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SuperSpike
Contributor
Contributor

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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1,980 Replies
bilalhashmi
Expert
Expert

I know.. I want to say it could add more cost or even reduce cost depending on the envirnoment.. I wrote a little blurb about that a few minutes ago on my blog..

http://www.cloud-buddy.com/?p=350

Blog: www.Cloud-Buddy.com | Follow me @hashmibilal
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peetz
Leadership
Leadership

VMware should have said: "Hey, our license revenues stall, because physical CPUs get more and more cores. So we switch to a RAM based model which we think is fairer." That would have been just honest.

Instead they are telling us that the new licensing model is a benefit for customers, it is "cloud friendly" and easier to manage, blah-blah...

I understand that they need to secure their earnings, but I really hate being taken for a fool! Shame on you, VMware!

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

Twitter: @VFrontDe, @ESXiPatches | https://esxi-patches.v-front.de | https://vibsdepot.v-front.de
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MKguy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

All licensing goes through adjustments as hardware and software  capabilities change. This has happened repeatedly through the years.

It did? Then VMware must be an exception to this or I've just been sleeping the past few years. They never changed the 6/12 cores per CPU restriction on the vSphere4 licenses which was introduced 2 years ago to this day.

They didn't include any of the new features into Standard and Enterprise licenses either. You have to put the bucks for Enterprise+ on the counter.

Yes, it is true that some, maybe even a lot of people won't directly have to buy more licenses now with the new licensing model because they currently run low-density boxes or aren't at their full VM capacity yet, but what have they gained? A surplus of XXX available vRAM because they haven't upgraded their hosts/RAM yet, or haven't deployed as much VMs as they wanted to on their current infrastructure? As opposed to an unlimited surplus of vRAM because that restriction simply didn't exist in the previous version.

Sorry, but the new licensing model is plainly trying to shove new licenses into a lot of people’s throats. Seems like some MBA noticed people were going for memory density and was like "Whoa, we should probably milk them some other way!"

It's kind of sad, but I guess this will mark the demise of VMware. Even though VMware has by far the best product, they can only go as far with their pricetags on it. Especially not when the competition gets closer and already got quite a few customers to dump VMware in their favor because of costs.

The whole annoying and overly marketing-aggressive cloud-buzz isn't going to save them either.

Another thing that really annoys me is how people always associate "big servers" with "big licenses". So I have servers with 2 sockets and 96 and maybe soon 144GB of RAM (with almost all RAM allocated), but the features provided by Standard licenses were more than sufficient for the workloads running on those. Guess what: Now need to blow out twice or even thrice the money I used to with vSphere4.

Even if I was using Enterprise+ already I would run into problems once I upgrade the hosts to 144GB and put more VMs on them.

I, for one, would stay with vSphere4 for now in the hope that VMware will un-@#!# this whole licensing disaster.

-- http://alpacapowered.wordpress.com
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Generious
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This whole license change is putting me off upgrading to 5 now, managing a environment of 150+ BL460G7 systems all with 256GB of ram in them... and running 4.0 Enterprise, not only would we be forced to move to enterprise + but now we also need to double the license cost.

VMware shame on you, Hyper-V test environment will be built instead.

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RogerThomas
Contributor
Contributor

Well this kills our use of VMWARE products dead.

It costs about $7,000 to stick 192GBytes of ECC memory in an average 2 CPU server, which allows me to greatly reduce my costs when it comes to the investment in the disk channel as I need no active swap on my VMs and my database instances are able to cache all the active data so there is no need to send read requests to the disks.

VMware's latest pricing requires me to purchase 8 copies of standard edition per physical server - so a list price of $8,000 per server. As we only have 3 servers we have only needed the Essentials edition in the past.

Well I can see us staying with our nice 4.1 release for the next year or so and then moving to Xen or Microsoft once both companies start to understand that VMware has decided to kill off its client base.

The strange thing is that VMware seem to have decided that there pricing model should be based around the type of server configuration from about 3-4 years ago where systems were built with 4GByte memory modules and servers had limits of 32GBytes or 48Gbytes.

