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?

[Full_Halsey]

Please, apply your patronizing logic to the post I made earlier. Obviously I am missing something the VPC certification didn't teach us in class.

With all due respect your argument for right sizing is invalid.

Now:

2-CPU - 256GB RAM = 2 VMware licenses

New model:

2-CPU - 256GB RAM (192GB vRAM assigned)  = 4 VMware licenses

What argument can you bring to the discussion that changes the fact that requires TWICE the number of licenses?? What does "right sizing" have to do with that calculation??

[DSTAVERT]

Most of the discussions have been emotional reactions to change. Some that have been able to take advantage of very high VM densities will be affected to a greater degree than others and will need to confront higher costs.   Licensing fees are just one piece of operational costs. Will some of the other benefits outweigh or reduce costs in other ways. Once we settle down and start looking at the other features perhaps we can begin to see potential savings or reduced management requirements. I have seen numbers where the hardware and software amount to 10 to 20% of the operational costs of IT. I don't know whether that still holds but I doubt VMware licensing changes will drastically alter what it is.

[Frank_Heidbuche]

is it only me, or are only the Vexperts on this forum teaming up with vmware on this licensing issue...

are they paid by vmware??? unbiast??

are all other people posting here stupid then, en configuring their setup wrongly?

or we just don't understand it... that is...

the statement of now we have to pay because we had some good years????

what the heck.... are you guys on crack???

i'm realy going nuts here....

rightsize you VM's???

if we lower the allocated mem to the VM

and the VM needs more mem because of spikes...

all this will be going to SWAP

yep disk IO on the SAN

so we may lower our VMware licenses by doing this...

but we up the swapping in the OS witch up's te SAN IO

so we need to invest in faster disk...

so what ever we do, we keep getting to the same conclusion...

this licensing sucks...

[SeanLeyne]

ChanEK wrote:

The license costs under vSphere 4 licesing - Enterprise

• Total Number of CPUs = 6
  
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = 2875 x 6 =  $17,250.00
  

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Enterprise

• Total vRAM requirment = 228 GB
  
• Number of vRAM allowed "per CPU" = 32GB
  
• Hence the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = 8 ( 6 per cpu licenses for each of the cpu at 32GB per cpu and 2 additional per cpu licenses to cover the remainder as you cannot buys a fraction of a license)
  
• The new cost = $2,875 * 8 = $23,000.00
  

This is an increment of 133%

This is even worse if the licensing was in vSphere 5 standard. so lets look at that calculation

The license costs under vSphere 4 licesing - Standard

• Total Number of CPUs = 6
  
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = $994 x 6 =  $5,964.00
  

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Standard

• Total vRAM requirment = 228 GB
  
• Number of vRAM allowed "per CPU" = 24GB
  
• Hence  the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = 10 ( 6 per cpu licenses for  each of the cpu at 24GB per cpu and 4 additional per cpu licenses to  cover the remainder as you cannot buys a fraction of a license)
  
• The new cost = $994 * 10 = $9,940.00
  

This is an increment of 166% for just the licensing cost alone (without taking in to account the additional SnS costs)

Sorry to "nit-pick" but the increases are 33% and 66%, not 133%/166%.

[Rumple]

Edward – do you mind if I have my Oracle vendor give you a call and you can tell him I shouldn’t give him all the RAM he wants…or will you provide the support for the application when he refuses too?

Will you agree this is a good model when the SAN make you pay for all the disk you would be using if it were not for technologies like Thin provisioning and deduplication…how about netapp comes to you and says..wait a minute..you have 70% storage efficiency going on there…without me you’d be paying 70% more…so ya know what..your costs just went up 50%....I’ll let you keep that 20% as a favor….

Of course you’d be pissed..the whole point of paying for their product is to gain those efficiencies…you don’t mind paying for how much you have available…but if I want to oversubscribe it 70%..thats my business.

VMWare just went completely ass backwards to that trend…making us pay extra for fully utilizing the resources we have at our disposal…the story now is to NOT oversubscribe but to scale out (since 3xhosts overloaded with 12 licenses gives me much less redundancy and flexibility then having 6 half used hosts now doesn’t it. Obviously there is a cost for power/management..but in the end…I could probably go with 5 hosts/10 licenses and cost me the same as going with 3hosts/12 licenses…

Since Microsoft has always been about us needing to scale out vs up to maintain same levels…where is my vmware advantage now?

