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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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ph0bia
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So it appears that I am looking at about a 400% increase in license costs for all of my new dual 12-core bl465c 256GB blades, we have dozens of blades altogether and I guess VMware wants me to now go to my bosses and explain to them why suddenly our license costs are so much higher.  This at a time when competitors such as Microsoft come in and visit the CxO's directly, offering them pretty much 'whatever it takes' for us to consider switching our core environment to their solutions.  I can only imagine that M$ is full of glee over this change, and I can say with great certainty that I am not going to approach my bosses with this price increase - to do so would be occupational suicide.  My recommendation will be that we end our maintenance agreement immediately.

Doesn't VMware realize that engineers are their salespeople within large organizations?  I recently passed the VCP410 and was very much looking forward to continuing to focus my career on VMware's solutions, I have been a vocal proponent of this technology for many years now and have been involved in the decision to use and deployment of some fairly large VMware implementations.  With this pricing change however, I have to reconsider my position and re-evaluate the other virtualization solutions available so that the recommendations I make are sensible and provide the value that VMware once had.

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GVD
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I voiced my concerns about Moore's Law & grandfathering old licensing RAM entitlements.

Response to Moore's Law was that future releases would see the entitlements raised and that if in the meantime changes were necessary they could still do it with intermediate releases. Doesn't really sound reassuring, as I'd hoped for a clear answer on when & how much they would grow.

The second reply was however more interesting:

"If a customer can definitively show that they would be out of compliance were they to upgrade now; vmware will look at ways to help the customer (it would be done on a case by case basis however in certail situations the customer would receive free licenses)."

No guaranteed grandfathering of your licenses, but I can only suggest that you contact your licensing contact (which you should have done already anyway). Personally, I'm in compliance for my 3 year projections with the latest licensing changes, so others will have to actually find out if VMWare is indeed willing to give out free licenses to those who can show they would fall out of compliance.

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bckirsch
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Our licensing will change but not by the levels that it would of before the 3rd.  Every person here can jump onto the Hyper-V wagon or some other solution but keep in mind that VMware is a 99.9999% uptime solution while the others are 95% - 98% uptime.  That goes from seconds of outage per year to days.  Yes the cost can be high but look at the massive savings in hardware maintenance / flexibility / etc...

No one likes to pay more but we talking about a tier one product here.

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hmtk1976
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I seriously doubt Hyper V and XenServer has a measly 98% uptime, let alone 95 %

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Dr_Virt
Hot Shot
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As I am currently deploying an enterprise datacenter, the timing of the licensing change has proved most interesting.

Some background, we standardized on 12, and 24 core systems with 256-512 GB of RAM. In analyzing the current environment while defining the requirements, the environment was documented at approximately 125% over allocated on RAM. So, in the new datacenter, I calculated the required amount of RAM based on limited over allocation and HA constraints plus growth expectations.

This resulted in a system that is allocating ~60% of memory with reserved growth capacity.

Even with the completed math cycle, we cannot upgrade to vSphere 5. With the original licensing, there was no way. With the updated licensing we might sneak in under the bar, but would have zero growth capcity. Conversely, the 2 vSphere 4 liceses per host cover all possible use cases in this design.

I believe VMware has come to believe they are THE game in town and must capitalize on a limited product set. I believe that with this license change, VMware can only have two honest expectations: 1) to be completely removed from cloud opportunities due to constraining costs of scaling, and 2) strong SMB presence. The licensing model prevents large scale deployments.

My other concern is that vRAM is a dynamic asset. It changes regularly with ongoing operations. This puts VMware in the place of a service provider underpinning my operations. Therefore, if this is the model going forward, can I return licensing when I scale down or "right size" operations?

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kmcferrin
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Brian (hotmail) wrote:

Our licensing will change but not by the levels that it would of before the 3rd.  Every person here can jump onto the Hyper-V wagon or some other solution but keep in mind that VMware is a 99.9999% uptime solution while the others are 95% - 98% uptime.  That goes from seconds of outage per year to days.  Yes the cost can be high but look at the massive savings in hardware maintenance / flexibility / etc...

