VMware Cloud Community
SuperSpike
Contributor
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
Reply
0 Kudos
1,980 Replies
LockAze
Contributor
Contributor

I think microsoft added the hyper-v drivers for linux, anyone think that there will be any difference or have we all given up?

Reply
0 Kudos
ClueShell
Contributor
Contributor

I try to ignore VMware (crap) news for the time being.

a) if the complains are really only the 5% pop, ignoring us works

b) if we're more but below critical $$$ levels, ignoring us hurts a

little

c) if we're just the early adopters or elsewhere described as fanboi,

ignorung us will be the biggest crisis vmware can imagine.

0.02$

Reply
0 Kudos
aroudnev
Contributor
Contributor

Microsoft never ever provided good enough support fro anything Linux related. I woul dnot count on such drivers - even if they do work now on some linuxes. To compare, VMware provides a great support for Linux vmware tools, and some Linux versions has embedded support (OpenSuSe 1 for example) as well.

Reply
0 Kudos
Dracolith
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

William Roush wrote:


I keep on this thread fairly often, I'm actuallying waiting for companies to feel that VMWare 5 has been out long enough to upgrade their licensing, and a whole new wave of anger when vCenter starts telling them they're overallocated when they spin up a handful of new VMs or tweak their allocations.

I think they "tweaked"  their licensing levels sufficiently when they updated vRAM amounts,

that it won't happen (much).    Especially that their largest customers are also most likely to have multiple DR sites that are providing failover

capacity with relatively unused licenses and plenty of vRAM.

But yeah, vRAM limitations kill all of VMWare's features for RAM usage, I can understand if they were using vRAM as RAM allocated by the hypervisor a little more at least.

Maybe, but not right now, really with the updated numbers.  In  12 - 18 months, they might. But I think we have to wait to see if that will bear out.

There is a little bit of a cloud of uncertain about this. Personally,  I expect that within 2 years,  VMware will have made even more changes to their license model.

If that's the case, existing customers won't necessarily be paying more for vRAM, even in 2 years,  it will just depend on

decisions VMware would make in the future.

Reply
0 Kudos
wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Dracolith wrote:

William Roush wrote:


I keep on this thread fairly often, I'm actuallying waiting for companies to feel that VMWare 5 has been out long enough to upgrade their licensing, and a whole new wave of anger when vCenter starts telling them they're overallocated when they spin up a handful of new VMs or tweak their allocations.

I think they "tweaked"  their licensing levels sufficiently when they updated vRAM amounts,

that it won't happen (much).    Especially that their largest customers are also most likely to have multiple DR sites that are providing failover

capacity with relatively unused licenses and plenty of vRAM.

It's sufficient for anyone not buying datacenter sized servers (very high capacity RAM >=128/socket), but soon those will fall into our laps, of course right now they're the ones already paying the most to VMWare and dictate who is getting all the R&D money. Also, anything outside of essentials gets rather pricy for us, and is what keeps our dev system off of licensed boxes.

But yeah, vRAM limitations kill all of VMWare's features for RAM usage, I can understand if they were using vRAM as RAM allocated by the hypervisor a little more at least.

Maybe, but not right now, really with the updated numbers.  In  12 - 18 months, they might. But I think we have to wait to see if that will bear out.

There is a little bit of a cloud of uncertain about this. Personally,  I expect that within 2 years,  VMware will have made even more changes to their license model.

If that's the case, existing customers won't necessarily be paying more for vRAM, even in 2 years,  it will just depend on

decisions VMware would make in the future.

The point is that vRAM makes stuff like overallocation terrible, being as I'm going to be paying more for vRAM than I do for physical RAM, making the whole point of "saving money via consolidation" pointless when you have that kind of consolidation ratios going on. This is a primary reason that dev is on a free 4.1U1 box still: if I overallocate RAM by 1-2x, I'm looking at paying twice as much as my VMs get worse performance.

Plus 12-18 months is way too slow, we're already looking at much larger boxes and higher core counts before the end of this year. You'll have to basically sync your hardware refresh cycle to whenever VMWare gets around to redoing their licensing.

Reply
0 Kudos
aroudnev
Contributor
Contributor

vRAM licensing kills essential licensing which is for now the only way for the smal businesses into this world. Guess what happens next - if someone starts with XEN isntead of VMWare, he definiteky will continue with XEN, too.

For essential, VMWare5 is 256/48 5, in reality 6 - 8 (overcommitment) , less capable vs Vmware 4, so I can't guess any idiot who will purrchase VMWare ESX5 essential license...

Reply
0 Kudos
JAndrews42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Essentials and Essentials Plus are aimed at the small business client with 20-30 VMs

With 196GB of RAM available that's Exchange (16GB), SQL (16GB) and 41(!) 4GB VMs on 6 physical CPUs with as many cores as you'd like. 

That it doesn't require a Windows server license is just a bonus.

I wish the Storage Appliance was cheaper and Linked Mode was allowed, but I sell Essentials Plus every week.

