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SuperSpike
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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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kmcferrin
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Enthusiast

RogerThomas wrote:

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.

You don't have any concerns about write lifecycles on an SSD used solely for swap?  Not saying that wouldn't work, but it seems iffy to me.

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kmcferrin
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LockAze wrote:

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?

Really?  Why would you want to?  Instead of picking your solution and then trying to manipulate the data to support it, why not just look at all of the data and then decide what course of action makes the most sense from it?  Put together the most compelling/advantageous situation from each vendor and compare.

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nuttervm
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I am not clear on how swap2ssd in vSphere 5.0 is a "new" feature. in vSphere 4.0 we can modify the default swapfile location by selecting a host --> Configuration tab --> Software menu section --> Virtual Machine Swapfile Location

Alternately, we have also been able to specify the swapfile location for VMs on an individual basis. So as far as I'm concerned, I have always been able to specify a SSD based LUN as my swapfile location.

Can someone (Duncan?) please explain to me what is new/special about swap2ssd setting?

Also, just to reiterate my point made in previous posts... These wonderful new VMFS5 features are only available for the higher level license SKUs, Us "little guys" using Essentials get almost no new features for our money (increased LUN size, sub-block allocation are the only things i see that we DO get).

Matt

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wdroush1
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J1mbo wrote:

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.

I only really understand it from a customer standpoint: Vendors don't have as many options with AMD up front (at least on websites, I need to like go in a back room and discuss custom AMD builds and prices), and most vendors push Intel (albeit from the 4.1 licensing days where 6-cores were your max for anything not E+).

On top of that, I'd take an additional physical core over hyperthreading's terrible logical one any day, plus the much faster hypertransport. It's a shame AMD is underrepresented in the market.

I wonder why vendors aren't leveraging the AMDs, I can understand for standard workloads the higher speeds for Intel are good, but for virtualization I'd eat more cores.

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wdroush1
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tomaddox wrote:

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 Smiley Happy

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

This is mainly what it comes down to, the savings in licensing costs going XenServer, Hyper-V or KVM means I can buy another server or two, that's a big deal for a small business.

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wdroush1
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jer0nim0 wrote:

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.

They did that on purpose, it's why they didn't remove the pCPU count.

I'd completely agree this wasn't just a dumb money grab if they removed pCPU restrictions and is truely a move to a cloud based model, oops, we're still tied to physical resources, just VMWare found a way to charge us a bit mroe.

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wdroush1
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RParker wrote:

wdroush1 wrote:

:smileyplain: so what you're saying is that we have to buy 3x the amount of hardware to get a 300% increase in performance, not that is magically going to pull 300% performance out of it's arse.

Which being as vRAM is actually pushing us away from super-dense clusters, it's another useless feature.

Thanks.

I think you are being a bit obtuse.  If you have a Laptop if you have a SATA drive on it (5400 RPM) your OS supports SATA II 6Gb/s speed but your drive does not, then yes your OS will NOT go faster.

However if you have an OS that does NOT support that much throughput, putting a faster drive will NOT make a difference.  but your OS is obviously throttled by the drive and NOT the code efficiency.  Once you replace the drive (in this case your existing SAN DOES have capability for much higher IOPS) your OS can benefit from higher IOPS.

I don't see where you feel this is "pulling out of it's arse".  I think you need to remove the bone structure on top of your shoulders from with YOUR arse because you are either a TROLL or purposely trying to confuse and confound, in which case I am not giving in.

You can be as stubborn as you want, I am not going to explain HOW storage or IOPS work, I am only reporting what VM Ware stated as part of their feature set!

Because it was presented as "the new VMWare 5 has a 300% performance increase" instead of "VMware 5 has a 300% capacity increase", two entirely different things. Bad wording on J1mbo's (and possibly VMWare's) part but meh.

Yeah, those of us that spend a lot of time architecting systems are stubborn about the right verbage, especially because telling us there is a performance increase gets us excited, but when we find out it's a capcity increase we're kinda like "meh...".

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wdroush1
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RParker wrote:

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.

