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?

[rgard]

LucasAlbers wrote:

I so agree with this point...

"It seems like a lot of us who have been pushing VMware all these years are now suffering a bit of head-trauma and loss of faith."

We are thinking of making t-shirts for our vmware sales event that is coming up, here is what we have for ideas:

1.)

ESXI free or Die.

2.)

Xenserver is free.

3.)

No Vtaxation with out representation.

4.)

Vsphere 4 = customers

Vsphere 5 = virtual customers.

5.)

(Crossed out vtax , the same as the crossed out "no smoking" signs.)

6.)

4.x till 2014/05/21, baby.

I had already been thinking about making a basic T-Shirt for VMworld.  Check out my design for a No vTax shirt.

http://goo.gl/iMbFM

[Rumple]

One interesting thing about Citrix and Microsoft product lines is that:

SCVMM 2012 will have a pligin to manage Hyper-V AND Xenserver together (and I believe vmware)

Xenserver is licensed per host and even with the top end license is $5 (or for is Cloud providers..$75/month/host…vmware cant’ touch that price)

Hyper-V is a baremetal hypervisor which is separate from the Hyper-V role.

So…vmware has significantly increased their pricing just before hyper-V 3.0 and Xenserver 6 along with a unified System Center Console that can manage both.

Overall, increased competition has vmware going after higher profits from their larger customers and leaving the low/mid to flow to the competition…

[hjmiii]

Mark Hodges wrote:

Overall, increased competition has vmware going after higher profits from their larger customers and leaving the low/mid to flow to the competition…

I don't buy this argument. I'm seeing just as many if not more of the large customers complaining about this because our Enterprise Plus licenses went from being unlimited to a paltry 48GB per socket. There are architectures out there for large scale deployments of Hyper-V and Xen, and especially when you're talking a 100%+ increase in the number of Enterprise plus licenses the agrument to convert gets really convincing.

[vmwareking]

How dumb is this cat, hyper pee for the cloud yeah right u monkey. As if aws and rackspace will ever use hype pee..

I do agree ms datacenter clients it might be a option!! That's it.

Xenserver is a great alternative ready to go now.

Sent from my iPhone

[Dracolith]

unsichtbare wrote:

I would neither expect not tolerate Microsoft capping the amount of RAM (other than the supported 192 GB) nor limiting the number of applications I could run! Sure, the cost for W7E was greater than XPPRO, but it was not 64 times greater (because 16 GB is 64 times 256 MB)!

Indeed.... between '01 and '09 there was approximately  25%  inflation in real terms.  So the price increase from  $99 to  $199  inflation adjusted

is really a price increase from    $124  to $199,   an increase of 37%.

For a 6400% increase in available RAM.  Also,  Windows XP Pro to 7  upgrade editions are available more cheaply than that.

All that inexpensiveness, and you don't even pay an annual fee to make sure you get upgrades at no additional charge.

If your organization subscribed to "Software Assurance to Microsoft",  there was not a $199

"Windows 7 upgrade fee"  to go from 256MB of RAM to 16GB at all;  it was included, just like

they had promised and just as you would have expected!.

Actually, there was a fee, but you already paid for it in the subscription.

Just like many VMware customers already paid for the annual SnS,

to protect their investment in vSphere4, and ensure entitlement to upgrades

without having to fork over a huge wad of cash....

And are now about to get pwn3d,  when VS5 release comes out,  if their current

vRAM allocations would exceed the new "license limits".

Yeah... SnS really lived up to its promise of investment protection.

IMO,    if a customer finds  the  vs5  licenses they are entitled to won't cover their

environment or their planned environment,  they should be entitled to at the very

least a refund of SnS,  since  it would mean VMware not living up to what they'd

promised.

[y_wisdom]

I am not sure who at VMware did the survey saying most customers use 96 GB RAM on their hosts and will not "impact" most customers with the new vSphere 5 license plan.

We are a mid size to large customer with more than 160 hosts on ESX 4.1. of which more than 125 hosts have 192 GB of RAM which was our standard untill 2010. As of last month we changed to new standard,  288GB of RAM running on Dell Blades M-710HD (2 Proc x 6 cores). Most of our hosts runs on Enterprise license, so with the new license model we now have to buy 9 Enterprise License or 6 Enterprise Plus License for each M-710HD blades.

So you do the math, we are screwed big time and are considering Xen or Hyper-V for all new installations. We are going to stay on vSphere 4.1 till our Hyper-V installation is stable and run in parallel with vSphere 4.1. We are not planning to migrate to Hyper-v.

I am for an additional 10 to 15 % hike in License fee for vSphere 5, VMware needs to make money for all the new features.

