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?

[aroudnev]

This will not help. Essential 5 license is de facto 1/4 of Essential4 license (256 GB memory in Essential4 or less  if I use 2x oversubscription which is common in test /dev systems, vs 48 GB of memory in version 5 - can you divide 512 / 48?); even if they add vRAM pack, the original licenses (both essential and enterprise) will de facto degrade old systems approximately 4x, so this all will mean sugnificant price increase anyway and more importat this kills the whole VM idea - I have physical resources which are limited but I can allocate unlimited virtual resources until they are not al used at the same time.

vmware forget that vRAM is often  2x - 3x of physical RAM so today we have approximately 512GB vRAM limitation per 2 cpu server. I checked few servers -  production servers have approx 1.5 memory oversubscription NOW (and have more when they have more then 64 GB of memory) and staging / development systems have approx 2x - 3x memory oversubscription - RAM 32 VRAM 48 is very common, RAM 64 vRAM 128 is common as well. I override their new entitlement on 1/2 of the servers even today, and it will be on all servers after any memory upgrade (32 -> 64 GB for example) - we have 2x memory oversubscription, approx 70% memory usage and 20% cpu usage in average so it's resonable to double our memory - and it became impossible with ESX5. Pooling can't help as well, it just delay the problem a little.

No matter what VMware CEO claim, they increased the real ESX5 price approximately 4x, so Vmware became useless for anything except really small installations or for really reach enterprises. Modern 2 socket server with 64 GB of RAM cost about maybe $3K / $5K; adding $1K for standard license or $3 for enterprise is reasonable, but adding $10K for new license can't be justified; it is cheaper to add more servers without any virtualization.

[Dracolith]

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.

I'm brainstorming  ways of  letting virtual machines utilize cheap RAM without the Hypervisor getting to know about this..

aside from just getting lots of SSDs, placing  guest OS pagefiles on SSDs,  and utilizing disk for memory.

Think about it like a  "Guest iSCSI Initiator",  sometimes used to overcome limitations of VMware's iSCSI initiator and provide guests direct access.

VMware  has a technology called  VMDirectPath   that lets you  map I/O devices to individual VMs.

Now  what happens if  that "I/O device"  just happens to be a  "port"  on a  graphics card  or other external dedicated

hardware unit... call it a "RAM aggregator", with a few terabytes of memory    to carve out virtual PCI devices as needed

on the various hosts....

I'm thinking of a "RAM aggregator" as something like a SAN for guest OS memory;  that is a shared highly-available unit

for presenting loads of cheap RAM to VM hosts  over a high-speed PCIe or infiniband interface.

So in theory one could have a "memory pool"  guest VM on each host, responsible for presenting memory,

and a guest OS driver on the other VMs   to read/write  blocks of memory.

This could also speed up Vmotions,  since  the hypervisor wouldn't  "see"  the portion of memory mapped from the external memory aggregator.

More importantly...  vRAM requirements would be reduced to the kernel/OS requirements

[rgard]

Our company would owe over $300k to upgrade from v4.1 to v5. That is just to go 1:1 on pRAM.  However if you count over subscription of memory into it, it is not a pretty sight.  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.

I know what you are thinking, well what about management for HyperV.  Most companies with an EA with Microsoft in the millions like ours already have entitlements for the management software too.  So VMWare WAKE UP.  We can make the shift for $0 dollars in software costs.

The new HyperV has HA and DRS.  It is also a core product line, so 'light weight' as it can be for Microsoft.

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.

[GiuseppeRobbiat]

Hi, I made that question and I think that what they replied was not an answer.

I also asked them "if 95% of your customer has a vram usage of less than 24G/Cpu, have you considered to review your consulting services instead of the licensing model?" and again I got a reply that was not an answer (the usual "run this tool ....").

There was one thing that was really interesting in that webminar, and it is:

"Customers who purchase vSphere 5 licenses and decide to downgrade to
older versions of vSphere will be subject to the EULA terms and licensing
model of the vSphere version they downgrade to"

This means we can still buy VSphere5 on a "per processor" basis and then downgrade to VSphere4.1 license and licensing model.