No one likes to pay more but we talking about a tier one product here.

That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.  Do you think that Gartner would have MS and Citrix in the leader quadrant if they weren't enterprise ready and capable of providing uptime numbers comparable with other enterprise products?  That's absurd.  And even if it were true (and it clearly isn't), it's virtual. Both both have HA and live migration capabilities, so the impact would be minimal at best.

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tomaddox
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Bigi wrote:

Let's assume you have lots of small VMs with relatively small CPU footprint,  because you are intentionally

creating as many VMs as possible for better application isolation,  and you utilize your RAM 100% with

some small amount of actual overcommitment of your physical hardware.

Do you give users 20 PCs as well to isolate their applications better?

This question makes me wonder what field you work in, because you clearly don't work in IT, at least not with regard to virtualization.

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RogerThomas
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Let's assume you have lots of small VMs with relatively small CPU footprint, because you are intentionally

creating as many VMs as possible for better application isolation, and you utilize your RAM 100% with

some small amount of actual overcommitment of your physical hardware.

I guess you have never worked with real OSs - Many people use VMWARE as a way to get around Windows'

and most Linux's lack of application partitioning. If you have a nice big-iron UNIX system you get such features

as standard - each application operates in it's own isolated OS environment.

As for my end users - yes some of them use application isolation tools from Citix and Novell to do the same

thing. Its a great way to limit issues with DLL hell and reg issues, as well as offering a 'packaged' application that

does not need to be installed via MSI type installation programs.

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wdroush1
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I too still see the new numbers as if VMWare is unable to do some basic math, still not aligned with modern hardware (if you're buying VMWare new, you're likely going to try to buy modern hardware to best leverage the technology), even when account for N*2 (that is times two) failover with no TPS and no overcommit.

XenServer was already multitudes cheaper than v4, v5 makes it absurd to try to justify it, we'll have our hands tied which is the exact reason I want to go virtual. I can save the company buckloads of money now, and probably headache later when VMWare screws customers again being as they're showing no effort to back down beyond a very poor tweak in numbers that show their complete lack of understanding of the situation at hand.

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hmtk1976
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vSphere 5 makes seems to make most sense in 3 cases.

- you're not into really heavy virtualization and the vRAM limits are high enough for you. (sounds crazy, I know)

- you've got OS's that aren't as well supported on other virtualization platforms.  Think old Netware stuff for example.

- you absolutely need the features that are exclusive to vSphere Enterprise Plus

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wdroush1
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hmtk1976 wrote:

vSphere 5 makes seems to make most sense in 3 cases.

- you're not into really heavy virtualization and the vRAM limits are high enough for you. (sounds crazy, I know)

- you've got OS's that aren't as well supported on other virtualization platforms.  Think old Netware stuff for example.

- you absolutely need the features that are exclusive to vSphere Enterprise Plus

I even find the first one silly though, I mean if you're not consolidating extremely tightly, there is no reason you can't go with a cheaper hypervisor.

It's why I'm most upset with it, because this software is built to do this, but the licensing prevents me.

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Dracolith
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Enthusiast

wdroush1 wrote:


I even find the first one silly though, I mean if you're not consolidating extremely tightly, there is no reason you can't go with a cheaper hypervisor.

It's why I'm most upset with it, because this software is built to do this, but the licensing prevents me.

And there we have a conundrum.

Remember VMware's whole argument that you should buy vSphere, because it's  "cheaper per application"  to virtualize using vSphere than XenServer/Hyper-V?

The others are supposed to have lack of Memory overcommit,  and therefore, lower consolidation ratios, therefore more hosts,  therefore more hardware and licensing costs PER APPLICATION.

Fast forward  2 years later...  RAM is getting really cheap.

Eventually RAM will be so cheap per GB,  that memory overcommitment technology becomes less and less relevant.

The dropping price of RAM and increasing RAM density per server INCREASES  the competitors'  consolidation ratios per license.

vSphere's consolidation ratio per LICENSE only  increases if you're actually able to utilize that overcommitment technology.

The inevitable conclusion, is, with the newly announced licensing,  the competitors'  hypervisor consolidation ratios will exceed VMware's on a per license basis,  due to vRAM.

