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?

[roglar]

Duncan wrote:

swap2ssd, splitRxMode, multi-nic vmotion etc. And I am just naming a few of the enhancements that vSphere 5.0 brings.

Ah, swap2ssd, that seems like a good new feature! Great with massive and aggressive RAM overcommitment! This gives customers an opportunity to run even more virtual machines with lots of memory allocated! A natural step together with "other" changes in vSphere 5.

[RogerThomas]

LockAze wrote:

So only $500...? That was actually really cheap for my part.

yep the essentials pack has always been price so that people would use it instead of deploying the free editions of XenServer or HyperV and as long as you stay under the 192GByte of vRAM limit it is still a very good deal for a very good product. Once you go past the vRAM limit the new pricing becomes a nightmare as you will need at least 7 licences of Standard edition which will cost $7,000 + SNS fees and a vCenter licence + SNS.

The result is that there is no real sane upgrade path for an essentials user if they need to just add memory to their basic environment. The cost of the upgrade can be higher than the cost of the hardware that they have deployed.

[RogerThomas]

roglar wrote:

Duncan wrote:

swap2ssd, splitRxMode, multi-nic vmotion etc. And I am just naming a few of the enhancements that vSphere 5.0 brings.

Ah, swap2ssd, that seems like a good new feature! Great with massive and aggressive RAM overcommitment! This gives customers an opportunity to run even more virtual machines with lots of memory allocated! A natural step together with "other" changes in vSphere 5.

It's a nice feature - but something you had been able to do by just telling 4.1 to send all swap to a certain disk, which can be a SSD based solution.

>> with massive and aggressive RAM overcommitment

Lovely idea if you are happy paying $1,000+ per 32Gbytes of vRAM allocated to your VM.

A Fusion-IO board with 300Gbytes of SSD space costs about $7,500 and its great at this type of thing, but to fully use it to overcommit your environment you need to spend at least $10,000 on VMWARE CPU licences (if using standard) and that's before SNS fees.

[J1mbo]

288GB of real RAM isn't much more than that SSD either.

[GVD]

RogerThomas wrote:

LockAze wrote:

So only $500...? That was actually really cheap for my part.

yep the essentials pack has always been price so that people would use it instead of deploying the free editions of XenServer or HyperV and as long as you stay under the 192GByte of vRAM limit it is still a very good deal for a very good product. Once you go past the vRAM limit the new pricing becomes a nightmare as you will need at least 7 licences of Standard edition which will cost $7,000 + SNS fees and a vCenter licence + SNS.

The result is that there is no real sane upgrade path for an essentials user if they need to just add memory to their basic environment. The cost of the upgrade can be higher than the cost of the hardware that they have deployed.

Keep in mind that prices for Essentials Kits will be modified on the 22th of august.

In my country, it will cost more than 5000 euros (excl VAT) to buy Essentials Plus with 1 (one) year of Production Support.
This is MORE than the current 4650 euros (excl VAT) for Essentials Plus with 3 (three) years of Production support.

(list prices ofc)

No word on Essentials kit itself in the non-Plus version though. I'd expect the difference to be small with current pricing.

If you're dead certain you need either the Essentials Plus kit, I'd strongly suggest you buy it before the 15th with 3 years of support. Saves you several thousand euros in the longer run.

[hmtk1976]

LockAze wrote:

So only $500...? That was actually really cheap for my part.

If Essentials Plus is possible for your budget I'd go for it.  IMO vMotion and HA are worth it.

[AaronKratzmann]

I am currently working part time. I am in the office Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you require urgent assistance please contact the IT Service Desk on ext 6999. Regards, Aaron

[LockAze]

I don't get HA with Essentials? I will have to pay for the Essentials Plus? That might be a dealbreaker.. 😕 . For such a small enviroment I would really have to consider $3K for XenServer Advanced than ~$6K for VMware Ent. Plus, this is a small enviroment where I don't need all the extras that VMware can offer, so XenServer will do just fine (I could even go for the free version, but I want HA, they have XenMotion that works great in the free version, so if all I wanted where Vmotion then I would rather go for the free version of XenServer than pay VMware $500)

I would like to buy VMware but I will actually have a bit of trouble explaining that I should pay almoust double for only 3 servers, these servers are so cheap that the $3K would buy me another server $2K (small only 32Gb ram but still) + one more license of XenServer Advanced $1K I might have to add some disks to my setup, but still, how do I explain this to my higher ups in a way that will favour VMware?

