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?

[ClueShell]

I am loosing my mind about this right sizing paradigma which got forced on us.

WE dont even vMotion (yet) and snapshotting is done in the powered off state so WTF are you going to tell me next Bigi?

If it were slow all those operations I would probably just take it as it is, do a bit google, realize I did something terrible and try to optimize this special case. BUT up to this point where someone complains about bad performance NOBODY of our staff will complain but rather enjoy the speed and responsivnes because requests were served from RAM instead of disk.

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[Bigi201110141]

@hmtk1976
You can also buy additional Enterprise licenses if more than 6 cores per socket are used without buying Entperise Plus. So get ur facts straight.

@ClueShell

Well most normal people use Snapshots during Backups or while the Server is on not to disrput users why still backing up the Server before any updates or changes.

Again you paid for vSphere 4 and support, no one guaranteed vSphere 5 for you. Its the same as if vmware released vSphere 5 in 3 years from now. Your not entitled to like the new policy and you can stay on vSphere 4 some people still use ESX 3.5 they have great features better than Hyper-V or Xen.

Free ride is over go to Hyper-V or Xen if not satisfied.

[tomaddox]

Bigi wrote:

Again you paid for vSphere 4 and support, no one guaranteed vSphere 5 for you.

Wrong. If we're paying the service and support costs (SnS), then part of our entitlement is the upgrade to vSphere 5. Hence the grief on this thread: we are getting the "free" upgrade, except that it was going to (and in some cases, may still) grossly increase our licensing costs!

[allenb1121]

I beg to differ. We are not "extreme" (state university), and 48 cores and 512GB of memory is our standard ESXi host config. We are not excessively allocating memory, we just have a LOT of VMs! Some large, some small, but most have less than 4GB allocated.

Allen B.

[lawjm]

Here here. I too am tired of people who know nothing about my environment telling me how much RAM my guests need. Further, I don't even care if they are right. Going from an unlimited capacity to a limited capacity is never good for the consumer. VMware has come off sounding like AT&T. "Sure the bandwidth was unlimited before, but most customers use less than 2GB of data so we have capped your usage."

--John Law

[Baddos]

Bigi wrote:

Free ride is over go to Hyper-V or Xen if not satisfied.

LOL I'm wondering when my Enterprise licenses were ever a free ride.

[rugeeple]

From Reddit on 7/17

--------

I’ll try to keep this as succinct (not) as possible, but there is a lot to cover.  This is all my opinion and anecdotal, I may be making a lot of it up.

Tipping points, jumping the shark,  and various observations at that time.

•     Osborne and the 'good enough' luggable.  Other companies come out with better, cheaper, good enough luggables while the new Osborne was more expensive.  No one sees the value over good enough.

•     Palm announces new Color Palm V is coming.  Sales tank while industry waits and it never felt the same after that. 

•     The day Bill Gates ‘fired his best salespeople’.  One of my ‘get off my lawn, you kids’ stories.  Way back, many of us techies were Microsoft’s biggest fans.  Microsoft was the underdog and the software was good enough for the price.  Even though WordPerfect and 1-2-3 were better, it made our lives easier with Office and we successfully championed it in many companies.  Then the Select Agreement came along, and we were caught off guard.  Good enough was no longer good enough, at that price.  By the time this happened, many of us had been promoted into management for our good thinking and practices.  We were able to stem some of the bleeding…but we never forgot.  Coincidentally, this is about the time when the Microsoft was brought up on charges for unfair business practices and monopolistic behavior.  I believe Microsoft was convicted of being a monopoly.

•     The alchemy of it all.  Another get off my lawn story.  One day Microsoft says it has a new thing, called CALs, that it is going to charge for.  The memory can be fuzzy, but let’s say $100 per CAL.  The industry goes nuts.  There is the wringing of the hands, the gnashing of the teeth, and the stomping of the feet (read this in a Bill Cosby voice).   After some time, Microsoft comes back and says that they have listened to the people and that the price of the CAL will be $50 (again, memory fuzzy).  Most everyone went, “Whew, that is more like it.  That is much more reasonable than $100…”.  Money from nothing.

Now let’s look at VMware and how this might play out

•     VMware could drop the price in a few days/weeks.  I would hate to think that their CEO brought this idea with him from Microsoft.

•     If they do drop the price and it is still more than what we currently pay, and we do nothing but pay it, then WE DESERVE IT. 

•     If that happens, and we take it, then we have told the industry that it is OK to practice this. 