[Full_Halsey]

Let gas go up 50 cents per gallon and people call congressional investigations. My calculations show a doubling in VMware license license investments for me. If you are suggesting a doubling of software licensing for customers with PAID support is justified, take it as emotional or whatever makes you feel justified and feeling good about that. All I am asking for is a one to one upgrade path, regardless of features that allows me to stay current with my PAID support.

[aarondovetail]

I agree, this is very simple:

Current customers in many cases have to double, triple, etc.. their licensing costs for the same functionality. In my case of vSphere Essentials Plus it's actually more like 300% increase in cost to get enough licenses to support the vRAM I need.

Total costs of IT are irrelevant, using 100% of the memory in your server is irrelevlant, pooled or not is irrelevant, etc..

[mikeyes]

Full_Halsey wrote:

With all due respect your argument for right sizing is invalid.

Now:

2-CPU - 256GB RAM = 2 VMware licenses

New model:

2-CPU - 256GB RAM (192GB vRAM assigned)  = 4 VMware licenses

What argument can you bring to the discussion that changes the fact that requires TWICE the number of licenses?? What does "right sizing" have to do with that calculation??

Take this another step:

Now:

2-CPU - 512GB RAM = 2 VMware licenses

New model:

2-CPU - 512GB RAM (480GB vRAM assigned) = 10 VMware licenses

Hard to justify 400% price increases.

[RogerThomas]

This thread is getting a little daft at the moment,

The people raising issues here are now being told

1) We can micro manage our VMs so to lower the impact of the new licencing structure.

2) We may not be doing our jobs as we can't need 'that much memory'

3) There is no problem if you are running a full HA environment as you will lots of free memory resources.

4) To build a big system (such as 1TB) you need vast numbers of CPUs so there is no licence issues

   (not true just build use AMD).

5) For some reason VMWARE should charge more because the underlying hardware can do more.

    If this is true so can all the other providers used to build the servers. A quick note they do not.

    My first real server was built around a 8Mhz 286, Just because the lastest Intel chip is

    10,000 times faster they are not able to charge me 10,000 times more for each CPU.

What we are trying to tell VMWARE is - its a great product, we have based our CVs on this product and spend our time building, supporting, defending and selling on this product.

THIS V5 PRICING PULLS THE RUG FROM UNDER MANY USER CASES WHERE V4 HAS NO PROBLEMS.

As such our own jobs and futures are at risk, many of us have learnt to our cost what happens when the pricing model is messed up. As a few people have noted this looks like a Novell moment.

XenServer and Hyper-V are basic products and no where near as rounded as ESX, but they will do for many roles - VMWARE yesterday claimed that they had near 50% of the market. With this new pricing that will be the high point.

[bilalhashmi]

Pascal Watteel wrote:

is it only me, or are only the Vexperts on this forum teaming up with vmware on this licensing issue...

are they paid by vmware??? unbiast??

are all other people posting here stupid then, en configuring their setup wrongly?

or we just don't understand it... that is...

the statement of now we have to pay because we had some good years????

what the heck.... are you guys on crack???

i'm realy going nuts here....

rightsize you VM's???

if we lower the allocated mem to the VM

and the VM needs more mem because of spikes...

all this will be going to SWAP

yep disk IO on the SAN

so we may lower our VMware licenses by doing this...

but we up the swapping in the OS witch up's te SAN IO

so we need to invest in faster disk...

so what ever we do, we keep getting to the same conclusion...

this licensing sucks...

Perhaps once the emotion settles down, more folks will see beyond the licensing model. I will probably not be replying back on this thread as most of what I have seen has been rather emotional.

I dont think the new model will hurt your pocket in the big scheme of things. What is Xen or Hyper V's answer to SRM, vCD, vCO etc etc.. I can keep going. Look beyond this.. I suggest we all calm down run our numbers and see how we can enhance our envirnoments with the new features and design our envirnoments based on real life examples and not a superficial number. The new model may require some adjustments which may not ultimately mean more CPU lic, in some cases it could simply mean more effcient designs.

For the record I am not a VMware employees and vExperts are not paid by VMware.