Roger

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hugopeeters
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Here's a script to help you calculate license requirements for vSphere 5:
Hugo
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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

what the heck is vmware thinking.

i first was thinking i was missing a zero after all the Vram numbers.

but it seems Vmware is really going nuts and it's not a typo.

i'm a presales/tech consulant for vmware products for years now.

but with this change i think it's time to push customers back to XENserver

the features of the new Vsphere 5 are all nice to have,

but i can never ask a customer to pay this mutch for licensing

Vmware you let me down...

i'm normaly always verry eager to start selling the new versions,

but now i will recommend the customers to buy Xenserver.

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

It seems like the licensing model promotes that "scale out" principle, where hosts with large amounts of memory now will cost a lot more than before.

I had hopes that VMware should counter Hyper-V and XEN with lower license prices to really keep the leader position, but I am afraid this will force many customers away to alternatives, especially since many of the new 5.0 features is at the Enterprise Plus edition only.

http://rickardnobel.se/archives/566

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

i hope that vmware will not release this licensing model, otherwise and this wont be a joke we will transfer our cloud to another product asap

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gmitch64
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Rickard.

It's not all roses for we customers with Enterprise Plus licensing. They are wanting me to trade a CPU license for 48gb of ram. I mean, really?

Sent from my iPod

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Vince77
Contributor
Contributor

Also very shocked here, i can't go to my boss and explain that our recent investment in 3 new bladeservers with 128Gb memory and 2 CPU's has to be licenced with extra VMware licences because there's "so much RAM" in it. We baught those systems so an extra 64Gb memory upgrade would be possible in the future without any licensing investment.

Also, when virtualizing servers the only bottleneck I run into is Memory, VMware also knows that so they now build their licensing (monymaker) based on that.

And every new version of Windows "likes" more ram to make it run smooth.

Now it's time to really take a good look an XenServer or even..... .. HyperV!

I really hope VMware doesn't go through with this.

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pcmanning
Contributor
Contributor

Just done the calculation, we'll be just OK with our "Enterprise" licence, but it means we can only utilise half the RAM in our recent upgrade - so we'll be forced to go "Enterprise Plus" Smiley Sad

We're fortunate at the moment, because of the upgrade we back all our VMs with physical RAM - but if you're arguing for vSphere on it's technical merit for memory management over the competition, you've just lost out because VMware are now charging you more for the privilege!

if they'd gone for a pure Physical RAM model, then I'd say I'd be OK with that, but vRAM? - counter productive!

Anyway, is vCloud now priced for vRAM too, or is that still stuck with the even dafter model of 25 VMs per licence??

Hyper-V V3 (in Windows Server 😎 + SCVVM is going to look really cheap now (we're on academic pricing)

Paul

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allenb1121
Contributor
Contributor

We are going to have to pay over $50k to maintain the use of the memory in our current hardware with this licensing scheme.  I think VMware has just handed a big chunk of their marketshare to Citrix and Microsoft.  XenServer is really not that bad these days...  not as good as VMware, but for the price, I think we can deal with it.

We normally use PowerEdge R815s with 512GB of RAM (448 available after spare row config) and 4 Opteron 6176 CPUs.  We will now have to purchase 10 licenses for Enterprise Plus instead of 4.

VMware had better turn this disaster around quickly, or they will be dealing with a mass exodus.

Allen B.

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DSeaman
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

For VDI environments like XenDesktop or other non-VMware View solutions where you would typically want to maximize physical RAM usage to reduce per-VM costs, I did some interesting calculations mid way through my article:

http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/vsphere-50-licensing-changes.html

Derek Seaman
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digitalfreak
Contributor
Contributor

Now we start to see the downside to having someone from Microsoft running the company...Smiley Sad

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cmbwml1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We have a private cloud for the University where our hosting customers are all employees of the institution.  The hosting/chargeback model is all internal to the company and used for quota management.  I believe this type of use is OK with the EULA but please correct me if I am wrong.