I think that this is what customers will do, and I think that VMWare will review its licensing model once they will get a report saying 99% of VSPhere5 customers downgrade to VSphere4.1 just for licensing. Million of $ in R&D thrown away....

[Flan5ter]

We will not be upgrading to vSphere 5.  We have most of our hosts with 256GB RAM, we have 30 hosts.  We haven't even installed Hyper-V, now we will be investigating it's use. How stupid can a company be to not realise what this change would cause.  This happened from 3.x to 4.x with the additional features of Enterprise Plus and having to pay extra for them, which still leaves a bad taste.  VMware have lost out trust and we will not be forced down this licensing model.  Just to re-iterate we have never installed Hyper-V, but now we will be doing so.

[vmwareking]

Why are you going to Hyper-V, Why not XenServer.. XenServer is prices per Host.. ?

[MAME201110141]

Hello

I have a question, and I would like to have an answer.

At this moment I'm running 2 hosts with each 1 quadcore CPU and 96 gb of memory.

At this moment these hosts run with a Vsphere 4 standard license.

These host are running all VM's containing Oracle Enterprise Linux with on top of it Oracle DBMS.

All these VM's have 1 thing in commen huge memory usage.

With the new licensing of Vsphere 5 we've got an big issue.

I may use only 48 gb for VM's and that is to less for my environment.

Instead of the whole 192 gb of memory.

I know that I'm not going to use the complete 192 gb but 96 gb is the sweet spot for me.

Please advice me how I can use Vsphere 5 in the future without any extra investment.

I've this is not possible then VMware turns his back towards clients who run Oracle DBMS on VMware products

Exactly the same way Oracle does this against clients that run Oracle DBMS on Vmware in a licensing way.

I cannot believe that 95% percent of the clients will not pay more for there licensing, it sounds like the information minister of Iraqi  (http://www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/ ) in the gulfwar.

[GiuseppeRobbiat]

Hi, Mame, with vsphere5 standard you're not elegible for 48gigs of memory per host because you've only one processor.

So for two single cpu host you have a maximum vm memory of 48gigs AGGREGATE.

In order to use 96gigs of ram between the two hosts you need 4 standard licenses or 3 enterprise licenses or 2 enterprise+ licenses.

Or you can buy two standard licenses and downgrade to vsphere 4.1....

[MAME201110141]

So i have to buy extra licenses en don't get any extra features with Vsphere 5 standard.

This sound really like Oracle.

And Vmware is still saying that it would not affect 95% of its customers.

This really sound like information minister of iraqi.

"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"

[FREDYz]

Guys,

I share the same disapointment that you all and I am very frustrated with this break of trust from VMware's part and some 'geniuses' from their marketing team.

But hold on for a minute. Why are you guys considering Hyper-V if there are better alternatives around ?

Remember Hyper-V is Microsoft and not really a company that you can trust when it comes down to money. If not now that they want as many customers as possible they might change their license model in the future and make it in those complicated ways they have for many other products(e.g: if you wear a yellow underwear at work you have to pay this extra). And also remember Microsoft's philosophy: "Or you play our game or we simply don't play with you".

Remember also of VMware's CEO background. 14 years of Microsoft and maybe where he learned a lot of what is happening now with VMware.

Honestlly. There are great alternatives around and much and cheaper of course. Starting with Linux KVM. Many people might still think it is not mature, etc, etc which I disagree. I think it is production and enteprise ready. Prove of this is Qumranet being purchased by RedHat which base their Virtualization Platform on KVM, so the are playing a big role on KVM development. RedHat Virtualization platform hasn't got all the same features that VMware has of course but 'has enough' and probably the same that Hyper-V and Xen have(VMotion, Storage vMotion, HA, DRS, Page-Sharing, Thin-Provisioning, Power Saving, Templates, GFS, etc, with the advandage of be based on Linux and use all its scheduler and I/O device drivers. If you do some search on the web about performance comparison for KVM and other hypervisors you won't be disapointed. Other than RedHat there are many software companies investing a lot on building software to work like vCenter and control hosts running KVM hypervisor if you want to save further on the costs, and there are nice ones available around. And by the way KVM runs inside the Kernel and not on the top of Linux so it gets near bare metal performance.