Reply
0 Kudos
wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

aroudnev wrote:

vRAM licensing kills essential licensing which is for now the only way for the smal businesses into this world. Guess what happens next - if someone starts with XEN isntead of VMWare, he definiteky will continue with XEN, too.

For essential, VMWare5 is 256/48 5, in reality 6 - 8 (overcommitment) , less capable vs Vmware 4, so I can't guess any idiot who will purrchase VMWare ESX5 essential license...

Yeah, we get by, but we're much smaller than most companies that would eyeball VMware.

JAndrews wrote:

Essentials and Essentials Plus are aimed at the small business client with 20-30 VMs

With 196GB of RAM available that's Exchange (16GB), SQL (16GB) and 41(!) 4GB VMs on 6 physical CPUs with as many cores as you'd like.

That it doesn't require a Windows server license is just a bonus.

I wish the Storage Appliance was cheaper and Linked Mode was allowed, but I sell Essentials Plus every week.

16GB on SQL? Heh, we're allocating 40GB on one alone ($2,000 in licenses BTW). 😕 I'd argure that this is a design issue with our database, but many VMWare guys agree to just throw memory at it and don't care. We're going to be bound by RAM way before we're bound by anything else, and when we do our licencing costs go through the roof instead of a gentle increase.

On top of that, once I crack out of essentials, those high-capacity hypervisor builds look tasty, which only makes VMWare's licensing look even more terrible.

The storage appliance blows being as that pricing starts to look at non-name brand SANs at that point, and it's missing all features that would be useful at that price point, and considering the high price point: architecture wastes a lot of hardware.

Reply
0 Kudos
JAndrews42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

So you'd only have 35 other 4GB VMs running, which is still above VMware's target client for the product.

I would argue a 40GB SQL requirement elevates you out of the SMB target, but I digress.

VSA wasts so much space, the total cost makes even name-brand arrays look good.

http://sostech.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/vsphere5-vsa-overhead/

33 (3-host) or 25% (2-host) usable and requiring eight 15k spindles or SSD really racks the hardware cost up.

Reply
0 Kudos
wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

JAndrews wrote:

So you'd only have 35 other 4GB VMs running, which is still above VMware's target client for the product.

I would argue a 40GB SQL requirement elevates you out of the SMB target, but I digress.

VSA wasts so much space, the total cost makes even name-brand arrays look good.

http://sostech.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/vsphere5-vsa-overhead/

33 (3-host) or 25% (2-host) usable and requiring eight 15k spindles or SSD really racks the hardware cost up.

Yeah, but stepping 5 feet out of SMB shouldn't cost me multitides more, on top of that, our provision puts us around 120GB used, and we have 15 servers, and that isn't accounting for VMWare's capacity planner sucking and reporting 64MB of memory allocated to various servers, and doesn't account for the ability for us to actually start to properly seperate services (which will eat more RAM for additional OSes). I agree for our dev environment that much memory would go a long way, but with people's opinion of throwing RAM at any performance issue: servers eat RAM like mad now, I already have a list of VMs that are getting provisioned more RAM after the move.

$7200? Eek, I swear I was given a lower number than that, I'm touching cheap name-brand SANs at that point! That isn't even counting having to buy hardware, and on top fo that, hardware waste!

I would argue a 40GB SQL requirement elevates you out of the SMB target, but I digress.

It's pretty much an attempt to keep entire databases in page cache, bleh.

Reply
0 Kudos
JAndrews42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

$7200 list, there is a 40% or so discount to buy it with Essentials/Plus

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.233928100?resid=TmAmg...

Reply
0 Kudos
aroudnev
Contributor
Contributor

THis don't make any sense. We just compare:

VMWare ESXi4 essential - 256 GB per server

VMWare ESXi5 essential 48 GB per server.

No matter what Vmware is sayingm, this wil kill essential or more likely will kill ESXi5. And it already made a happy day for their competitors (every VMWare competitor is happy wuith VMWare 5i because it brings more customers to them, competitors - the advantages of VMWare 5 are minor compared with disadvantages).

Reply
0 Kudos
wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

JAndrews wrote:

$7200 list, there is a 40% or so discount to buy it with Essentials/Plus

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.233928100?resid=TmAmg...

Ah, I may have gotten a bundle quote.

Also becomes a useless piece of software after essentials.

aroudnev wrote:

THis don't make any sense. We just compare:

VMWare ESXi4 essential - 256 GB per server

VMWare ESXi5 essential 48 GB per server.

No matter what Vmware is sayingm, this wil kill essential or more likely will kill ESXi5. And it already made a happy day for their competitors (every VMWare competitor is happy wuith VMWare 5i because it brings more customers to them, competitors - the advantages of VMWare 5 are minor compared with disadvantages).

Yeah, we were looking at 4.1U1 and leveraging cheap RAM to deal with growing pains, now RAM is a bit more expensive, the whole virtual flexibility goes to VMWare's competitors now.