•     If this happens, and we let it, then we are Geeples.  Geek/Sheep/People.

What to do?

•     We all have to stop buying VMware until the pricing is back to pre-announcement.

•     If VMware announces that they have listened, and that the vRam Tax will not be as much, we still have to stop buying VMware.   Anything other than this is a) validating the practice, and b) completes the transition to Geeple’s.

•     If the value of a product cannot be demonstrated over good enough, then we buy good enough and ask that management help us to send this message to our customers/users.  People (users) do understand and will live with a products shortcomings, if properly messaged.

Well then, what should the price be?

•     $5/month per VM.

•     $5/month per VM for full use of all VMware tools.   So, $10/month for VM+Tools.

•     $5/month for a VDI client.

•     VMware concentrates on making their tools hypervisor agnostic, and charges $10/month for non-VMware vm’s.

[Bigi201110141]

@ allenb1121

if 48 cores and 512GB of ram is not extreme I dont know what is.Your living in fantasy world. In your case stick with vSphere 4 no one is forcing people to upgrade. Updates and bug fixes will still be provided for version 4 even 3.5 still gets updates.

Sounds to me like you have a Server sprawl. How many physical sockets per server are you counting HT as well?

[DKramkowski]

I have to say I was excited about vSphere5 and its new features... Until I found out about the new vMem licensing sucker punch.

At home in my personal/test environment, I'm currently running the free hypervisor on a dual socket server with 48GB RAM. When all my VMs are powered on, all 48GB (and then some) are consumed. That server is soon to be upgraded to a newer quad-socket server with 64GB of RAM. I have a single host powered on at any given time with no shared storage. The only features of vSphere that I would rather like to have in my environment are VMWare Data Recovery and Update Manager (Just the hosts, don't need the ability to patch the guests from it. It actually used to be included with one of the older hypervisors. 3.5, I believe). I, like many others I'm sure, have no need, want, desire or use for any other features of vSphere in this kind of environment.

In my work environment, I have two hosts with two sockets each and 128GB RAM each running vSphere standard. I currently have about 125GB in use between the two hosts and all the guests. I haven't looked at the total allocated, but I'm pretty sure it's somewhere north of that. There's no way I could upgrade this environment without purchasing more licenses. Explain that one to your boss: "Well, we have a current support contract so we're entitled to upgrade to vSphere5 for free, but in order to do it, we're going to have to purchase more licenses even though we didn't add anything to the environment. So it's actually not a free upgrade." Right.

A friend/former coworker has two VMWare environments with two hosts each, two sockets per host running vSphere Advanced on both who will also will not be able to upgrade his environment without purchasing more licenses just to be able to power on his VMs.

Per host licensing is probably the best. Per CPU Socket is "ok". If you ask me, there was nothing wrong with vSphere 4's licensing, other than maybe the number of cores per socket. But to throw in this vMem entitlement is just plain daft in my opinion.

Unless, at some point, VMWare reverses this sucker punch of a license model, I suspect you'll see a LOT of people migrate to Hyper-V or Xen.

I, for one, have no plans or intentions of upgrading either environment to v5. I'll be sticking with 4.1 in both places for the foreseeable future.

[tomaddox]

Bigi wrote:

@ allenb1121

if 48 cores and 512GB of ram is not extreme I dont know what is.Your living in fantasy world. In your case stick with vSphere 4 no one is forcing people to upgrade. Updates and bug fixes will still be provided for version 4 even 3.5 still gets updates.

One can easily purchase an HP 4-socket Opteron system with that build, probably for about $30K, so no, I wouldn't consider it extreme.

[Dracolith]

Bigi wrote:

Again you paid for vSphere 4 and support, no one guaranteed vSphere 5 for you.

Wrong.     If you bought vSphere4,  you pay for   SnS.  That's short for Software and support.

SnS according to VMware includes entitlement to all future upgrades  at zero additional cost  (other than maintaining SnS).

Free ride is over go to Hyper-V or Xen if not satisfied.

Everyone who buys any has to buy at least one year of the SnS  per license.

It is not a  free  ride  to begin with.   The annual cost of production SnS is basically  25% of

the license cost.

So if VMware has a major release every two years,  you are essentially paying

half the new license price,  for your right to upgrade.

It's so far from free, it's absurd to use the phrase "free ride"  to describe the situation.

[bilalhashmi]

In spite of the swearing and name calling thats going on here, I will make the attempt to get my point across.

