esxi 5 free hypervisor?

[gallagauge]

I saw that there is a new version of esxi (version 5).

Will there be a version 5 of the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor or is this product going to stay at version 4.1?

[rickardnobel]

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

[MindTheGreg]

Rickard wrote:

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

8GB of vRAM is still useable. I'm glad they aren't killing it off OpenSolaris style.

[mauirixxx]

I ran our 2 ESXi 3.5 servers with 8GB of ram for quite awhile, as it was all we needed at the time to do what WE wanted / needed it to do. We're a very small company (10 employees!) that figured we could stop running multiple physical servers (1 AD login, simple file server, Exchange 2k3, dedicated backup server, sharepoint server, linux web / database server).

It was possible to run a company with that much memory ... just not a very large one :smileysilly: Now we're up to 32 and 24 gigs in our 2 ESXi 4.1 servers, and it looks like we'll be moving up to v5 (Essentials / Essentials+ vRAM limitations doesn't affect us). The 60TB luns are something we (ok, my I.T. department consisting of me, myself, and I) are looking forward to, as we've almost exceeded 2TB of saved data in our file server VM.

I feel for the guys in big companies / schools (heck anyone NOT running a small busineess setup such as ours) that are looking at doubling their costs just to stick with VMware. If I came to my boss with THAT request, I'd either be laughed out of the office, or probably fired 😕

Good luck to you guys, I'm hoping VMware changes their stances on this before VMworld - otherwise there's going to be a lot of unhappy people trying to enjoy Vegas, but pissed off over licensing woes

[wdroush1]

Greg wrote:

Rickard wrote:

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

8GB of vRAM is still useable. I'm glad they aren't killing it off OpenSolaris style.

*OpenIndiana (and not dead)

Which we still have derivitives we're running, you can't beat it's ZFS speed. Oracle aquiring Sun made me some money from their stocks, but I honestly like Sun a lot and would have easily eaten my investment for that company to thrive on it's own.

❤️ Fishworks.

[GVD]

GVD wrote:

I've just had feedback from Dell (acting as our VMWare representative):

The Dell VMWare licensing "experts" said that it is 8 GB vRAM is "per socket" to a maximum of 4 populated sockets. Which means:

• 1 pCPU & less or equal 8 Gb vRAM = OK
• 2 pCPU & less or equal 16 Gb vRAM = OK
• 3 pCPU & less or equal 24 Gb vRAM = OK
• 4 pCPU & less or equal 32 Gb vRAM = OK
• 1 CPU & 9 Gb vRAM = NOT OK!

Which  quite frankly is pretty retarded, since it encourages you to buy more  cheap CPUs rather than one expensive one, rather than saving money in  power consumption which is a part of the benefit of virtualization.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but Intel must be smiling for this particular change.

Personally,  our standalone DEV & QA servers are 2 pCPU and 24-36 GB pRAM.  Meaning we now can provision less vRAM than we have memory. Needless to  say, we won't be upgrading to Hypervisor 5.0...

So, I contacted VMWare with the information quoted above. They did not contradict this.

Their feedback was that they are aware that there's an issue there and that they're receiving feedback on this, which has caused them to internally review their choices again.

They encouraged people who had issues with this (especially existing deployments in 3.5 or 4.1) to contact the Licensing Support desk and give feedback on how this is affecting them. If enough feedback is given, the licensing terms might change.

So give feedback guys! There might be some hope...

[WendellGee]

GVD wrote:

They encouraged people who had issues with this (especially existing deployments in 3.5 or 4.1) to contact the Licensing Support desk and give feedback on how this is affecting them. If enough feedback is given, the licensing terms might change.

I need to go poke through the new licensing scheme, I think.

I was looking forward to building a single-quad system at home to use myself as the guinea pig for a future ESXi 5 upgrade deployment in the government lab where I work, but this would kill that dead (I am spec'ing my hardware to have 16 GB RAM, and most of our production app machines could not run a meaningful test ESXi deployment as they are dual-quad CPU, 48 GB RAM).  RAM is cheap and big systems are using more and more of it, so demo systems need to be able to keep up.