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GaryHertz
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Enthusiast

ClueShell wrote:

http://www.vmware.com/download/eula/multicore.html

As the core density per processor increases, customers may want to  deploy their VMware software products on Processors which have more  cores than their entitlement permits. Customers in these situations have  two options:

1) Upgrade to a different VMware software edition with higher core  per processor entitlements, sufficient for number of cores on their  processor OR

2) Combine multiple VMware software licenses on a single host.  Licensing Policy allows combining licenses of same software on single  processor.

Example: A customer has previously purchased vSphere  Enterprise licenses. Recall that each vSphere Enterprise license may be  deployed on a processor with up to 6 cores. However, the customer now  wants to use these licenses on a newly acquired server that has  processor with 12 cores. The customer has two options:

  1. Upgrade the vSphere Enterprise license to vSphere Enterprise Plus, which provides a 12-core entitlement and additional OR
  2. Use two (2) vSphere Enterprise licenses for each processor with 12 cores.

Thanks ClueShell.  I knew this but it really didn't sink in until I read your post.

The one argument I keep hearing over and over again is that the move to vRAM had to be done since future core per socket counts will be 16, 32, 64, 100 and up.  This would cause the current socket license model to break down.  Future CPU designs will mean that people will need fewer and fewer licenses.

I fell into the trap that was laid by the above arguement.  A lot of people including me thought a fairer solution to the above problem would be to change from a per socket license to a per core license.

There's only one problem with the argument.  It isn't true.  Cores per socket are capped under the 4.1 model so VMware already has a per core licensing model of sorts.  As cores per socket increase people will need additional licenses to keep up with the increase in cores.  There is no licensing loss due to increased cores per socket.

This makes the reasoning behind the vRAM model even more confusing to me.  In the absence of the increased core count argument I really fail to see the need to change the licensing other than to get increased revenue from the installed base.  VMware can always increase the cost of new licensing to align it with increased product featues and value.  Current customers who purchased SnS to protect their investment shouldn't have to bear addition costs over what they already spend on SnS.

I challenge anyone that has defended the new vRAM model based on the future core per socket argument to respond to this post.  There are several of you out there. 

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taz722
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I think the new licensing policy negatively impacts the customers with smaller servers. However, is it not true that as part of consolidation, customers are moving to more dense servers with more CPUs per chassis. If  I have 8 sockets on my servers and with the limit of 96 GB per CPU , my total entitlement for the server is 96 * 8 = 768 GB, which seems prett high. I think where this licensing hurts is when customers have single/dual socket servers. But,aren't we moving away from those to more powerful servers. What proportion of your servers are small vs. large ?

Thanks.

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wdroush1
Hot Shot
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taz722 wrote:

I think the new licensing policy negatively impacts the customers with smaller servers. However, is it not true that as part of consolidation, customers are moving to more dense servers with more CPUs per chassis. If  I have 8 sockets on my servers and with the limit of 96 GB per CPU , my total entitlement for the server is 96 * 8 = 768 GB, which seems prett high. I think where this licensing hurts is when customers have single/dual socket servers. But,aren't we moving away from those to more powerful servers. What proportion of your servers are small vs. large ?

Thanks.

I couldn't imagine paying $28,000 in licensing alone to virtualize less 3/4ths of a terabyte of computers.

I could run 2TB+ worth of machines under v4 licensing (TPS, Overallocation).

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tomaddox
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

taz722 wrote:

I think the new licensing policy negatively impacts the customers with smaller servers. However, is it not true that as part of consolidation, customers are moving to more dense servers with more CPUs per chassis. If  I have 8 sockets on my servers and with the limit of 96 GB per CPU , my total entitlement for the server is 96 * 8 = 768 GB, which seems prett high. I think where this licensing hurts is when customers have single/dual socket servers. But,aren't we moving away from those to more powerful servers. What proportion of your servers are small vs. large ?

Thanks.