[hmtk1976]

I think you should compare the various editions.   Google: compare vsphere editions.

This thread is more about complaining about the v5 licensing.

[J1mbo]

$500 is practically giveaway for Essentials, there will be little sympathy here for moaning about that.

But is HA really such a big deal?  All it does is restart VMs if a host fails; are you expecting your hosts to fail regularly?  What is the proposed hardware?  And, are these for Microsoft VMs?  What is your shared storage solution?

[tomaddox]

scowse wrote:

As posted earlier, this really is the "Rolls Royce" marketing model. Millions of people have tossed and turned at night refusing to accept the fact that they really could not afford one.

Get over it, move on and try as hard as you can to enjoy the clunker that is within your means

We can afford it; the question is whether we should.

[jer0nim0]

Hey guys.

What happens when I have say 10 hosts with 2 cpus and 70 Gigs of RAM each.

Alright I need 2 licenses cause of the 2 CPUs.

Enterprise would be overkill since it would give me 128 GB of RAM per machine which I don't have/need.

Now if I take 1 Enterprise and 1Standard license per host, what defines which VMs are using which license, i.e. what defines which VMs I can do Storage vMotion with, which is only included in Enterprise?

Bye.

[RParker]

Dracolith wrote:

The problem is you are not repeating VMware's words.  VMware never said anything about a 300% performance increase as part of the VS5 changes.

You are conducting synthesis;   taking two different things VMware wrote at different times,  and treating them as if they said  both things today.

Whatever, it's ON VM Ware site, go read it for yourself.  It clearly STATES 300,000 IOPS to 1 Million IOPS which works out to be whatever % increase, VM Ware *DID* say it or write it, Don't care if you want to believe or get bogged down over semanatics, it IS what it *IS*, you choose to deny it your problem, VM wAre said it was faster, they PROVED it by testing, and if your storage can't support it, whose fault is that?  NOT VMware, not mine.  You want to argue performance increase discuss it with VM Ware.  Just because YOU don't understand or have a disagreement with the FACTS on the FEATURES page, just means you are being deliberately obstinate.

> This degree of performance improvement is something you have implied, not something VMware has stated!

Since when is a mathematical formula "implied", did you NOT graduate from elementary school? 300,000 to 1 million is a difference of what percentage??! (hint go back and ask your 3rd grade math teacher if you made it that far)

[sergeadam]

You need to license the edition that fits your need. That is not different from all other versions.

[RParker]

allenb1121 wrote:

Speaking from an almost exclusively AMD shop these days, I can tell you that AMD is not 1/2 the computing resources of Intel.  I will take 12 real cores over 8 real and 8 logical CPUs any day for massively multithreaded operations and for virtualization..  The only exception seems to be Oracle on Linux...for some reason, the Intel Xeons consistently outperform the Opteron 6100s there, but I have not done any in-depth investigation to determine why.  Our DBAs tend to think it is the additional CPU cache on the Intel CPUs.  For single-threaded apps (which are becoming fewer and fewer), Intel may be the better choice.  Also, if you have custom apps that were compiled with Intel's compiler (we have that in the HPC/Research computing area, where we use Intel), Intel is the way to go there.  They are different tools for different applications.  Choosing the best one for the particular job, and you will get much better results.

Either way, if you have the licenses for it, the Opteron 6100 series CPUs are the better choice for virtualization from my experience - and we are heavily virtualized, and heavily AMD.  I'm about to forklift out the last of our Intel virtualization hosts...

