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SuperSpike
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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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JDLangdon
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Albert Widjaja wrote:

No, actually I have 61 GB on my 8 new blades, based on my approved budget I only need to buy 2CPU sockets x 8 unit = 16 Enterprise plus license on VSphere 4.1)

But as for vsphere 5 I’m not sure if I have to buy

61x8 / 48  = 10.1 license ?

vSphere 5 licenses are based on the amount of RAM.  For a single blade with 2xCPU and 61GB of RAM you will need to purchase 2 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses.

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RogerThomas
Contributor
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Albert Widjaja wrote:

No, actually I have 61 GB on my 8 new blades, based on my approved budget I only need to buy 2CPU sockets x 8 unit = 16 Enterprise plus license on VSphere 4.1)

But as for vsphere 5 I’m not sure if I have to buy

61x8 / 48  = 10.1 license ?

You still have to licence each physical CPU so you will need 16 licences, you will only have an issue if you go above 92GBytes of allocated vRAM across all your systems - so a total of 736 of active vRAM.

This means you currently do not lose out due to the change, but what are your memory plans for these nodes over the next year or so?

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Frank_Heidbuche
Contributor
Contributor

I think if vmware insist on these mem limits.

they should forget the CPU limits totaly and focus on max physical memory only.

example

ess 48GB

std  64GB

ent  96GB

ent plus 128GB

this way you can choose the edition based on features and buy mulitple of them to get to the total physical memory you want to use over all your servers.

so if you have 2 servers with a 64GB each

you could buy 2 std editions or 1 ent plus to reach the memory limit

this way more people would go to ent plus, and get the newer features...

where vmware is premium in.

and as memory requirements go up... vmware's license counts also goes up.

making them more money...

but you can still overcommit with no problem...

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DANCHUFT
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Contributor

I too was excitedly reading through the new vSphere 5 specs until I stumbled upon the new licensing model  :smileyshocked:

We currently have 2 Socket 128GB RAM Blades running Ent Edition. For us to move to vSphere 5 we would have to double our current license count! Being an NHS Trust I can't see the funding being approved for the migration to vSphere 5 any time soon.

To penalise people who are achieving high consolidation ratios, which was one of the main drives behind virtualisation seems to be a major own goal by VMware. I wonder if the increase in revenue from the extra licensing costs will outweigh the amount of people who will surely abandon vSphere in favour of HyperV in today's financial climate?

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odonnellj
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The worst thing to do is to start negotiating vRAM levels. The whole concept is absurd and should be scrapped and an apology given.

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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

jbonicki wrote:

I totally agree with you. The new licensing model is even worse on the SMB side:

Today:

2 x DL380 G7, 2 CPUs and 96 GB RAM each = Essentials Plus Kit

Tomorrow:

2 x DL380 G7, 2 CPUs and 96 GB RAM each = Standard Kit

That is about 300% (yes, THREE HUNDRED PERCENT) increase in price. Good luck explaining the added cost to your boss Smiley Happy.

Take care

jacek

Are you designing for N+1? If so you should fine with Essentials Plus Kit for 2 servers. You should not be using much more than 96 GB of memory if your design is N+1.

Essentials Plus Kit is 144GB Max. Pooled vRAM that means if you using 2 servers and are only using 144GB of memory (In your case

75% of total memory)

Even if you buy standard it's just 24GB per CPU at 6 CPU you sitll only entiled to 144GB of VRAM. You will have bump up to Ent or ENT + if want more vRAM per CPU.

Always remember it's vRAM used! Not total memory in the systems. 

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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sergeadam
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I've been preaching ESX for close to 8 years now. I just started here a couple of months ago. My company is embarking on a virtualization project. My predecessor bought 3 R710, dual CPUs, 2 X 96GB and 1 32GB. Essential Plus license. I'll have a HA cluster. My standard image for a 2008R2 server is 4GB and goes up from there. vSphere 5 allows me 144GB. I'll be over that. Even designing for HA, it is not unheard of to overallocate vRAM. In all my clusters up until now, I've always had servers that did not need to restart in the event of a host failure. If a host fails, it will be fixed within 12 hours. I can afford to have monitors, AV, and a whole bunch of 'helper' servers down for a while. 