You do know that a hyperthreaded logical core will at best get you a 20% increase in workload, and at worse, 20% LESS, right?

Also hypertransport is faster than QPI (probably why AMD can keep double the core count, they have nearly double the bandwidth for memory), the usual fallback is you're not going to be pushing 3+GHZ out of an AMD chip, so you'll have to rely on multithreaded processes (which most servers will be using now-a-day anyway) and assigning more than one vcpu to account for it (so if you're running a hybrid environment, you're probably assigning half as many with the idea of Xeon single-threaded speed in mind).

And I'd agree, the choice isnt' absolute, but for most virtualization workloads I'd rather go with AMD for higher densities, cheaper equipment, etc., unless you have a workload that very specifically benefits from single-thread throughput.

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wdroush1
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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.

You mean utterly pointless with v5 licensing, right?

I'm not going to be paying thousands of dollars so I can leverage SSD swap which is still going to be painfully slow compared to RAM.

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roglar
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wdroush1 wrote:

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.

You mean utterly pointless with v5 licensing, right?

Yes, it was ironic.

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kmcferrin
Enthusiast
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wdroush1 wrote:

I only really understand it from a customer standpoint: Vendors don't have as many options with AMD up front (at least on websites, I need to like go in a back room and discuss custom AMD builds and prices), and most vendors push Intel (albeit from the 4.1 licensing days where 6-cores were your max for anything not E+).

On top of that, I'd take an additional physical core over hyperthreading's terrible logical one any day, plus the much faster hypertransport. It's a shame AMD is underrepresented in the market.

I wonder why vendors aren't leveraging the AMDs, I can understand for standard workloads the higher speeds for Intel are good, but for virtualization I'd eat more cores.

Whether it's true or not, Intel has a perceived performance advantage and better brand recognition.  AMD has always been perceived as an underdog (even during that stint when they had the fastest IA32 and x64 CPUs in the world).  It's always been that way and probably always will be.  The reason that AMD Opteron jumped ahead in physical core count was primarily because they got less performance per core than a similar generation Intel Xeon CPU.  They needed the cores to keep pace (on a per-socket basis) with the faster Xeons (and again, this is in very general benchmark terms).  Whether they are faster for a particular application or not isn't something that you can really determine without testing, and so many people take the general benchmarking and run with it rather than spend the time to test.  I suspect that whichever CPU they choose, most customers are perfectly happy with the performance that they provide.

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roglar
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RParker wrote:

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,

You do not seriously belive that because of VMFS 5 scales from the already extremely large amount of IOPS (300k) to something higher, that this could be described as "300% increase in performance"? And this fact should be a feature that "ALONE will be enough to make people move" to vSphere 5...?

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wdroush1
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kmcferrin wrote:

wdroush1 wrote:

I only really understand it from a customer standpoint: Vendors don't have as many options with AMD up front (at least on websites, I need to like go in a back room and discuss custom AMD builds and prices), and most vendors push Intel (albeit from the 4.1 licensing days where 6-cores were your max for anything not E+).

On top of that, I'd take an additional physical core over hyperthreading's terrible logical one any day, plus the much faster hypertransport. It's a shame AMD is underrepresented in the market.

I wonder why vendors aren't leveraging the AMDs, I can understand for standard workloads the higher speeds for Intel are good, but for virtualization I'd eat more cores.

Whether it's true or not, Intel has a perceived performance advantage and better brand recognition.  AMD has always been perceived as an underdog (even during that stint when they had the fastest IA32 and x64 CPUs in the world).  It's always been that way and probably always will be.  The reason that AMD Opteron jumped ahead in physical core count was primarily because they got less performance per core than a similar generation Intel Xeon CPU.  They needed the cores to keep pace (on a per-socket basis) with the faster Xeons (and again, this is in very general benchmark terms).  Whether they are faster for a particular application or not isn't something that you can really determine without testing, and so many people take the general benchmarking and run with it rather than spend the time to test.  I suspect that whichever CPU they choose, most customers are perfectly happy with the performance that they provide.