Very disappointed with VMware ! "Don't Kill The Goose That Lays The Golden Egg"

[Baddos]

vmwareking wrote:

How dumb is this cat, hyper pee for the cloud yeah right u monkey. As if aws and rackspace will ever use hype pee..

I do agree ms datacenter clients it might be a option!! That's it.

Xenserver is a great alternative ready to go now.

Sent from my iPhone

They don't run vmware either so what is your point?

Despite your name calling, hyper v is an alternative for the smb market that vmware is ignoring. The next version coming out soon will have a lot of new features and enhancements. VMware only has itself to blame for what will happen over the next 2 years if they stick with this license model.

[aroudnev]

You did not got the point.

Problem is not that people go and find out Hyper-V an excellent or XENT an excellent. Problem is that there are always an alternatives. While we was confident with VMware, we did not seach for them actively, believing that VMWare is good enough and Price is acceptable enough. I personally encourages few people here don't spend tiome with Hyper-V because it maybe could bring some benefits, but not enough to spend time vs work with VMware - we was 100% satisfied by combination of Free, Essential and Standard/Enterprise systems and licenses (and Free was important in our plans, too).

Once we all lost this peace of mind and do not trust VMWare markening anymore (and we don't), we all started to look around - what else do we have on the market_. And for sure, for many, many installations there ARE good alternatives - GOOD ENOUGH. SO no matter how good VMWare is, this mistake cause many people to find a GOOD ENOUGH alternatives which is a clean loss for VMWare. And it can't be reverted, because it ALREADY HAPPENED.

I personally don't trust to Hyper-V - it is Microsoft, which means a lot of negatives. First of all, if Vmware support clustered VMFS storage file system, Microsoft don't have anything even near such thing. There are many other drawbacks, too. But no matter how bad is it, some customers will find it GOOD ENOUGH and switch over. And this switching over was triggeded by dumb marketing in VMware with this dumb new licensing.

[y_wisdom]

Can't we give our opinions ?

You must be a VMware employee and worried about your job if customer switch to a different Hypervisor !

[DSeaman]

I have a reliable contact that provided me with some possible licensing modifications that will be announced next week. Changes include increased vRAM entitlements, and a cap on vRAM licensing per VM to help control costs for large VMs. Of course these are just internal rumors and are subject to change until formally announced, so use a pinch of salt for the time being.

http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/impending-vmware-vsphere-50-license.html

But the good news is that it seems the uproar is being heard at VMware, and some changes are likely.

[scowse]

I agree about the trust-challenged relationship with M$ but in spite of this i have used their OS for 20+ years

I think the feedback here on VMTN may crystalise Vmwares thinking regarding the fact that M$ doe not need to make any/much money from its hypervisor because it gets to make the money from its guest licenses. Vmware has no such luxury and it should be worried that a well resourced company like M$, in spite of its short comings, can put a huge effort into (eventually) offering a free hypervisor with the same features as vmware and expect no return other than the guest license fees.

Remember Netscape?

Vmware should be very afraid and back-peddle as fast as it can. Sacking Paul M$ would be a good start!

[hmtk1976]

I agree.  The major advantage VMware has is VMFS.  All the other features are nice to have but in my case are far less important.

[hmtk1976]

DSeaman wrote:

I have a reliable contact that provided me with some possible licensing modifications that will be announced next week. Changes include increased vRAM entitlements, and a cap on vRAM licensing per VM to help control costs for large VMs. Of course these are just internal rumors and are subject to change until formally announced, so use a pinch of salt for the time being.

http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/impending-vmware-vsphere-50-license.html

But the good news is that it seems the uproar is being heard at VMware, and some changes are likely.

If true still not good enough.

1. Standard gets no increase in vRAM (or maybe 32 GB per CPU if they follow Essentials licensing) .  Enterprise Plus still gets too little.  From unlimited to 96 GB is lame.  Enterprise has become a useless product - if price is important you buy Standard and if you need more features you buy Enterprise Plus.

2. Still lame.  What's 192 GB over a 6 CPU cluster?  And no word (yet) whether the vRAM pool on Essentials upgradeable.

3. Good for extremely large VMs but machines with say 32 - 64 GB RAM will still fill you vRAM pool quickly.  Mostly a cosmetic change to get rid of comments like "you need 22 Enterprise Plus for a 1 TB VM".  Those with more reasonable but still memory intensive VMs continue to get shafted.

They should simply have increased prices somewhat to account for inflation and extra features and changes in CPU licensing.  Dramatically increasing the price of what is quickly becoming a commodity product is stupid.

[hellraiser]

Any more news re: potential licencing changes?

JD

[hmtk1976]

They're still staring at that ball they dropped.