Follow me @ Cloud-Buddy.com

[rahlj]

Look around on the Internet and it is actually pretty amazing and sad that we help these sites with hits and buying the books and you wont find a VExpert that will touch this as a subject or if they do its as you stated that we just dont get it.  Look at how many replies this topic has and then go to all of the experts websites and see what they are talking about. 

[stevieg]

While it's a little bit long to post here, I think these changes will have a significant impact on organisations looking to virtualise Exchange 2010:

If you're thinking of virtualising Exchange 2010 on VMware, you might want to consider your options....

Steve

[chanaka_ek]

These replies we are getting from these vExperts are a waste of time as they will just defend the licesing model just for the sake of it arguing we do downsizing....etc. (have you even thought about the impact of an already downsized environment where the over subsricption is purely down to the number of VMs running as opposed to the size of the VMs vRAM?? )

Realy they are just trying to justify a decision probably made at a level far above them within the vmware hierarchy, just because they have to with little silly arguments. There was only one sensible argument I saw from one of them that admitted that VMware had to find a way to raise prices to get a bigger chunk for the increased VM densities the customers are achieving due to growth in resource capacities and the scalability of vSphere (thanks for being honest). However the figures they've used in working the metrics out (34gb per CPU for Enterprise customers ?? C'mon....) is way too low even to my very pro-VMware mindset.....

I will not be hastily jumping ships quite yet as that would be stupid but will definetely be recommending that we evaluate alternatives (as a precaution). We have a sign off for a massive project I architected & recommended involving a geographically clustered SAN and running Vmware on both ends (based on vSPhere 4 quotes) in order to virtualise atleast a 70-80% of our physical server estate (on top of the existing vSPhere cluster) but can no longer rely on just Vmware as the potential hypervisor.

[Frank_Heidbuche]

i'm indeed worried about my job...

i have to go tell 2 new customers to virtualize tomorrow.

but i have no idea what to tell them anymore...

the customer already has citrix xenapp licenses...

but i told them, to install the xenapp in vmware...

but i can never ask them these new licenses.

i'm sure we will loose the hardware sale and the rest,

and the customer will upgrade their xenapp to xendesktop to get the free xenserver with it...

all this with another supplier...

i feel screwed over by vmware, i'm loosing bussines...

and well this is my money we are talking about...

sorry i get a bit emotional about this...

i don't have a vmware backaccount...

and years of advocating for vmware is ginving me this....

it feels like a stab in the back..

[mikeyes]

Alberto wrote:

SuperSpike, thanks for commenting and expressing your concerns. At first sight it seems that you are missing some very key points about the model that can end up affecting the end result:

1) vRAM entitlements are pooled across the whole enviroment, therefore when you do the math you shouldn't focus on one or two servers, but your whole environment. This can radically change the end result. Here is a good example from a customer that was just as shocked as you are and then ran the numbers: http://lonesysadmin.net/2011/07/12/the-five-stages-of-vmware-licensing-grief/

2) the vast majority of people overpovision CPUs and physcial RAM for HA purposes. I don't know about your enviroment, but I'd be surprised if you didn't do that with such large servers running many VMs. With the new model essentially you don't have to license that capacity

3) While core limits are not an issue today if you are running Ent + (they certainly are an issue today is you use Enterprise), within 12-18 months under the vSphere 4.x you will have to deploy to two licenses per processor with the additional negative factor that you won't be able to share core entitlements among hosts

4) To run a 1TB VM you probably need a 16 sockets server with 1TB RAM. This means that the incremental cost would be about 6 licenses since each socket has to have at least one license and we are not even factoring in any spare vRAM capacity you may have in your pool. Looking at prices for hardware like the one above, it seems that the HW alone would cost over $150K, so I am not sure that virtualization software would end up being the most expensive component of the solution

5) vSphere licenses are perpetual so if you are refreshing your existing vSphere environement with new larger boxes you can redepoly your existing licenses to the new boxes just to expand the pool

Look I don't mean to sugarcoat it to you, but I think you should really run the numbers first to determine if you are impacted. Looking at the configs of latest purchased servers may lead to very wrong conclusions as we are seeing in many cases. We will soon make available a free utility app to check possible impacts of the new model on your environment - I'll post the link as soon as it's out. Hopefully it will help provide more clarity and please let us know what you find out.