Well my biggest complaint here is that I can load up Xeon's at DELL's site without any work, if I want an AMD most of their models require me calling them, and those that are allowed to be outfitted on the website are completely messed up (I can't put more than 4GB of RAM in an R715! I have to call them!).


Yeah though, a lot of cusomters do want just an end-to-end solution and many don't even virtualize the systems themselves, so I can understand how many simply don't care, give me what you got, etc. I agree with you when that's the situation you pretty much just go with the market's status quo, but for those of us that basically hand-specialize our virtual environments it's kind of frustrating when we want to get vendor backed AMDs.

Plus, don't want to go back to only Intel again and the whole stagnation of processor development when they were the only ones around. Smiley Sad

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LucasAlbers
Expert
Expert

Another reference points out that the lock manager rewrite for vmfs-5 improves performance with larger nodes.

"Unlike VMFS-3, the VMFS-5 lock

manager scales linearly with the number of nodes in the cluster and hence enables VMFS-5 to

scale gracefully when subjected to limits of increased VM density and node connectivity in an

enterprise cloud.

For an 8-node cluster setup, the new lock manger exhibited ~40% improvement over its

predecessor during concurrent updates of shared resources in the cluster."

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J1mbo
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

> I'm not going to be paying thousands of dollars so I can leverage SSD swap which is still going to be painfully slow compared to RAM.

Yes it is, and as covered already these high-grade SSDs are approaching the cost of RAM anyway.

Here's a thing.... the 386 had a RAM bandwidth of around 75MB/s, and SCSI disks of the day would do maybe 50 IOPs (ratio of 1.5MB per IOP)

Nehalem has a RAM bandwidth maybe 25GB/s, and the SSD cited does 20k IOPs (ratio of 1.25MB per IOP)

So swapping to SSD today, in a sense, is similar to swapping to spinning storage back in the 1980's, i.e. several hundred times slower, plus you need to do two IOPs to make good one RAM page of course (swap out then swap in).

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JAndrews42
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nuttervm wrote:

Also, just to reiterate my point made in previous posts...  These wonderful new VMFS5 features are only available for the higher level license SKUs, Us "little guys" using Essentials get almost no new features for our money (increased LUN size, sub-block allocation are the only things i see that we DO get).

Matt

If you are using the $560 Essentials kit you should at least be excited about the vCenter appliance that will save you a $800 Windows license.

Many of my small clients (all have ESS+) are also looking forward to >2TB RDMs

Subblock allocation is not new, just improved.

I'll appreciate the improved ESXi local commands and remote DCUI will be nice also.

What do you want for $100?  (or whatever the SnS is for ESS)

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allenb1121
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Does your organization have a contract, and a Premier site login with Dell? If that is the case, let them know, and they will fix your purchasing portal account. We routinely order R715s and R815s, and have had no problem with the configuration. Otherwise, I think the configurator works fine on the public-facing site.

Allen B.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

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wdroush1
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allenb1121 wrote:

Does your organization have a contract, and a Premier site login with Dell?  If that is the case, let them know, and they will fix your purchasing portal account.  We routinely order R715s and R815s, and have had no problem with the configuration.  Otherwise, I think the configurator works fine on the public-facing site.

Allen B.

Allen Beddingfield

Systems Engineer

The University of Alabama

Time to feel bad: When I was looking for prices Dell was kicking me on a non-US portion of it's site, completely ignore all complaints I had.

Dell so needs a 615 model though.

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Dracolith
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Enthusiast

JAndrews wrote:

If you are using the $560 Essentials kit you should at least be excited about the vCenter appliance that will save you a $800 Windows license.

You don't need a $800 windows license, for your management application.

vCenter server can be installed on Windows XP.

It can also be installed on one of your existing  servers.   Windows software includes virtualization rights

for some number of instances  (depending on the OS edition).

Many Essentials users would not be spending any more in OS licenses for the vCenter instance, in the first place.

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hmtk1976
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Putting vCenter on a server running other applications is something I never do.  And XP as a server?  Ye godz!  A single OS Windows Server license should not be a problem.

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