VMware is a corporate not a welfare

The company went ahead and revised their licensing based on customer feedback and we are still not happy. I am trying to understand what are we after here? Yes the tape player in my car was awesome 10 years ago but I dont want one now. Because its outdated. Just like that so is the vSphere 4 licensing with the cores that are increasing by the day. So if VMware does not switch to a model based on capacity, we will put VMware out of business by dividing the number of hosts. I guess its wrong for a business to think about its future. And MS and Citrix would never do that.

Yes your contracts should allow you to upgarde to vSphere 5 for free and I am all for it. But screaming/yelling/crying here isn't going to fix that. What I have seen on this thread is what about the future, we need a roadmap bla bla bla. Please try getting a roadmap for other companies like MS and Citrix that have been marketed here numerous times. Being a VMware community, I wont go into the eithics of that either. Plus everyone has right to have an opinion.

So with your contract your upgrade should be free, and I agree on that point. But getting mad about what will happen 2 years from now is not what was promised in the contract. If your envirnoment is so intensivley used and overcommited (dont worry about thanking VMware for that btw), that it will cost you money to upgrade, I suggest you speak with your reseller about that. I am sure there will be a solution to this.

And for all the marketing thats done about MS and Citrix on this thread.. Goodluck to those who choose to migrate to other platforms. Then you will have a real reason to cry and no community to voice your opinion.

I hope my comments don't start a shitstrom. Please think about what I said with a cool head. Lastly not many companies will revise there licesning as quickly as VMware has done. So if you are going towards the darkside (XEN, HyperV).. Good luck! Hope it works out for you.

[Jimbonx]

after all is still on extreme environment many challenge for that quite extreme configuration besides the 48 cores

is on the memory 512 GB?

how many socket for that mount of ram u use? and how big is the ram each? 4GB/pcs, 8GB/pcs, 16GB/pcs?

it is impossible to had that configuration with 30k$

event on my environment that i already consider near the extreme with just 2 socket 6 core with the 192 GB of RAM

or at 4 socket with 10 core still on 192 GB of ram

the different is just to locate the vm which one is hungry for the cpu and which ones is hungry for the ram.

and you still to considering the HA also

is it good enough to had 1 physical server with 48 cores and 512 GB RAM vs 3 physical server with 16 cores with 192 GB RAM?

think smart and for what u need to virtualize if the HA not to consider? just to consolidation or optimizing your physical?

use another virtualization software then vmware not become the option from my perspective.

there is many good feature that vmware had, and it is true they are not forcing every customers to upgrade to vsphere 5

u just had a right to upgrade with no throw away your vsphere 4 license and purchase the new one.

every one is complaining for the new license scheme because this had many fabulous feature and better performance, so this make every customer wanna upgrade their version. Are you wanna the big improvement for free? where do you live? on the planet of dreamer?

wake up and ring the bell, this are the business and it is cruel. just good enough when their license is make sense.

i was also the clients that get big impact because this change of licensing model, but with the jump of feature they had, it become the weapons for me to managements to upgrade with the benefits of 1,2,3,4,5, etc and this much they must to pay for this benefit and improve of performance.

if they do not wanna to upgrade this are the consequences 1,2,3,4,5, etc and this are the benefit 1,2,3,4, etc

so why we are arguing here i am not defending the vmware just that are my real sense of it business

just talk to management provide the data, they whom own the $, we just need the data to convince them to upgrade.

they will make the call to upgrade or not, we are just give and advice to them and provide the data, so why we argue?

i think that we are that interest in this version for free, just why not viewing from business perspective?

are you need the drs that runs on storage? are you want memory share more flexible not tight with the host? are you want .....

but not want to pay even on a penny? come on this are real world, we are here already mature not just born yesterday.

forgive me if my words is like that but this are my opinion

thanks

[Dracolith]

Bilal wrote:
So with your contract your upgrade should be free, and I agree on that point. But getting mad about what will happen 2 years from now is not what was promised in the contract.

With your SnS contract, the upgrade should be free,   both   free in cost, AND free from new/additional restrictions or legal  constraints on your deployment that were not part of the original  software.

You have a right to project or predict how any change imposed on you  will most likely impact your organization in the future, and complain about those impacts.  In 2 years, you won't have any right to  complain, if you accepted the new model today/initially without complaint now,

just because it doesn't effect you today.

The basic principal is acquiescence;  if you or a reasonable person would know that somebody is doing something wrong

that will hurt you,  or is infringing upon something you should rightfully have,  and you standby doing nothing,

then  morally through your own intentional inaction, you denied yourself any rightful opportunity to complain.