Since I'm just starting my project, I'll now be loading Hyper-V and giving that a good trial. I already own Windows Enterprise. I don't need any ESX features other than what Essentials Plus gives me. Hyper-V may just be good enough.

Sad day.

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hellraiser
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vRAM is irrelevant - if I'm going to pay for RAM to add to a server, then it's necessary. I am unlikely to have the luxury of pools of hundreds of gigabytes of RAM installed that I won't be using!

JD

JD
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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

DANCHUFT wrote:

I too was excitedly reading through the new vSphere 5 specs until I stumbled upon the new licensing model  :smileyshocked:

We currently have 2 Socket 128GB RAM Blades running Ent Edition. For us to move to vSphere 5 we would have to double our current license count! Being an NHS Trust I can't see the funding being approved for the migration to vSphere 5 any time soon.

To penalise people who are achieving high consolidation ratios, which was one of the main drives behind virtualisation seems to be a major own goal by VMware. I wonder if the increase in revenue from the extra licensing costs will outweigh the amount of people who will surely abandon vSphere in favour of HyperV in today's financial climate?

I going to harp on this

4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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pnewell
Contributor
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Wow, 263 posts on this thread, and it hasn't even been around for two days!

I'm throwing my opinion in as well, in that I too agree that the vRAM entitlement is way too low.  I sincerely hope that VMware decides to re-evaluate the vRAM licensing option (increase it, generously, or get rid of it all together), as this will cause a massive defection of VMware customers to the competition.  Myself included.

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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

sergeadam wrote:

I've been preaching ESX for close to 8 years now. I just started here a couple of months ago. My company is embarking on a virtualization project. My predecessor bought 3 R710, dual CPUs, 2 X 96GB and 1 32GB. Essential Plus license. I'll have a HA cluster. My standard image for a 2008R2 server is 4GB and goes up from there. vSphere 5 allows me 144GB. I'll be over that. Even designing for HA, it is not unheard of to overallocate vRAM. In all my clusters up until now, I've always had servers that did not need to restart in the event of a host failure. If a host fails, it will be fixed within 12 hours. I can afford to have monitors, AV, and a whole bunch of 'helper' servers down for a while. 

Since I'm just starting my project, I'll now be loading Hyper-V and giving that a good trial. I already own Windows Enterprise. I don't need any ESX features other than what Essentials Plus gives me. Hyper-V may just be good enough.

Sad day.

We been running hyper-v in for hosted datacenter for some time now and we are working as fast as possible to get off it. Mutiple failed live migrations, server os not working right. Preformnce issues all over the place.  Good luck.

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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tietzjd25
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Paul Newell wrote:

Wow, 263 posts on this thread, and it hasn't even been around for two days!

I'm throwing my opinion in as well, in that I too agree that the vRAM entitlement is way too low.  I sincerely hope that VMware decides to re-evaluate the vRAM licensing option (increase it, generously, or get rid of it all together), as this will cause a massive defection of VMware customers to the competition.  Myself included.

From what I saw, prices have drop per license. This could help off set prices, the prices on SMB have not changed though.

VMware statnce is Ess + or Ess was ment for SMB with less then 20 servers... 144/20 is almost 8GIG memeory per server.....

Joe Tietz VCAP-DCD Solutions Architect
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DANCHUFT
Contributor
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Joe Tietz wrote:

DANCHUFT wrote:

I too was excitedly reading through the new vSphere 5 specs until I stumbled upon the new licensing model  :smileyshocked:

We currently have 2 Socket 128GB RAM Blades running Ent Edition. For us to move to vSphere 5 we would have to double our current license count! Being an NHS Trust I can't see the funding being approved for the migration to vSphere 5 any time soon.

To penalise people who are achieving high consolidation ratios, which was one of the main drives behind virtualisation seems to be a major own goal by VMware. I wonder if the increase in revenue from the extra licensing costs will outweigh the amount of people who will surely abandon vSphere in favour of HyperV in today's financial climate?

I going to harp on this

4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

In our Live Cluster we have 5 Blades, 2 Sockets 128GB Ram in each giving a total of 640GB RAM across the 5 Blades. We allow for one complete Blade failure so 640GB -128GB = 512GB potentially in use at 100% capacity across the 5 Blades.

