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?

[hmtk1976]

Then a lot of people would have quickly purchased licenses and/or taken 3 years of SnS before the price hike.   Prices do increase though and the new features are mostly limited to Enterprise Plus.  Little new filters downto Enterprise or Standard.

[JAndrews42]

Two cakes:

Charging for pCPU and vRAM.

“pay for consumption”  - but charging for allocation, not usage

“pay for consumption”  - but you only have to pay for the first 10% - the rest is free.

[wdroush1]

taz722 wrote:

Trying to play the devil's advocate here. Why are users complaining since the license prices per se have not been changed. What if there was not no vRAM tax and the prices had been raised instead ?

I also have a brief survey put together to gather all that has been discussed here in the past couple of weeks. Please  provide your inputs. Shouldn't take more than a minute to complete. I will post the results here as soon as I get reasonable number of responses.

  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FLMGGQ2

They're already the most expensive hypervisor by far (bar mainframe hypervisors), their competition is catching up and even 4.x licensing was still the worst available too. On top of that, record profits, yadda yadda.

No amount of screwing us would make me happy, what would make me happy is more competative pricing so we can purchase a higher volume of this stuff.

[taz722]

Classification: For internal use only

To your point of them being the most expensive hypervisor, you get what you pay for. Which hypervisor comes even close to vSphere today in terms of features, scalability ? None.

[wdroush1]

taz722 wrote:

Classification: For internal use only

To your point of them being the most expensive hypervisor, you get what you pay for. Which hypervisor comes even close to vSphere today in terms of features, scalability ? None.

Yeah, and no one comes close to Windows AD, they should triple their price too. :smileyplain:

And to be honest, a lot of hypervisors are coming into the SMB (New versions of Hyper-V and XenServer meet most if not all needs for SMBs, a lot of enterprise features are fluff to us that we pay for but get very little use out of) market in terms of features we need, so yeah it's kinda a big deal when your marketshare is going to be eaten from the ground up (and their development has been much more rapid, not that there is much more VMWare can pull out of it's hat that will be of any huge benefit for the most part that isn't just number-competing with their competitors).

To act like they're untouchable is laughable, the argument could be made that we should all go buy virtalization mainframes because they're the best, and screw pricing, all that matters are feature sets, yeah?

I'm able to pay much more in v5, and get nothing new for the majority of SMBs (that don't require seperate licensing anyway), the idea of "you get what you pay for" is laughable (I bet you're buying Sun/Oracle SANs right? They cost a ton, must be the best, right?). I pay for what an ex-Microsoft exec in charge of VMWare tells me to.

[wdroush1]

hmtk1976 wrote:

Then a lot of people would have quickly purchased licenses and/or taken 3 years of SnS before the price hike.   Prices do increase though and the new features are mostly limited to Enterprise Plus.  Little new filters downto Enterprise or Standard.

Um, that was an option for v5 too, and a plan that we considered.

[taz722]

Classification: For internal use only

Thanks. Please respond to the survey. It will help us understand how the community feels collectively.

[mendrigueira]

just received the response of one's sitting on his high horse that customers that continually renew SnS aided to put very up…

Hello.

Thank you for contacting VMware’s Purchasing Programs (covering VPP and TPP). We received an inquiry from you regarding: licensing view HA/View.

You've reached the email that supports VMware Purchasing Programs.

Please send our inquiry to pricing@vmware.com

Regards,

VMware Purchasing Programs Team

-----Original Message-----

Subject: licensing view HA/View

Description:

we have 4 servers that hosts esxi enterprise managed by one vcenter.

we have getting feedback on your changes of licensing and even the recent ones don't address the problem of development and test vm's that we don't care to be on high avaibility or with much advanced features that we disable to not interfere with production environment and even so vmware don't discriminate on cost of licensing such vm's from the ones of production that need vmotion/ha/io improvements. That compromises the linear transport of quality offered by different resource pools or vm's configured to not do HA or Vmotion and we continue to pay vmtax for those vms at enterprise level. From our higher level of company management the impression is that you are blind to this concerns and this other: - We was considering the use of vmware view on our 4 licensed servers on other resource pool and apparently it will pay vmtax unless we buy dedicated servers for the effect. Also here there should be an exclusion for vms managed by view.

regards,

-------------------------------

{...}

I beg your pardon?...i’ll say old chap keep on with the good work.

