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?

[afidel]

Here's my results

Counting physical cpu's and vRAM in your environment. Please be patient...

======

pCpu Count: 24

vRAM (GB):  1185

======

Resulting license options:

Edition                    Entitlement                Licenses

-------                    -----------                --------

Essentials/Essentials P... 1 pCpu + 24 GB vRAM        50 with 26 pCpu overhead

Enterprise                 1 pCpu + 32 GB vRAM        38 with 14 pCpu overhead

Enterprise Plus            1 pCpu + 48 GB vRAM        25 with 1 pCpu overhead

======

That means we'll "only" have to upgrade from Enterprise to Enterprise+ and buy an additional Enterprise+ license, so a mere $20k capital and $5k a year additional cost...

Oh, and when we grow to actually using all the ram in these hosts that would be another $44k and $11k a year in maintenance. I'm starting to think that putting the man hours into a RHEV\XenApp\Hyper-v pilot might be money well spent.

[egray]

UEFI will be for ARM systems only, not x86.  Relax.

[bobbach]

Not to mention that VMware just shifted the cost of that expansion to capital expenditure from maintenance. Why not just a small percentage increase on maintenance?

We all deal with Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, HP etc. In most companies we can usually add to maintenance more easily than to capex.

The really insidious part is that they may save many environments with older hardware today, but they know that we'll keep adding more and more memory for hungry applications over the next year or two and we'll be having to ask for capex dollars to give them.

In the mean time they'll stifle the move to hosting services who will really get gouged due to their RAM/CPU ratio and have to pass those costs along.

I was so pumped when vSphere 5 was announced, with multicore FT and but the wind has been taken out of its sails. You can now run a VM with a TB of RAM, but you'll have to pony up almost $75,000.00 in vSphere licensing.

[MDK_BUHL]

i really hope so. There were some information in the news about that:

http://translate.google.de/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%...

(in german -> translated)

MK

[egray]

Please note that VDI (i.e., non-View desktop workloads) are covered by the vSphere Desktop license which is not measured by vRAM but by concurrent desktop VMs.

http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2011/07/vsphere-desktop-licensing-overview.html

Secondly, cloud providers already have a RAM-based pricing model for vSphere and are covered by a completely separate license agreement.

Hope that helps clarify.

[JEDWARDS777FL]

I think VMWare is feeling the heat with all of the complaints.  They setup a team to review the overwhelming negative response to the change.  Maybe they are starting to realize that their "study" justifying the change was a complete joke.

If you haven't already, EMAIL vi-hotline-replies@vmware.com with your complaints and scenarios on how this is going to be terrible.  They just might listen.

[andreaspa]

JEDWARDS777FL wrote:

I think VMWare is feeling the heat with all of the complaints.  They setup a team to review the overwhelming negative response to the change.  Maybe they are starting to realize that their "study" justifying the change was a complete joke.

I think the word "joke" is a bit.. light

I have a customer that now needs to buy several more licenses in order to keep their systems running with vs5. They said something about needing additional 20 licenses. They are being punished for running big servers. Now they are thinking about XenServer and Hyper-V.

VMware really needs to rethink this. I'll get in contact with my partner contact person, and explain to him the views of our customer and that we now have to recommend other products to our customer that doesn't scare the hell out of them when it comes to pricing.

[allenb1121]

It's about time that they woke up and realized that their manufactured reality in which this is a good idea doesn't exist...

Allen B.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

[UpstateVM]

Like many, we have been a loyal VMWare customer for 5+ years.  This licensing change has doubled our license cost and screwed my TCO.  I am now reviewing our 5 year technology plan.  Before this announcement VMWare was the cornerstone of our future, now we are reviewing everything and looking at alternative vendors.

Needless to say, our pending VSphere 5 upgrade is on hold (probably permanently).  For those who haven’t looked it up or seen it, VSphere 4 support lifecycle details below.

http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/lifecycle/enterprise-infrastructure/eos.html

VMware ESXi 4	General availability	End of Support	End of Technical Guidance
	(YYYY/MM/DD)	(YYYY/MM/DD)	(YYYY/MM/DD)
ESXi Version 4	5/21/2009	5/21/2014	5/21/2016

Unless something changes we will probably remain on VSphere 4 until we migrate to an alternative.  I’m hoping MS can raise their game, with Windows Server datacenter moving to Hyper V is free!

[JEDWARDS777FL]

Yeah I was being polite.  I'm the datacenter admin for a region of our organization.  We are in the middle of an expansion and are working on a more consolidated infrastructure.  We are about to deploy 64 new ESX hosts using Cisco UCS with a total of 16 TB of RAM.  The change means I will need at least 214 ADDITIONAL Enterprise Plus licenses licenses and that's with no overcommitment.  If we go that route, it will be an additional $1 million in CapEx alone!  It's not just the SMB that this is hurting.

[VCCS]

Yeah, this is not going to work. I am the main Vmware Engineer for the Virginia Community College System, and you can bet that us, along with the entirety of our schools, will be revisiting our commitment to VMWare.

[Dracolith]

Eric Gray wrote:

Secondly, cloud providers already have a RAM-based pricing model for vSphere and are covered by a completely separate license agreement.