For those who still don't trust KVM I also think Xen choice is a fair choice either. But Hyper-V ? Come on guys, let be smarter.

Disclamer: I don't hate Microsoft and I do use their OSes inside guests extensivelly for many clients, Microsoft has got its merits which many recognize and I do so. Also I don't work or get anything from RedHat, I just like KVM approach and think it's getting a lot of attention for the fact it is built into the mainline Linux kernel and because it is free and open-source.

Think well guys,

Regards,

[vmwareking]

Look at XenServer. just download it. its a business decision not a regligous debate.. XenServer is now in the Gartner leaders Quadrant and has all the features most of you require. stop crying and do something about it, migrate all your work loads to XenSerer. KVM and Hyper-V are way behind Vmware and also XeNServer..   Hyper-V is not a free product, u still need tp pay for the OS, XenServer is free with paid version.. the free edition has XenMotion and Snapshots for Free.

[Flan5ter]

I have no preference for either Hyper-V or XEN and know very little about either.  I have been a VMware die hard up until now.  I won't accept VMware's licensing model as it stands.  I will investigate both products when the time comes.

We are holding off until VMware change their mind about licensing.  We will be sticking with 4.1 for the time being and will be downgrading any 5 licenses we may have to buy.  VMware will have to change their mind or they will loose out heavily to their competitors.

[jcasares]

SeanLeyne wrote:

I have been "digesting" the new license model for most of the afternoon, and it is giving me heartburn!  :smileyshocked:

According to a "Important VMware vSpere 5.0 Licensign Changes" PDF that I received from a supplier, VMware thinks that:

"Although it is impossible to predict the effects of the new moldel in every type of environment, the licensing model has been designed to minimize the risk of potential impacts in existing environments while also providing root for growth.  VRAM entitlements have been set to tprovide enough capacity to scale well beyond today's average consolidation ratios of 5:1.  In addition, thanks to pooling, customers will be able to share entitlements among multiple hosts, thereby making more efficient use of available capacity."

I don't know who VMware "surveyed" to determine "average consolidation ratios" but I have read a number of articles which refer to ratios from 8:1 to 12:1!!!

You mean VMware itself says that... http://www.vmware.com/solutions/consolidation/index.html

I'm astonished at the change. It clearly impacts on more than 5% of their customers and gives some advantage to the competition. Now they won't compete with features but mostly on price and no IT manager/admin will be able to justify a price increase of 2, 3 or 4 times on "being with the market leader" alone. And I'm not impressed by any new feature of vSphere 5.

Should start certifying CITRIX XenServer soon. I foresee a lot of work on their yard.

A shame, you're not only impacting your customers but your partners as well! Now our work wold be extremelly hard.

[Vyper201110141]

vmwareking wrote:

Hyper-V is not a free product, u still need tp pay for the OS...

Sorry beg to differ.  Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 is completely free, and capable of a 16-node cluster, including Live Migration and Dynamic Memory.

[vmwareking]

are u saying Windows 2008 R2 is free? u can beg, but u would be still wrong.

[hellraiser]

No, but I believe you can download Hyper-V on its own (it’s effectively a free 2008 Core edition) and that is free.

JD

[gmitch64]

He didn't say windows 2008r2 was free..... but windows 2008r2 hyper-v edition is.... so the hypervisor edition is free... the os for the guests you run on top of that isn't

[scowse]

Arguing without googling - how last century.

http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx

[JEDWARDS777FL]

I just got this email from a VMWare EMPLOYEE regarding my issues with the new licensing model.  I have a big issue as the new model would cost us over $1 million MORE just for our newest deployment at the regional datacenter I admin.

"You refer to the average VM size that VMware has said is used, I believe this is where the issue actually is here. I believe that the data they gathered first day was flawed and even though all the decisions made based on that data were correct (based on that data) it was never going to be the correct way to go if the original data gathered was wrong. Thats what I believe having seen the data and the issues we are now receiving from customers. As I said I will pass on all of this to senior managemnet here."

[sergeadam]

What we’re saying is that most of us already own 2008R2 Datacentre licenses to satisfy the licensing needs of our VMs. That means we already own Hyper-V.