nothing to do with edition. I buy an edition based on the features I need. Because Standard licenses are what I need at a location does not mean my VM density will be any less.