Let's not sidetrack the discussion off to an AMD vs Intel war, though.  There are valid points on both sides, and valid applications for both.

Point taken on the AMD vs Intel, this is a VM Ware discussion which fully supports both.  However.. you started a digression by implying that Intel doesn't have "real" cores.  I will agree to your point about AMD, AMD are equal to Intel in every way, but Intel *DOES* use real cores.  You are confusing the early days of hyperthreading that used idle computing cycles, no longer the case.  a 6 core processor has 12 *REAL* hyperthread cores, they are not logical.  You can DISABLE the cores if you want which is essentially dismantling hyperthreading because some OS don't fully utilize them, whereas OTHER OS do (Linux in our case, specially RHEL 5.5 vs Windows 2008 R2).  Linux has trouble running Oracle hyperthreaded, yet same architecture running Windows 2008 R2 (hyper-v specifically) works fine, ALL cores are equal.

So if didn't want to sidetrack this discussion you should AT LEAST get the facts straight, because we WILL point out discrepancies.

[jer0nim0]

Meaning?

(There is no more license fitting my needs (exactly))

[sergeadam]

Meaning if you need the features of the Enterprise edition, that's what you get. If your total vRAM allocation is more than your pRAM, you win. You don't mix and match editions on the same host to get a vRAM allocation close to your pRAM.

That's where the new model fails. It realy should target one or the other. I shoul either license my sockets or my RAM.

But right now, you pick the edition you need based on features, and buy enough licenses of that edition to cover the greater of sockets or vRAM.

[RParker]

tomaddox wrote:

TysonL wrote:

The problem with per core licensing is that AMD CPUs have twice the cores as Intel CPUs. So clusters that are using AMD CPUs in their servers would pay twice as much for licensing for no additional compute power (since AMD and Intel CPUs are roughly equivilent).

Er, no. With AMD, you get double the physical compute cores, which probably equates to 40-60% greater performance than existing HyperThreaded Xeons or almost double the performance with HT turned off. Also, the latest AMD blades we bought were about half the cost of the equivalent Xeon-based blades and we were able to pack in a third more RAM.

You will have to show me these numbers, because I will put performance numbers for Intel 6 cores with hyperthreading up to AMD anyway, and you imply they will be 40% FASTER?  Don't think so.  we have both, and frankly I don't see a performance difference either way, so AMD vs Intel is a CHOICE not an absolute.

Tilesets, VM Ware has performance figures for the FASTEST virtulization hosts on the planet (hint, they are NOT AMD processors...).  So explain that!  AMD MIGHT be faster under CERTAIN circumstances, but not across the board.  You can't say ANY platform outperforms ANY other for EVERY benchmark, that is a fallacy.

[J1mbo]

As a point of interest, AMD's market share has declined quite materially over the past few years.

FWIW, personally I tend not to have much of a preference.

[kmcferrin]

ClueShell wrote:

this business is binary, either you're a one or zero, alive or dead.

VMware with good license strategy = 1

VMware with vTax as it is now = 0

And honestly, Hyper-V is not something you want to shove an existing

VMware Ent/Ent+ customer into, even if its free as in beer. And don't

get me started with XenCrap that requires processor VT-x help to even

execute Windows 32 bit, that performance must be horrible. Still

investigating/evaluating.

Regarding VT-x, why do it in software if you can do it in hardware?  The CPUs have had support for this baked in for at least 6-7 years now, and VMware will take advantage of it if you enable it.

And you're right, if you're an Ent/Ent+ customer who has been making extensive used of all of the features of VMware then migrating to Hyper-V may not be an option.  But if you were only using VMware because it was the "brand name" (think Xerox or Kleenex) or you only bought higher-end SKUs because of the size of your environment, then Citrix or Microsoft might be viable options.

I guess I'm a little confused why you would say that VMware with vTax is dead, but that neither of VMware's top two competitors are good enough to use as a replacement.  Either you're screwed or you have options.  If you're a VMware customer and neither Xen not Hyper-V can meet your needs then there isn't an alternative.