Just to prove that this licensing was intentionally put with bad faith with the previous written damage control of doubling the already very low tax to please the whining peasants!

[tomaddox]

taz722 wrote:

Trying to play the devil's advocate here. Why are users complaining since the license prices per se have not been changed. What if there was not no vRAM tax and the prices had been raised instead ?

I also have a brief survey put together to gather all that has been discussed here in the past couple of weeks. Please  provide your inputs. Shouldn't take more than a minute to complete. I will post the results here as soon as I get reasonable number of responses.

  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FLMGGQ2

No, you're a shill for VMware, and that survey is laughable. It's both hopelessly biased towards VMware and useless in terms of gathering actual statistical data.

[wdroush1]

tomaddox wrote:

taz722 wrote:

Trying to play the devil's advocate here. Why are users complaining since the license prices per se have not been changed. What if there was not no vRAM tax and the prices had been raised instead ?

I also have a brief survey put together to gather all that has been discussed here in the past couple of weeks. Please  provide your inputs. Shouldn't take more than a minute to complete. I will post the results here as soon as I get reasonable number of responses.

  http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FLMGGQ2

No, you're a shill for VMware, and that survey is laughable. It's both hopelessly biased towards VMware and useless in terms of gathering actual statistical data.

Not to mention terribly constructed for data crunching and pretty poor questions and very huge lack of insight into the issues involved. I'd actually spend the 30 minutes to get a decent number-crunching survey page together and actually gather useful data to analyze. To be honest most surveys over the issue are like this though, usually hastily put together with very little forethought about how any of those numbers are going to help you reach any conclusions, or that your data points will be completely outside of the realm of where a lot of the complaining is coming from.

Plus this will be about the eleventy billionth survey that the public gets asked to fill out, and one of two things result:

1) The results are published and are terrible.

2) The results are never published.

Heh. :smileyplain:

[taz722]

I will publish the results tomorrow. I have only 10 responses so far. There is a reason why the survey is biased towards VMW. As I mentioned before I am playing the devil’s advcate here and trying to see how many people actually take their money somewhere else. Because, in spite of all that we have said here, the fact remains that all other companies are still playing catch up to VMW. So , your anger does nothing till VMW actually sees business shifting to rivals and that ‘s what I am trying to gauge. Would this really hurt VMW’s pocket ?

[ClueShell]

32 GB vRAM for standard ought to be enough.

ho ho ho

we didn't buy the Adv-Acc-Kit (6cpu) and corresponding 3P-SSS contract.

we have postponed (read 50% chance canceled) our VDI plans and try to

sit out the GA of vSphere 5 to enjoy the uproar that will come from the

customers that did not yet care about this vRAM change.

There will be a 2nd change to licensing in the next 3-6 months.

[J1mbo]

taz722 wrote:

Trying to play the devil's advocate here. Why are users complaining since the license prices per se have not been changed. What if there was not no vRAM tax and the prices had been raised instead ?

Check out the price of Essentials Plus under v4.1 and under v5 - the above is simply incorrect.

Someone from vmware sales called me this morning, wondering when I'd be upgrading to 5.  The standard company line followed about how it wouldn't affect almost any users.  No comment on Moore's law or SnS rights.

[wdroush1]

taz722 wrote:

I will publish the results tomorrow. I have only 10 responses so far.

A perfectly well sized set for coming to any conclusion.

:smileyplain:

[wdroush1]

ClueShell wrote:

32 GB vRAM for standard ought to be enough.

ho ho ho

we didn't buy the Adv-Acc-Kit (6cpu) and corresponding 3P-SSS contract.

we have postponed (read 50% chance canceled) our VDI plans and try to

sit out the GA of vSphere 5 to enjoy the uproar that will come from the

customers that did not yet care about this vRAM change.