Bilal wrote:

The company went ahead and revised their licensing based on customer feedback and we are still not happy. I am trying to understand what are we after here? Yes the tape player in my car was awesome 10 years ago but I dont want one now. Because its outdated. Just like that so is the vSphere 4 licensing with the cores that are increasing by the day. So if VMware does not switch to a model based on capacity, we will put VMware out of business by dividing the number of hosts.

Realistically:  no, we won't divide the number of hosts.   Not in our current environments  (besides, we already paid VMware for those licenses),

Nor in brand new environments.    It is true that servers are coming out with higher number of cores and larger amounts of RAM.

The idea that fewer virtualization licenses would otherwise be needed is highly theoretical and not borne out by the facts.

I'm not sure what world you live in where applications are becoming less  demanding of system resources.

We may be getting faster CPUs with larger amounts of RAM,  but there are some fundamental things about the x86

architecture that mean enhancement in vSphere5 is not going to divide the number of servers in half.

CPU and Memory are not the only performance critical components of a server;  there are other bottlenecks that begin to become more important.

One fact is that utilizing more memory incurs more CPU overhead.    The performance of a server is limited by the slowest component, and there is limited CPU/memory bandwidth, limited bus capacity, limited interrupt capacity,  and limited storage IOPs in x86 systems.

Another one of those things is availability.    We cannot be failing VMs over from a dead host to that same host.

Yes your contracts should allow you to upgarde to vSphere 5 for free and I am all for it. But screaming/yelling/crying here isn't going to fix that. What I have seen on this thread is what about the future,  .... Being a VMware community, I wont go into the eithics of that either.

Yes, they should.    And if they wont;  "screaming"/"yelling"/whatever provides us (the community) useful information.    It certainly helps point out problems/flaws with the new licensing models.

And for all the marketing thats done about MS and Citrix on this thread.. Goodluck to those who choose to migrate to other platforms. Then you will have a real reason to cry and no community to voice your opinion.

I hope my comments don't start a shitstrom. Please think about what I said with a cool head. Lastly not many companies will revise there licesning as quickly as VMware has done. So if you are going towards the darkside (XEN, HyperV).. Good luck! Hope it works out for you.

[allenb1121]

Dude, I don't know if you live in the small business sector or what, and if you do, I understand. However, you need to understand this - not everyone is in the same boat. We have Dell PowerEdge R815 systems, with 4 Opteron 6176 CPUs and 512GB of memory each. Enterprise Plus, with VMotion, HA, and DRS. Yes, I am accounting for HA failover, and no I don't think anyone should have to pay extra, if they are paying SNS specifically to gain access to the new versions when they are released. Oh, and the cost of one of those systems is $26k, with academic pricing.

Not trying to be rude, but you ARE being rude and confrontational for no reason.

Allen B.

[chrisheidemann]

@bil

I would love to see the results of those customer surveys. How many of them are running Server 2003, Exchange 2003, etc. that have low memory requirements. How many of the surveys were cherry picked by some marketing intern that matched what his boss said to look for? Memory is most likely the cheapest input for servers now. It's a good thing too because everything is consuming more RAM to run at an acceptable performanc level.

I don't disagree that VMware needs to stay current with all aspects of their business to keep providing new features. 2, 3, 4 years ago they could afford to charge a premium because nobody else could do what they were doing. They still have that in some areas but the gap is closing. Sure they still have things like FT or dVS that MS and Xen don't have but how many customers are willing to pay the premium for those features going forward?

There's a lot of comments in this thread that a lot of hosting providers don't use VMware because they're already forced into this licensing model. Now VMware is forcing the rest of their clients into this licensing model, into having to seriously consider implementing chargeback. Great in theory but will be tough to implement in a lot of situations.

I think people should continue to scream about this. Letting it go is the same as saying you are ok with it. Some of the furor will go down because some people won't be affected as quickly - but I can bet that within 12-18 months, if the current licensing scheme is still there, it will pick up again. Who sees memory usage going down? When has it ever gone down as a trend?

Bilal wrote:

If your envirnoment is so intensivley used and overcommited (dont worry about thanking VMware for that btw), that it will cost you money to upgrade, I suggest you speak with your reseller about that. I am sure there will be a solution to this.

Isn't that the whole point of running VMware? To safely, but aggresively overcommit the hardware you purchased? I do thank VMware for letting me run an obscene amount of VMs on a server. But to lure me in to it and then yank the rug out from under me? That's what bothers me. I'm sure that the engineers who spent countless hours on TPS, balooning and the other memory optimizations love this new licensing. Who gives a rip about TPS when it's all about the allocated vRAM?