[fdcpinto]

With the new vram model,Hyper V is a cheaper,welcome alternative to a Vmware's. I'm a vmware client for more than 3 years now. It's the best technologie but it has became to expensive in v5.0

[kmcferrin]

cmangiarelli wrote:

Maybe you could do that because of your Microsoft licensing, but those smaller customers not using datacenter only get a limited number of guest licenses too.  So to say they can download hyper-v and convert for free is not correct (and I'm not saying you said that, just playing devil's advocate).  It's possible that they may need to true-up licensing if they are trying to use their Standard and Enterprise licenses for guests because those licenses don't allow an unlimited guest workload per physical hardware device. 

This is not true.  There is a tremendous amount of FUD and blatant misinformation in this forum with regards to Hyper-V licensing.  As someone who sells services for both VMware and Hyper-V, let me enlighten you:

Hyper-V is free.  Period. End of discussion.  You can download it for free.  You can install it for free.  It includes HA, Live Migration, Dynamic Memory, and all of the other features that Microsoft has developed, and it is all free.  There is absolutely zero licensing cost associated with Hyper-V.  If you CHOOSE to leverage System Center to manager Hyper-V then you must license the management server that runs System Center and buy a System Center CAL for each physical server that it manages.  That is it, but that is System Center licensing, not Hyper-V.  Hyper-V can be managed perfectly well from the command line, via PowerShell, or via the free Remote Server Administration Tools that you can download from Microsoft.

The Datacenter Edition of Windows doesn't enter into the discussion.  Let me repeat myself:  Windows Datacenter Edition has NOTHING to do with licensing Hyper-V.  You can download and install Hyper-V for free, then install any supported guest that you want.  You could install free editions of Linux (though I wouldn't use Hyper-V if I were a Linux shop) and have ZERO licensing cost for Hyper-V and the guests.

If you are virtualizing Windows on Hyper-V (or VMware, or Xen) then YOU MUST license those guest/VM operating systems.  It doesn't matter what virtualization solution you are using, the licensing for Windows VMs is EXACTLY THE SAME.  Period.  If your Windows VMs are properly licensed under VMware then you can swap out your virtualization solution for Hyper-V or Xen with no additional Windows licensing cost.  Obviously you can also go from Xen or Hyper-V to VMware as well.

A lot of people get confused about this because of the guest/VM rights that come with Windows Server licenses, but those rights don't change depending what virtualization solution you use.  You license your guest VMs exactly the same way, regardless of the virtualization solution, and there is not licensing cost for Hyper-V hosts because IT IS FREE.

[kmcferrin]

jmounts wrote:

Link -> http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/how-to-get.aspx

Highlights in that link

2. Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 does not require CALs for  the product itself.

(You can download for free via Windows Updates, the Application Hyper-V is free to install and run, still requires a 2008R2 License, which is NOT FREE when comparing it to ESXi-Free to Xen-Free)

Though, I guess you can 'consider' the 3 day trial of any 2008R2 install + Hyper-V free...for 3 days.

Aside from that, The features they are promoting are similar to ESX and XEN.

However, do you really trust Windows (Think of the security holes now) to host your other Windows Environments? I sure as hell don't.

Again, that is SIMPLY NOT TRUE!  There is no host license requirement with Hyper-V.  It is free and DOES NOT REQUIRE a 2008R2 license as you state.  The free "Hyper-V Server" product includes everything that you need to install and configure Hyper-V and has no licensing requirement.  If you actually read the link it says NOTHING about this make-believe 2008R2 license requirement that you have invented.  You could take my word for it, because I MAKE MY LIVING selling virtualization services on Hyper-V and VMware (mostly VMware in the larger businesses), but you don't have to.  You can read the text yourself:

Licensing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is a stand-alone product that will be available via the Microsoft Download Center free of charge.

  
  

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 does not require CALs for the product itself.

  
  

• CALs will be required for all Windows Server virtualized operating systems which are hosted on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

  
  

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 will be available in the following languages:

  • English (EN-US)

    
    

  • German (DE-DE)

    
    

  • Japanese (JA-JP)

    
    

  • French (FR-FR)

    
    

  • Spanish (ES-ES)

    
    

  • Chinese Hong-Kong (ZH-HK)

    
    

  • Chinese Simplified (ZH-CN)

    
    

  • Korean (KO-KR)

    
    

  • Portuguese (Brazil) (PT-BR)

    
    

  • Chinese Traditional (ZH-TW)

    
    

  • Italian (IT-IT)

    
    

  • Russian (RU-RU)

    
    
  
  

[kmcferrin]

aroudnev wrote:

You did not got the point.