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Full_Halsey
Contributor
Contributor

If I had went to an MBA and said, "Give me a license model that achieves two goals: 1st, prevent customers from doing a one to one, no cost, ESXi 5 upgrade, regardless of the fact they may be running Enterprise Plus with full maintenance. 2nd, extract the most amount of money from our existing customer base."

This ridiculous license model would have been the reply. There is no other method I can can think of that is so prohibitive and screws existing customers as good as this model does. I think most experienced admin who have been running virtual shops would agree that memory is the biggest common denominator when deciding server limits for virtualization and failover. VMware repeatedly in all their rollout speeches kept repeating the phrase "fair, this is fair". I do not agree. It is metering at it's very worse extreme. Imaging having a data center full of 2 proc, 256GB RAM UCS blades, oh lets say 50 of them running with about 80% allocation of vRAM against physical. that would have been 100 Enterprise Plus licenses. Under the new plan, you do the math. That's a license increase of almost 3 to 1. I will refrain from typing my reaction to that revelation under the new license model.

Over the past few years, I have defended our data center against the management pressure to introduce Hyper-v or XEN to save costs. I can no longer do so. Using other vendors for DEV and LAB environments will be a no brainer now. Most larger data centers license their Microsoft OS on their ESX servers with DataCenter because it allows for unlimited VM's. Switching to Hyper-v for us would be a NO COST solution.

I foresee our data center staying with vSpere 4 until end of life and at that time, switching virtual platforms. Microsoft has been playing catch-up for a while and I'm guessing in 2 to 3 years they may be more on par with VMware. Unlike VMware, as long as I keep maintain software assurance on Microsoft products, I don't have to pay through the nose to upgrade to their newer releases.

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stevieg
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Another unhappy, long-term customer here.

We've so far managed to justify VMware's expense over the competition due to the higher consolidation ratios we could achieve compared to other products, but unfortunately these changes will make our future using VMware products unlikely.

Like many others we've standarised on server models with large amounts of RAM as our main limitation to growth has been memory, not CPU or storage. Comments from VMware and their apologisers about memory right-sizing doesn't cut it for many of our internal applications where there is a requirement from the vendor for certain specifications and also internal customers who run memory intensive applications. Over the past few years we've been able to get the costs down to a reasonable level by using decent VI management products but we've still doubled our allocated memory footprint over the last 12 months, and under the new licensing model will expect significant costs over the next year if we continue virtualising the remainder of our mission critical applications on VMware.

Although to us, Hyper-V hasn't been as good as VMware, we now need to seriously consider whether it is "good enough". We already license Windows Datacentre for all our ESX hosts and under our pricing SCVMM is extremely cheap, a drop in the ocean compared to our yearly SnS with VMware. As we use Enterprise edition we've not seen any killer features coming to us in vSphere 5 either - if there were, then this may have made a difference.

I've often wondered whether VMware would be the modern Novell, and I'm now convinced. The new licensing model combined with the upcoming release of SCVMM 2012 may well be VMware's "Active Directory" moment where Microsoft (and Citrix) gobble up their market share.

Up until yesterday, Hyper-V and Xenserver were just used by us for for lab and testing - there wasn't much business justification in moving away from VMware, as the work involved would be hard to justify. Now we need to seriously consider our virtualisation strategy.

Steve

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rickardnobel
Champion
Champion

It seems strange to both have worked on the higher scalability in VMs and in the same time a license model that punishes high memory usage. Now a virtual machine could have 1 TB of RAM allocated, but that single VM would cost 21 Enterprise Plus licenses to start..

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
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Rumple
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Cmbits- private cloud is fine under standard eula...

Most people still use cloud when discussing multi-tenant or hosting solutions so I jumped to a conclusion 🐵

I think vmware could probably easily move to a vram based licensing model and base it on UTILIZED ram, not allocated.

Then its truely a pay per use model, allows us to maximize the tps components of vmware to oversubscribe memeory, plus provide huge ass memory spec's vm's to vendors that want it (but we all know don't need it) and not get killed on our licensing.

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