The licensing folks will definitely hear from me (and probably my boss too).

[Leathal]

Sorry 4.1 will be only available for a while, but people can upgrade to 5... 4.1 doesn't support drives largers than 2TB, so how do you suppose people who want to take advantage of the 2TB+ system go with 4.1 and upgrade to 5 later without having to rebuild their systems?

Thanks

Andrew

[tschuld]

Well VMWare just shot themselves in their foot here.  I've got about a dozen 1 CPU/12G esxi 4.1 (free edition) development boxes here that I was thinking about upgrading to the standard edition if esxi 5 worked well on them.  Sounds like I'm just going to buy Hyper-V for them instead and call it done.

[tschuld]

Thought just occured to me...

If the solution for my Ent+ boxes (DL580's running 64G+ per socket) is to simply purchase another 1 CPU/48G sku and not assign the "5th, 6th, etc" socket, wouldn't that work for the free edition (Assign 2 free licenses to that single CPU test box) to increase the vram pool to 16G?  Which in turns begs the question why doesn't vmware issue a single 4 CPU/32G vRAM pool license for the free editions and be done with it?

[Leathal]

I see that VMWare has decided to not go with the 2TB+ LUN option in ESXi 5 and vSphere 5. This is a major set back; I may have to take a closer look at Microsoft's product and go with that...

A.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

vSphere supports larger than 2 TB LUNs.  Virtual disks are still limited to 2 TB.

[mauirixxx]

Dave Mishchenko wrote:

vSphere supports larger than 2 TB LUNs.  Virtual disks are still limited to 2 TB.

As long as you're using an RDM setup you can go past 2TB luns, was my understanding. If you don't use RDM, you're still stuck @ a 2TB lun.

Am I mistaken?

I got that from the vmfs-5 blog entry:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-1-vmfs-5.html

[Leathal]

People from my work went to some show this year that VMware was at. We use VMware ALOT for our own stuff and the clients the company I work for that we support also use it. Anyhow when they asked VMware about the 2TB+ LUN support in v5 they were told VMWare decided not offer it.

A.

[DSTAVERT]

No one would have been able to provide any official information about 5 until it was publicly announced a few weeks ago. VMFS 5 is not limited to 2TB LUNs.

[rcstevensonaz]

In regard to tschuld's comment on his configuration of 1CPU and 12Gb, this configuration matches any of the basic consumer LGA 1366 motherboards that is popluated with memory as follows:

4Gb stick in one DIMM bank

2Gb stick in both DIMM banks

If a person is using an LGA 1366-based motherboard (e.g. Core i7), this is about as basic as you can get.  The only lower option is 2Gb sticks in a single DIMM bank (6Gb).  Seems like VMware has not factored in tri-channel boards into their 8Gb limit.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

It's 2TB + for datastores as well.  It worked just fine in the beta including upgrading VMFS3 to 5 and then expanding that beyond 2 TB.

[mauirixxx]

Dave Mishchenko wrote:

It's 2TB + for datastores as well.  It worked just fine in the beta including upgrading VMFS3 to 5 and then expanding that beyond 2 TB.

wait, so I *don't* have to mess with RDM to make an 8TB iSCSI or RAID-whatever LUN?

Sweet!

The blog I referenced earlier made it sound like that was the only way to get past bigger then 2TB. Seems I need to re-read and comprehend it better.

Thanks for the clarification Dave.

Aloha!

[freefall]

So I wonder if with the new increase to 32GB of vRAM people will still be wanting to move from the free version?

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

[rickardnobel]

I belive the new limits (described here) makes the free Hypervisor an attrative choice for a reasonable time. 32 GB is very fair for a totally free product.

[GVD]

freefall wrote:

So I wonder if with the new increase to 32GB of vRAM people will still be wanting to move from the free version?

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

For my personal use, it is sufficient for at least 2 years, so I will be upgrading. Most likely this will still fall outside some people's expectations, but I think 32 GB vRAM/pRAM will be sufficient for most users of the free hypervisor.

There's still questions about Moore's Law of course, so while it's a stop gap now, it might not be valid in a few years anymore.