Problem is not that people go and find out Hyper-V an excellent or XENT an excellent. Problem is that there are always an alternatives. While we was confident with VMware, we did not seach for them actively, believing that VMWare is good enough and Price is acceptable enough. I personally encourages few people here don't spend tiome with Hyper-V because it maybe could bring some benefits, but not enough to spend time vs work with VMware - we was 100% satisfied by combination of Free, Essential and Standard/Enterprise systems and licenses (and Free was important in our plans, too).

Once we all lost this peace of mind and do not trust VMWare markening anymore (and we don't), we all started to look around - what else do we have on the market_. And for sure, for many, many installations there ARE good alternatives - GOOD ENOUGH. SO no matter how good VMWare is, this mistake cause many people to find a GOOD ENOUGH alternatives which is a clean loss for VMWare. And it can't be reverted, because it ALREADY HAPPENED.

I personally don't trust to Hyper-V - it is Microsoft, which means a lot of negatives. First of all, if Vmware support clustered VMFS storage file system, Microsoft don't have anything even near such thing. There are many other drawbacks, too. But no matter how bad is it, some customers will find it GOOD ENOUGH and switch over. And this switching over was triggeded by dumb marketing in VMware with this dumb new licensing.

Absolutely.  Vmware is the undisputed king when it comes to having the most features, dials, and knobs.  If you're a company that depends on those features (or has come to expect them) then it's likely that you're going to be stuck shelling out for VMware licensing at least until the competition catches up (possibly longer), and if my experience with deploying "scale-up" boxes is anything to go by then you will be paying more for v5 than for 4.1.  Based on what I've seen the subset of VMware customers who require the features that are VMware-exclusive is a minority, and those are people who are at-risk for switchcing.

But while competing products may be free (and they are), switching is not.  If you're a small shop with 20-30 VMs then you can pretty quickly setup a Xen or Hyper-V system and migrate your entire environment.  But what if you're a larger shop?  I have a customer that has recently finished a virtualization project that included the P2V of literally THOUSANDS of servers into VMware.  They have several rows in their primary data center filled with racks filled with blade enclosures running WMare.  The effort to convert to a competing product would be mammoth, and certainly cost-prohibitive.  So what do they do?  With server lifecycles spanning 3-5 years (or more now that hardware is less of an issue) it could take them a decade or more to transition to a competing product, all the while paying the vRAM tax.  Those are the people that are going to get seriously screwed, because not only are they going to have to pay for 25%, 50%, or 100% more licenses but they'll be buying hundreds more licenses to run the same environment, and they'll have little recourse other than to ask for a discount.

[Digidwain]

Yes it appears that VMware is starting to pattern themselves after MicroSteal.

Too bad, they were really a great company until Evil Machine Company took over (EMC)

I must admit that I have wondered when they would start the pricing and gouging techniques.  They will probably censor my post too.

We all know the drill, "thank you for purchasing so many copies of Vsphere!"  We want to get more money so, we will now make the "features" that make us superior to other virtualization products available to our customers for more money by making them, our loyal customers, purchase VCenterServer in order to manage all of their hosts! 

It turns out that the Vsphere purchases and the management were not enough. They release a new version and they take more money from loyal customers.  They begin to emulate MicroSteal by cobbling the lisenses and making EXISTING customers pay extra by nit picking what they do with the product!!!

In other words they will move away from what made them so popular - the concept of licensing that made us want VMware in the first place.  Now VMware is beginning to revert back toward the per server model of licensing - only a little bit for now... they don't want to scare VMware customers off while they can still milk some money.

Well VMware users/customers/fans/loyalists, we will have to wait to see if they begin to force upgrades in order to incurr profits like their Redmond counterparts.  So, MicroSteal will now begin to take this market the same way they undermined Netscape, Novell, etc.   Lure us in because MicroSteal's server virtualization product comes "free" with the Win 2008 server (remember Internet Explorer vs. Netscape?)

MicroSteal will wait until VMware's pricing and licensing practices drive customers over to the inferior "Free" MicroSteal product, when VMware becomes vulnerable they will pounce, take over the market share and then VMware will go the path of Novell, Netscape and others and slowly die.  We will all lose a great product and by the time this happens, very few will mourn because VMware will have alienated the dedicated fans who got involved in the earlier golden days.  Those folks who ushered in VMware's meteoric rise will be soured by the corporate greed which will drive the price of VMWare back into the realms of large businesses and away from the little guys.  The little guys who can finally offer "big IT" service at a price they could afford.

By the way VMware - the largest percentage of the U.S. economy is driven by small businesses.  It might not be the wisest move to alienate them.

People still do not get it.

Oh well it was great while it lasted.

I'd really hate to see it go though!

:smileycry: