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CCJNL
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vSphere 5 License Query Script - Results Thread

I'm not sure if this has type of results thread has been started else where but I am interested to see what the real world scenarios are and how VMware's customers may or may not be affected.

Some nifty scripts have appeared that cut right to the chase and informs you if you are currently using more or less vRAM that you would be entitled to  under vSphere 5 licensing rules.

Check the scripts out here and post your results!!!

  

AuthorLink
Alan Renoufhttp://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/
LucDhttp://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/
Hugo Peetershttp://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/vmware/calculate-vsphere-5-licenses-with-powershell/

Cheers!

-Justin

Edit:

It is worth noting that as Hugo mentioned on his blog, his script "assumes the environment is homogeneous, so uses only one type of edition."  I've also had feedback that it does not take into consideration how many CPU licenses are registered in vCenter.  Rather it looks at how many CPU licenses are in use by the hosts managed by vCenter.  What that means is that if you own 36 CPU licenses but are only using 22 CPUs, the calculation will be based off of 22, not 36.

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dgrace
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Enthusiast

slaclair wrote:

>Get-VM | Measure-Object -Property MemoryMB -Sum

It will return the total configured memory in MB, so divide by 1000 to change to GB

Nice and simple... slaclair wins.  Thanks!

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LucD
Leadership
Leadership

You can expand that simple line into

Get-VM | where {$_.PowerState -eq "PoweredOn"} | Measure-Object -Property MemoryMB -Sum

That way you'll see what actually uses vRAM pool memory.


Blog: lucd.info  Twitter: @LucD22  Co-author PowerCLI Reference

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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

In this last environment I tested, they are not going to be impacted by the licensing change..however they are horribly horribly underutilized and overbuilt.

they have 10-esx hosts with 48-96gb of RAM in them and they are running 125VM's with 300GB allocated...

So..what it comes down to, is..if you built your vmware environment using the Microsoft hyper-v design of a 1-2 or 1-5 consolidation ratio you will be fine...however most of us have paid for the vmware design..which is consolidate the living hell out of things and use the power of the product to oversubscribe much higher since it does it so well.  We are the ones who will get screwed.

Everyone else who threw way more money and licenses at their pool early on without needing to, save money in the future...those of us who scrimped and got the biggest ROI on our servers now have to pay the piper...

I Still believe the vRAM OR pCPU model is the correct answer..not both...

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JustinL3
Contributor
Contributor

Without sharing specific numbers, I can tell you that in our environment that we've just upgraded to new hardware AND ENT+ licensing to be able to use that new hardware, we will be ok initially as we have about 1.7T of vRAM entitlement headroom.  My account team will be eager to say "see, you'll be ok".  But that's not acceptable to me because we're only 20% utilized right now and we invested alot of money to be able to use the infrastructure for the next year or two.

If I wanted to get to a conservative 65% utilization, I'll have to buy at least an additional 80 ENT+ licenses as our utilization increases under the current entitlment numbers.

Without re-posting my thoughts on this, check this out if you like.  http://communities.vmware.com/message/1792658#1792658

Have a good weekend everyone!

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GaryHertz
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Enthusiast

I have four servers, each dual socket, 256 GB with Enterprise Plus licensing.  I an currently using 340 GB vRAM which comes out to about 7.1 licenses.  I own 8 so according to VMware I should be perfectly happy. I purchased the servers 12 months ago and sized them to allow for at least four years of growth.  Thanks to the new licensing I've just about reached that point already.

I still have several physical servers that I would like to migrate.  Those servers have 160 GB of memory.  I know I can cut down on some of that but most of them are configured as required by the software vendor.  Whenever we have an issue I'll have to boost it back up to the vendor requirements and taking it back down will be a losing battle.  I'll take a rough stab at a number and reduce the memory by 25% and go with 120 GB as the vRam needed for these servers.  340 + 120 =  460.  This will require me to purchase 2 more licenses.  I'd need to get the required vRAM down to 92 GB in order to get the extra license down to one.

VMware response seems to be that all I need to do is right size my servers and  I'll be fine.  I actually have software that monitors my VMs and makes sizing recommendations.  According to that software I need to add about 8 GB of memory overall to my existing servers to right size them.  In addition several servers are being used for projects that are in the development stage.  They are sized anywhere from 25% to 50% of what is recommended by the vendors so I am sure I'll need to add memory to them when they go into production.

Doing the math, to utilize the memory I have and allowing for one server offline for HA, 1024 - 256 = 768, I need 16 licenses or an additional 8 licenses.  This is using a 1:1 ratio of pRAM to vRAM, in actual practice I should be able to get more than 768 GB of vRAM from 768 GB of pRAM so the number is probably more like 10 to 12 licenses.

So yes, according to the script I'm fine under the new licensing scheme and I'm in the 90% to 95% of users that aren't affected by the new licensing.  Life is good.

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wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

GaryHertz wrote:

I purchased the servers 12 months ago and sized them to allow for at least four years of growth.  Thanks to the new licensing I've just about reached that point already.

So yes, according to the script I'm fine under the new licensing scheme and I'm in the 90% to 95% of users that aren't affected by the new licensing.  Life is good.

I love how we go from "My 4 years of growth budget being gone" to "life is good". :smileyplain:

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bckirsch
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I made a calculator to help me figure out some of the prices differences...Enterprise isn't even worth buying now, your better off with Enterprise Plus.

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iguy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

My environment today is good to go for a little bit:

DataCenter1

Counting physical cpu's and vRAM in your environment. Please be patient...
======
pCpu Count: 201
vRAM (GB):  3476
======
Resulting license options:

Edition                                Entitlement            Licenses
-------                                -----------            --------
Essentials/Essentials Plus/Standard    1 pCpu + 24 GB vRAM    201 with 1348 GB vRAM overhead
Enterprise                             1 pCpu + 32 GB vRAM    201 with 2956 GB vRAM overhead
Enterprise Plus                        1 pCpu + 48 GB vRAM    201 with 6172 GB vRAM overhead

DataCenter1

Counting physical cpu's and vRAM in your environment. Please be patient...
======
pCpu Count: 163
vRAM (GB):  3628
======
Resulting license options:

Edition                                Entitlement            Licenses
-------                                -----------            --------                                               
Essentials/Essentials Plus/Standard    1 pCpu + 24 GB vRAM    163 with 284 GB vRAM overhead

Enterprise                             1 pCpu + 32 GB vRAM    163 with 1588 GB vRAM overhead
Enterprise Plus                        1 pCpu + 48 GB vRAM    163 with 4196 GB vRAM overhead

I'm good to go for existing jump to vSphere 5.

Updated:  7/18/11 12:18pm ->  Issues with the script pulling all data was found.   Re-ran with each vCenter instance independently.

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chadwickking
Expert
Expert

Since everyone is posting results you mines of well also cast your vote!

So far over 40% say it will cost them more money, in fact over 100%.  Pretty sick and there have been some good comments as well.

We will fall into the greater then 100% in licensing.  We are going to have to purchase an additional 47 licenses on top of 42....

http://virtualnoob.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/vsphere-5-licensing-cast-your-vote/

Please vote and lets see how it goes!

Cheers, Chad King VCP4 Twitter: http://twitter.com/cwjking | virtualnoob.wordpress.com If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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rgard
Contributor
Contributor

Our company would owe $300k to upgrade from v4.1 to v5. If you are a Microsoft shop and own Microsoft Datacenter as we do, you could effectively download the new Hyper-V R2 SP1 server and move your environment for free. To further the problems for VMWare, If you have a Microsoft EA with entitlements for VDI as we do, it would be free to build out a VDI deployment on Hyper-V vs many hundreds of thousands of dollars for VMWare.

We have no experience with the new R2 HyperV and clustering with it, however we are already in the process of building out and testing it. The costs to maintain the types of consolidation ratios with VMWare vs HyperV don’t make sense anymore. VMware basically just took themselves out of the market for anyone with a consolidation ratio over 5:1. Our business is WAY over that, with a total virtualization ratio of around 95%. We will build our 2012 projects and budget around this change and likely not go forward with VMWare.

Two years of price increase from VMWare, that is not a trend we wish to continue.

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aroudnev
Contributor
Contributor

There is a difference between  'What you have now' and 'what you will need in next 2 years'.

Yes, JUST NOW we fit into ESX5 model. But RAM is cheap and we use our CPU only 10 - 20% so we plan to add more RAM into both big VMware cloud and few small Essential sites. Usual, non expensive dell 710R server need about 64 - 128 GB of RAM to utilize 100% CPU with small /medium size VM guests.

IT makes new license absolutely irrelevant and we definitely will never go to the ESX5 licensing; if enforced by dropping old model we will move to other technology. And I will never recommend Essential5 for purchase to anyone while I recommended it to 4 - 5 users (who come to VMware first and was distracted by their high prices for the beginners... before they learn about step by step way as Free -> Essential -> Standard). We easily run 128 - 200 GB of vRAM on DELL 710 in development staging and testing; new model makes it impossible to license (I will pay for the virtual things such as vRAM which never do exist.. thank you).

To be relevant, new mode must allow average of 4x - 8x growth NOW; it do not allow any; so it will not survive. ESX4 model do allow it (todays memory is about 32 - 64 GB RAM per 2 cpu server; maximum is 256 GB; pretty relevant to stay with it). It is absoluely clean to everyone. The authors of this model can already request bonuses from Microsoft for the helping them to compete.

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iguy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Have either of you talked with your VMware Account rep yet?   VMware would love to know what the situation is that is causing you to not be able to go to vSphere 5.   This is off topic for the purpose of this thread. 

Can you post your data from the License Query Scripts so we can see your situation from solid numbers?

Thanks

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iguy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What version of Powershell are you running?  This error leads me to believe your running on the stock powershell on Windows 2008 which is Powershell v1.   Upgrade to Powershell 2.0 RTM and try again.

Windows 2008 32bit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=11829

Windows 2008 64bit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=20430

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iguy
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What does your VMware Account rep say about the $300k to go to vSphere 5? 

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mindli
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I'm a SMB customer. Nevertheless, we licensed Enterprise Plus because of it's features. We also tried not to pack that much VMs on our servers as others seem to do. We always like to have enough headroom for possible server outage and performance. This means we're luckily in a quite comfortable situation, as you can see in my license validator results below. The average vRAM assigned to our VMs has always been between 3 and 4 GB, going from 1 GB to 16 GB max.

We have 8 Dell PowerEdge R710 with 2 CPUs (6 cores) and 72 GB RAM each.

license_validator.jpg

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Jwalsh2
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Enthusiast

All,

All,

I will be out of the office Wednesday through Friday. I will have limited email access and might not respond to you until Monday August 1st.

If this is related to a prodcution issue please call the SOC at 847-467-6662 and ask for either the OS or Storage Team be paged depending on your need.

John

John Walsh | vExpert 2012, 2013, 2014 | @jwalsh2
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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

For clarity of this thread. Mindli - see my response in this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/1800336

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