EMC though loves the whole nickel-and-dime you thing, so not really surprised.

Reply
0 Kudos
Dracolith
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

William Roush wrote:

$7200? Eek, I swear I was given a lower number than that, I'm touching cheap name-brand SANs at that point! That isn't even counting having to buy hardware, and on top fo that, hardware waste!

I agree.   While the VSA in principal is a great idea, at "$7200", anyways; if that is right, the  VSA doesn't seem priced to be an attractive sell to SMBs right now.

Not only that... but the VSA is still just software, and you still gotta buy the hardware for it.

"Minimum of 8 disk drives in RAID10."

And significant amounts of resources on the hosts have to be used for the VSA.

At a price of $7200;  SMBs would expect VMware to be shipping out a piece of metal to be dedicated to

the VSA;  a piece of metal with redundant hot-swappable  power supplies, HDDs, controllers/brains,

network, and other components.

Reply
0 Kudos
hmtk1976
Contributor
Contributor

The biggest problem with Essentials is that it has a hard limit.  No possibility for upgrading the vRAM pool at all.

None of our customers will come close to the vRAM limit with the licenses they have in the forseeable future so for us there's no immediate problem.  The biggest problem we face is that VMware does not provide a roadmap for its vRAM allotments.  Will it just increase over time?  Will it increase with every point update?  Or with new releases?  And how much will it increase?  Chances are you'll need to update your environment for licensing which is utterly and completely stupid.  Knowing VMware even bigger chance is that you'll have to pay SnS to do it.

The VSA is just shit.  Stupidly expensive, ridiculous requirements. For the target market a SAS SAN will probably be cheaper.  An HP P2000 with dual SAS controllers can be used by 8 servers and you'll have less wasted disk space.  I might have been interested if it could be used with Fusion IO drives for small View environments.  Two DL360 G6 or G7 with a single Fusion IO drive and 10 Gb dual port NIC would provide extremely fast storage with failover.  But no, we need to buy 16 hard drives to get the capacity of only 4.

Reply
0 Kudos
wdroush1
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Dracolith wrote:

William Roush wrote:

$7200? Eek, I swear I was given a lower number than that, I'm touching cheap name-brand SANs at that point! That isn't even counting having to buy hardware, and on top fo that, hardware waste!

I agree.   While the VSA in principal is a great idea, at "$7200", anyways; if that is right, the  VSA doesn't seem priced to be an attractive sell to SMBs right now.

Not only that... but the VSA is still just software, and you still gotta buy the hardware for it.

"Minimum of 8 disk drives in RAID10."

And significant amounts of resources on the hosts have to be used for the VSA.

At a price of $7200;  SMBs would expect VMware to be shipping out a piece of metal to be dedicated to

the VSA;  a piece of metal with redundant hot-swappable  power supplies, HDDs, controllers/brains,

network, and other components.

On top of the terrible price: fixed clusters are terrible, and defeat the entire purpose of installing a VSA.

Cut the price drastically and finish writing the software.

Reply
0 Kudos
JAndrews42
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Reply
0 Kudos
sedilbur
Contributor
Contributor

To focus back to the subject:

I totally aggree with this survey

http://wuffers.net/2011/07/18/vsphere-5-migration-survey

I don't move to vpshere 5 until I feel me more in trust with Vmware (Emc licensed)

In my opinion:

1) Vmware fuses Enterprise with Enterprise Plus at the cost of Enterprise. (Also increases the vram entittlement and takes off socket/core limitation)

So 1 licenses for one Esxi (whatever the number of socket/core)

2) Vmware give me all the hardware I need to run my bought vmware license.

Why I need to buy the hardware and be over-licensed in the software part limited in the socket PLUS vRAM used ? Emc wants me to buy 2 times my licenses ?

3) Go back to the old licensing modele that take care only in my hardware specification.

(More efficient because you bough your hardware and the licenses based on socket number/core. Why vmware claims that "Vmware ballooning" is the best part of vmware Infrastructure and then, customers need be pay back for this functionnality now ?)

I WILL NOT move to vsphere 5 until the license modeling becomes more interresting for me.

Reply
0 Kudos
vintera
Contributor
Contributor

Besten Dank für Ihre Nachricht.

Ich bin bis am Mi 26.10.2011 abwesend. Emails werden aus diesem Grund erst verzögert beantwortet. Bei dringlichen Anliegen bitte ich Sie meinen Stellvertreter (Fabian Dobler, fabian DOT dobler AT travel DOT ch) oder meinen Vorgesetzten (Pascal Scandola, pascal DOT scandola AT travel DOT ch) zu kontaktieren.

Herzlichen Dank für Ihr Verständnis

Freundliche Grüsse / with best regards / cordialement

Benjamin Schaja

System Engineer

travelwindow AG

Steinentischstr. 5

8027 Zürich

Switzerland

Reply
0 Kudos
AaronKratzmann
Contributor
Contributor

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

Regards, Aaron

Reply
0 Kudos