There will be a 2nd change to licensing in the next 3-6 months.

Yeah, as I understand it the vRAM licensing only doesn't apply under VDI if you have another whole infrastructure to dedicate to it, which a lot of small businesses can't do (or at least justify).

[bcpss21202]

Not so taz722,

VMware has already made the same mistake that another software company made quite some time ago. This other software company thought that they held the keys to the kingdom and took an elitist attitude toward their consumers. That was until a second software company took the opposite approach and started a revolution in PC's and software. That stiff necked company took a huge loss in the market and it took that company many decades to make up the losses. But unfortunately that company has not truly learned from their mistakes. Subsequently they have made the same error in the tablet market and once again they will take a bath in the pool of tears that will result in the setback they will experience.

VMware will suffer the same fate though they are now the king of the hill in virtualization software. Because much like that software company I mentioned earlier (and another narrow minded software vendor whose name shall remain unspoken whose same mistakes increased VMware’s profit margin) VMware has assumed too much. As we speak there are at least two other major players in the virtualization arena who are sneaking up on VMware so fast that it's laughable. Before VMware can correct their errors in judgment they will find themselves left in the dust and trying to catch up by courting their consumer base with all types of rewards to get them back. But by that time it will be too late and the shareholders will be demanding someone’s head on a pike, mark my words.

[ClueShell]

We're talking about 25-40 desktops and we prefer upgrading the two

existing server-load boxes and buy a third and do vdi on them.

Buying two more servers just for the load-balance/high-av stuff and a

third new box for a dedicated vCenter is a waste of money, electricity,

time, and human resources to begin with.

VMware just made it easy for me, because with this "new facts" I don't

even need to think about going to management asking for funds. It's just

the short answer "Stay on current but soon old software with 2nd best

patches and QA from vendor or pay up triple to achieve our goals."

Assuming the patches for v5 will go throu more QA testing than the v4

series (most companies have this).

[tomaddox]

William Roush wrote:

taz722 wrote:

I will publish the results tomorrow. I have only 10 responses so far.

A perfectly well sized set for coming to any conclusion.

:smileyplain:

I suspect it's about the same as what VMware used for the initial vTax allocation.

[Dracolith]

tomaddox wrote:

I will publish the results tomorrow. I have only 10 responses so far.

I suspect it's about the same as what VMware used for the initial vTax allocation.

The problem with online surveys is selection bias....

e.g. People from oganizations who thought nothing was wrong and are perfectly happy with vTax  (if there are any)

or haven't found out about it yet.....  are potentially less likely to find/answer the survey.

In that case, the utility of the survey would be reduced.

However,  I am quite in favor of someone doing any study using rigorous methods

that eliminate such biases in  either direction.

Then the results wouldn't really be subject to dispute by VMware;

if they are inline with what posts in the thread say.

eg Either the methods used were erroneous, or the survey results would be most certainly valid

[JAndrews42]

ClueShell wrote:

We're talking about 25-40 desktops and we prefer upgrading the two

existing server-load boxes and buy a third and do vdi on them.

Buying two more servers just for the load-balance/high-av stuff and a

third new box for a dedicated vCenter is a waste of money, electricity,

time, and human resources to begin with.

VMware just made it easy for me, because with this "new facts" I don't

even need to think about going to management asking for funds. It's just

the short answer "Stay on current but soon old software with 2nd best

patches and QA from vendor or pay up triple to achieve our goals."

Assuming the patches for v5 will go throu more QA testing than the v4

series (most companies have this).

Please post screen shots of your current infrastructure, specifically # of VMs and configured RAM.

I have yet to see proof of someone being required to pay "triple" their current cost (tho of course that itself shouldn't be hard - your current cost is just the SnS contract)

Why would you need to buy "two more" plus "a third" servers?