If we upgrade to vSphere 5 with our current allocation of 10 license (5 x 2 socket Blades) it will only entitle us to use 320GB RAM across the 5 Blades. So yes I see your point, to license us for the remaining 192GB would only be another 6 licenses not 10. It still means that we would need to buy another 6 sockets of Enterprise and Support just to upgrade to vSphere 5 though....

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JDLangdon
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Expert

odonnellj wrote:

The worst thing to do is to start negotiating vRAM levels. The whole concept is absurd and should be scrapped and an apology given.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but isn't vRAM the amount of RAM that is allocated to a VM upon bootup?

If that is correct then upon bootup, my VM with 16GB's of RAM assigned to it is using 16GB's of vRAM.  What happens to my licensing cost if I limit this same 16GB VM to 2GB's upon bootup and use 14GB's of SWAP space?  Did my licensing cost just go down?

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dgrace
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Alberto wrote:

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.

I really think this utility should have been out on day 1 of the announcement. Think of the PR disaster VMWare could have saved themselves if the app was out and customers could easily check on the claim on the spot. Not everyone has powershell ready to go to run scipts from the net.

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hellraiser
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Enthusiast

Dunno, but if it needed 16GB and had to rely on 14GB of swap space performance would be dire...

JD

JD
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jontackabury
Contributor
Contributor

I just wanted to throw my opinion in as a small VMware ESXi user. We currently have 2 servers with 1 CPU each and 32GB of RAM in each host. We run 6 VMs (4 on one host, 2 on the other). Currently we are using ESXi (free) and have been trying out the Essentials kits to allow use to use VCB to make our backups easier to manage. This was going to cost us around $1k-$2k total for both hosts. If we upgrade to VMware vSphere 5, ESXi only allows for 8GB RAM, which is crazy. The next level up only allows for 24GB RAM, so we'd be forced to spend $6k total for both hosts to be allowed to use all 32GB of our RAM. That's almost as much as I paid for the hardware! VMware, you've gone off the deep on this one. We don't have high requirements, and don't need many of the features that come with the higher versions of vSphere so we're looking at Hyper-V now as a replacement. Instead of VMware getting $2k from us, they tried to get $6k and now they're not going to get anything.

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derekb13
Contributor
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Joe Tietz wrote:


I going to harp on this

4 ENT Edition lic = 128 vRAM in use..... Are you not designed for N+1 failover?

And I'll harp on this: That's a red herring for most environments.

Let's look at my environment - I've got 16 blades, 144GB per blade, 2 sockets of Ent+ CPU licensing per unit. That gives me 1,536GB of vRAM capacity across my entire environment. Now, let's throw out two of those blades. They're redundant warm-spare blades for maintenance and service capacity. (N+2 so even more redundancy than you're thinking I should have). So let's assume I'm only *using* 14 of my 16 licensed blades. Let's assume of those 14 blades' memory, I'm only running them at 80% usage. (Which bear in mind is highly unlikely, in a number of environments, given the OVERcommit hype of 4.x, but let's just say that I'm being EVEN MORE memory conservative than I need to be).

14 * 144 * .8 = 1612.8GB, an overage of 76GB, which means I now have to go buy two CPU of Ent+ licenses just to do what I was already doing the day before.

And I'm a small shop who's not running REALLY dense installs. I have colleagues who are running quad-sockets with 512GB or 768GB of memory per server. A dozen of those, even including the vRAM-license capacity sitting idle in the warm-spare units, gives a licensed capacity of (4 * 12 * 48 = 2304GB), but (10 * 768 * .8 = 6144GB of actual allocated vRAM, meaning they'd need to buy **80** extra sockets of Ent+ licensing (in addition the 48 sockets they presently own) just to get legal under the new doctrine.

In other words: N+1 is a red herring, and I really wish you, and every other person who harps on it, would please just give that a rest.

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AlbertWT
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Thanks for the reply Roger,

"This means you currently do not lose out due to the change, but what are your memory plans for these nodes over the next year or so?"
### I'm not planning any major upgrade again for the next 3 years so it will remains the same as this blade just arrived this week.

sh*t that's way so much 2 Enterprise+ license for each blade 😐

/* Please feel free to provide any comments or input you may have. */
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JustinL3
Contributor
Contributor

I asked our SE about this and the response was limits don't affect vRAM allocation calcs.  So in your example you would be using 16GB of your vRAM Allocation even though you've limted the VM to only be able to use 2 GB of pRAM...

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