Anytime someone tries to sell this as a good thing they are sugarcoating it.

What is the benefit to the customer?  Where is the good news here?  All you are talking about it why this really won't affect us as much as we think.

In the old license model if I bought a server it did not matter how much RAM I put in (enterprise plus).  I only had to care about the CPU.  In most VMware virtualized environments RAM was more precious than compute cycles.

RAM was becomming important.  RAM was becomming denser.  VMWare wanted to make more money.  VMware increased their license costs and tried to get too greedy too fast.  They used low numbers that affected more of their customer base than they thought.  VMware screwed up.  VMware needs to fix it before they lost customers.

This is very different than just a feature change that pisses people off.  When people threaten to move to HyperV over this they really mean it.  You can't just add money to your IT budget becuase VMware got greedy.  If you have to put in X amount of server and VMware just priced themselves out of your budget you don't have a choice but to consider the alternative.

[rickardnobel]

The argument that memory might have been unused anyway in a HA environment is perhaps not always correct either. Let us say you have five hosts and want to be able to handle the failure of one host. Then it is likely to keep the memory load to about 70-80% on all hosts to make this possible.

However, this is physical host memory that you would want to keep free. Your VMs could have any amount of RAM allocated to them, possible much more than the total of physical RAM available. Since you are paying for the memory allocated to the guests and not how much is actually used physically I do not really see why the HA argument is valid.

[BrendonColby]

As a single VMware admin at a small company, I just want to say that this new licensing model does NOT make things easier for me. We have three HP DL380 G6 servers with six CPUs and 144GB memory each. The capacity of these 2009 model servers is 192GB and upgrading to this could be an easily justifiable expense next year. Obviously we want to get the most life out of these boxes and have progressively upgraded memory over the past two years since that's the most consumed resource. The new licensing would require us to purchase at least another three Enterprise Plus licenses to cover what we have now, and another SIX licenses to cover the full capacity of these servers.

My main concern with using vRAM utilization for licensing is the burden having another metric to have to monitor and get licensing to cover. I'd much rather purchase a CPU license and not have to worry about memory utilization throughout the year. I don't really control what the vendor requirements are for VMs so I can't cut back on memory utilization for the most part. In the end, this is just one more thing for me to have to manage and more licensing fees for the company on top of the huge investment we've already made in VMware.

As a VMware customer for over ten years, today is a rather disappointing day for me. I will definitely be investigating other products like Hyper-V, Xen and KVM. I'm not sure I can justify upgrading to vSphere 5 with this licensing model, especially since we were planning on virtualizing several big memory boxes over this year and next.

[Rumple]

So…here is why we are emotionally responding…

In the beginning we’ve all been going to our C-level management and telling them what yes, vmware is expensive upfront, but longer term hyper-v is more expensive because of the lower consolidation ratio’s and the fact their memory oversubscription sucks. Over a 36 month term we have proven again and again that we are getting a ROI on our vmware virtual infrastructure vs Hyper-V or physical of 30-50%....(Scale up vs Scale out)

Today my graph are going to need to change so that my up front costs are expensive and as Hyper-V or Physical because everytime I scale up my costs rise with it….

You can swing this anyhow you want…I’ve just lost a 30% margin of argument against the Microsoft lovers in the company because I may have more hosts with Microsoft..but I paid a boatload less in licensing (since guess what guys..I had to pay for M$ licensing anyhow).

[SeanLeyne]

Axel wrote:

You're right, if i will have plans to run a 1 TB Machine, VMware licenses will not be a very big part of the equation, because i will not think over to vmware in this case now.

Why?

21 Enterprise plus Licenses = one very huge physical server

"very huge physical server"?? Huh?

SuperMicro has a 5U, Quad Xeon 7500/E7-8 CPU system (http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/5U/5086/SYS-5086B-TRF.cfm) which supports 1TB of DRAM (using 16GB DIMMs).

I figure I could build one for less than $55,000.

That said, the server cost is 40% less than the minimum up-front cost of the 21 Enterprise plus licenses+SnS ($91,749 = 21 x 3,495+874).

If you were to factor in the SnS for years 2 and 3 ($18,354/yr) the VMware cost would be over $110,000!

Where does it make sense for software to cost 2 twice as much as hardware???

[aarondovetail]

You must not have ever purchased Oracle licensing