The incremental cost of deploying your services in a public cloud is expensive;  if you already have your own environment, probably it doesn't make sense.      Cloud providers already charge customers for vRAM,   so, if the customer should insist on VMware as the cloud Hypervisor,  the  vRAM cost is easily baked into  the monthly service charge.

If the customer doesn't demand the hypervisor be VMware,   then  I think the cloud provider is likely to pick whichever platform meets their requirements, and their customer's requirements  at the lowest cost.

VMware should not want to lose their Enterprise customers,  as VMware does not have much robust  competitive advantage in the Cloud, as evidenced by the success of EC2 and other XEN based solutions.

VMware's  Hypervisor has technical superiority.      However,  noone's datacenter design has a functional requirement of  "Must use the technically superior hypervisor at any cost".

Datacenter architects are ultimately charged with  maximizing shareholder value for their respective enterprises,  which means buying  the products that meet the necessary technical requirements with the fewest dollars spent over the life of the deployment.

And sometimes the technical requirements can even be revised down if they are not realistically achievable.

[UpstateVM]

One other thing, in addition to emailing comments to 'vi-hotline-replies@vmware.com' make sure you CC your VMWare representative.  My rep called me within 10 minutes and he is forwarding my comments to his VP.

[TysonL201110141]

In a discussion with my manager yesterday we realized something else.

ESX4 Enterprise license limited you to 256GB of pRAM.

ESX4 Enterprise+ license had no limit to pRAM.

ESX5 Enterprise license for a 2 CPU server limits you to 64GB of RAM.

ESX5 Enterprise+ license for a 2 CPU server limits you to 96GB of RAM.

How can VMware claim that under the new license model most of their customers are unaffected when the ESX5 Ent+ license allows you 37.5% of the usable RAM that you were given under a ESX4 Ent license?

This change is absurd.

As an Ent+ customer, going from having no limit to RAM usage to being denied half of the RAM in my server unless I double my license cost is insulting.

[rjb2]

TysonL wrote:

In a discussion with my manager yesterday we realized something else.

ESX4 Enterprise license limited you to 256GB of pRAM.

ESX4 Enterprise+ license had no limit to pRAM.

ESX5 Enterprise license for a 2 CPU server limits you to 64GB of RAM.

ESX5 Enterprise+ license for a 2 CPU server limits you to 96GB of RAM.

How can VMware claim that under the new license model most of their customers are unaffected when the ESX5 Ent+ license allows you 37.5% of the usable RAM that you were given under a ESX4 Ent license?

This change is absurd.

As an Ent+ customer, going from having no limit to RAM usage to being denied half of the RAM in my server unless I double my license cost is insulting.

We mainly have Enterprise licenses and we came to the same conclusion. By using the upgrade rights that we paid for, our existing licensed servers go from having a 256 GB capacity down to 64 GB (a 75% reduction).

This is a challenging problem for VMWare to fix for existing customers. For better or for worse, with new licenses they obviously prefer to go forward with entitlements close to the ones they have published, so they won't want to mess that up. And since the only way to add more vRAM is to buy CPU licenses, they probably aren't going to want to start offering additional licenses to customers (i.e. 3 for every 1 to make an Enterprise customer whole).

Someone suggested that they offer vRAM packs as an option. If they would create this option, they could win back some of the goodwill that they have lost by at least offering existing customers additional memory to offset what they are taking away.

[tomaddox]

UpstateVM wrote:

One other thing, in addition to emailing comments to 'vi-hotline-replies@vmware.com' make sure you CC your VMWare representative.  My rep called me within 10 minutes and he is forwarding my comments to his VP.

Ha ha, my VMware representative. If only I knew who he was . . . our last rep got promoted or transferred, and the new one hasn't condescended to reach out to us.

[scowse]

Hmmm...in my first hour with citrix i have installed xenserver and xencenter, added an iscsi datastore, applied an update patch and created a vm - not a steep learning curve

My impression is that it will be "good enough" and also exceptionally good value compared to some virtuailization products currently being flamed

[malaysiavm]

you may try the NFS deployment on Xen, which can make it more simple, and honestly speaking, is not hard to get use to it

[aroudnev]

This is not a problem. For example, once/if I'll start XEN testing, I will have many options how to deploy it, license it and so on. As I said earlier, it is one way road - once we turn onto it we will go to the end with a very high probability. VMware made a huge mistake causing many people to turn on the XEN and MS roads - and even if they change licensing, 1/2 of these people will never return back. So harm is already done.

(Options are always - NFS, PAX boot, and so so on... )

[GlobalMind]

rjb2 wrote:

Someone suggested that they offer vRAM packs as an option. If they would create this option, they could win back some of the goodwill that they have lost by at least offering existing customers additional memory to offset what they are taking away.

We had this very conversation today.  If VMWare is hell bent on this consumption model of licensing by memory, then what they really should do is pitch the per CPU/Socket pricing component and just have memory enablement packs as the model.

The whole thing is just silly, and really opens doors for competitors. But VMWare has obtained enough market share to have the arrogance to think everyone will just go along with whatever they push out.

In my view they do so at their own peril.

As a partner, I can't recommend any customer upgrade to vSphere 5 until we do a very thorough analysis of their systems to see what the impact of this change will be.

I am at an IBM System x & Storage conference this week and tomorrow AM VMWare is going a session on licensing. Should be interesting to see the fireworks display.