A little sour grapes on the MS/Xen info on this thread - there are obviously plenty of people already running on those platforms. Every software has a problem. Remember the ESX 3.5 Update 2 timebomb? I don't think MS or Xen could have asked for a better present or opening.

I don't think you will see an immediate shift to another platform. But in 12-18 months, when vSphere 4.1 starts getting out of date (assuming licensing stays the same), companies will have to evaluate if it's worth sticking with VMware and this licensing or moving to MS/Xen. Sure it's a big change but a $100k/year savings will be pretty tantalizing to the bean counters.

The one positive that VMware can take out of this is they know they have a very dedicated and loyal community. This thread proves it. If nobody cared about the VMware products, there woudln't be a 95 page thread complaining about how it will affect my business. If nobody cared, partners and customers would tell their VMware rep to screw off and start talking to MS and Xen instead. But nobody really wants to do that. We've all spent a ton of time taking classes and tests, writing automated scripts, learning how to make our lives easier because of VMware software. Not to mention the thousands, or millions, of dollars already spent on software and licensing.

I don't want to have to leave VMware but if I as a consultant can't justify the increased cost to clients, I have to start evaluating other products or I lose my job. I dread having to learn the ins and outs of Xen or Hyper-V but if that's the direction I'm pushed, I can't push back without a damn good reason.

[ClueShell]

If I remeber correctly.

Microsoft Windows Clients Professional/Business (XP/Seven) and the corresponding Server OSes stayed the same in price over the years and they steadily included the same product use rights or even extended them to the benefit of the users.

So they rack in money like VMware does.

The notable difference is: Windows gets licensed per installation (not counting vm rights or datacenter licenses) and VMware per physical socket of the host.

They devised this new tax to get instantly more cash from us because they for once slept deeply to miss the trend.

Other companies with this "buy now get perpetual free upgrades with SnS" did the only legal trick. They invented other plans/editions so to force the customer to upgrade to those if he wanted the features.

The new hardware version 8 is an essential feature but crippled non shared storage vMotioning is not, but VMware has an incentive to put this in the SME packs to gain more customers.

Thas why they should try the road of charge per socket for the future as they did in the past and expand your customer base with reasonable pricing.

End of Line!

The master control program.

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[SeanLeyne]

Dracolith wrote:

Bigi wrote:

Again you paid for vSphere 4 and support, no one guaranteed vSphere 5 for you.

Wrong.     If you bought vSphere4,  you pay for   SnS.  That's short for Software and support.

SnS according to VMware includes entitlement to all future upgrades  at zero additional cost  (other than maintaining SnS).

I had read in an email I had read from my supplier that I only had 30 Days to accept the v5 EULA, otherwise the later upgrade would not be a $0.

Has anyone talked to VMware and confirmed that I could upgrade to v5 and any point in my SnS term?

Further, if I am SnS now and my contract expires in 6 months, and I renew, can I upgrade to v5 later and $0?

[Jimbonx]

that is way allen i had an apologize word at the end

just express my opinion without confront to anyone, so once again accept my apology if u feel i am being rude to you.

but that are my oppinion we in here also shocked about the new licensing model, even worse we just invest on vmware about a year ago.

and suddenly the license is changing and our sizing is already count for vsphere 5 because there some vm that need about 16-24 CPU with 128 GB mem.

so we already hear about they will launch big changes on next version, we also provide the data and convince the management.

can you imagine what will be the question from the management/owner for their investment.

but what can we do, just talk and give an opinion on community what i think off.

i just wait are they will do the changes again before available to public.

we are on the same boat here just hope they will change to reasonable licensing model.

thanks

[ClueShell]

Boah VMware

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/cloud-computing/private-cloud/index.html

Security for cloud-based models cannot stop or prevent change and dynamic movement – it has to embrace it.

Your unhackable hypervisor. I'd rather go back to pen and paper with my medical data as to trust it to the "cloud".

You praise this new way of thinking, meanwhile ignore how the customers should get there?

Ever knew this word called "soft migration". Your approach is more like *boink* we hit you with the vBat.

Even with EnterprisePlus and the distributed switch, network acls, bla blah I would put a real physical box on each internet facing connection, and possibly in addition route traffic throu filtering VMs or whatever needs to be done to prevent zone breaches.

I'd soon have to unsubscribe from thread updates to start/keep working on our EXIT strategy.