I think it depends on your definition of "smaller." We just deployed a bunch of dual-socket servers with 12-core CPUs and 256 GB of RAM. On a per-socket count, they're smaller, but they have waaaaaay more horsepower than our old four-socket dual-core systems (triple the CPU cores with CPUs four generations newer) at half the footprint. This is the root of VMware's issue: as enterprise customers hit their asset refresh cycle, they can substantially increase their system density without increasing their license count. On the flip side, those customers are still paying SnS, which means that VMware continues to rake in the cash. And, frankly, as we expand our VM footprint and move more strongly towards 64-bit systems and applications, we'd probably still have to grow our licensing commitment. Having to refigure our entire virtualization strategy based on a sudden switch to virtual resources as opposed to physical ones is huge pain, though.

To add a little detail, we're moving from full-height blades to half-height, which has made no difference in terms of VMware licensing in the past, since the half-height blades can only take two sockets. It's now possible, however, to install quite a bit of RAM in the half-height blades (the sweet spot in terms of pricing through our vendor is 256 GB for AMD vs. 192 GB for Intel), so it makes sense for us to get more granular and buy half-height blades. We'd just gotten half a dozen Opteron blades (less powerful than the Intel blades, but also about half the cost) when the new vSphere pricing was announced, which left us rather hanging in the breeze from a cost perspective.

VMware wants to be shown the money, but they might wind up being shown the door.

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J1mbo
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We just deployed a bunch of dual-socket servers with 12-core CPUs and  256 GB of RAM. On a per-socket count, they're smaller, but they have  waaaaaay more horsepower than our old four-socket dual-core systems (triple the CPU cores with CPUs four generations newer) at half the  footprint. This is the root of VMware's issue: as enterprise customers  hit their asset refresh cycle, they can substantially increase their  system density without increasing their license count.

How exactly is this any different to any server refresh cycle of the past 30 years?  This is the point; there is great focus on core counts and RAM densities increasing but this all just keeps pace with the traditional rate of increase of computational densisty that itself has remained quite consistent for many years.

Secondly I want to pick up on this line "VMware is evolving the product’s licensing to lay the foundation for customers to adopt a more cloud-like IT cost model based on consumption" (I discuss this a bit on my blog, here, for those interested).

It just struck me, nowithstanding all the quibbles over vRAM or sockets or anything else... why is there a capital purchase cost in this case since this simply isn't aligned at all with "cost model based on consumption"; in other words license cost and SnS should be combined into a single monthly payment.

Also I thought I'd post a link to this - draw your own conclusions: http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/licensing.html  From that, "vSphere 5 has also introduced a small change to the entitlement process around what is known as virtual memory or vRAM."

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depping
Leadership
Leadership

ph0bia wrote:

So it appears that I am looking at about a 400% increase in license costs for all of my new dual 12-core bl465c 256GB blades, we have dozens of blades altogether and I guess VMware wants me to now go to my bosses and explain to them why suddenly our license costs are so much higher.  This at a time when competitors such as Microsoft come in and visit the CxO's directly, offering them pretty much 'whatever it takes' for us to consider switching our core environment to their solutions.  I can only imagine that M$ is full of glee over this change, and I can say with great certainty that I am not going to approach my bosses with this price increase - to do so would be occupational suicide.  My recommendation will be that we end our maintenance agreement immediately.

Assuming you are using Enterprise+ how would that be a 400% increase? Or are you overcommitting 200%?

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depping
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Leadership

Bigi wrote:

The only problem with the licensing now is that vRAM is based on RAM assigned to VM and not actual RAM used. So much for the overcommit feature, makes it worthless.

vSphere 4.x runs great, people that have more RAM than currently will be licensed under the new model should stay with 4.x. Lets see how the numbers turn out in the next 18-24 months and maybee version 6 will be more RAM friendly.

overcommitment savings is more than "licenses". what about the cost of hardware? what about the cost of management? what about the cost of network / storage I/O ports? it is not worthless, far from!

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hmtk1976
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What about getting shafted by VMware twice when you had Enterprise back in 3.5 and still  not getting the newer features even though we pay SnS?  Customers who had Enterprise back then haven't seen much of an increase in value of their licenses.  New features seem to be added to Enterprise Plus almost exclusively.

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