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?

[JAndrews42]

vRAM entitlement does not include host or guest overhead and has no direct tie to physical RAM.

[pkuzma82]

I still think licensing vram is a big change and will stifle hardware innovation. When I upgrade to windows 7 and allocate more memory to each vm I will ultimately have to purchase more enterprise licenses. It is feasible that the cpu load will not be any more with win7 over xp, but the memory will be. We can already jam 2, 4 and even blade cpus, but that was never the bottleneck with esx. The bottleneck was waiting for innovation to happen and provide higher density memory modules. Albeit the hardware utilization is amazing with vmware, but I think that vmware should allot more than 64gb per cpu simply to showcase their amazing achievements in hardware utilization. This limit from an outsiders perspective would lead you to believe that is all esx can offer per cpu. With my limited experience I know each cpu can handle at least twice that. I know you can buy more licenses, but don't they want their product to look the best and these limits really lead me to believe that they think that's all it can handle.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone

[rbtwindude]

The reality is - people are hitting the memory ceiling an not a CPU ceiling! I use Cisco UCS and it's the same way - need more memory not CPU!

Eye in the sky; If you want a friend, be a trusted friend first!

Please excuse any typos. Sent from my iPhone

[JAndrews42]

>When I upgrade to windows 7 and allocate more memory to each vm I will ultimately have to purchase more enterprise licenses

Again, with View Bundle or the vSphere Desktop license you do not have a vRAM limitation so that is not an issue for XP/7 in most environments.

[hmtk1976]

The problem in View environments is that some people have been using "regular" licenses (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus) that had a reasonable RAM limit and now all of a sudden they're faced with very tight limits.  For example one of our customers has 8 Enterprise licenses for 2 clusters of 2 dual socket machines (one cluster for servers, the other for desktops).  This means that we can assign 256 GB of RAM to desktops because we're using regular Enterprise licenses.  Had we know that licensing in vSphere 5 would change this drastically we would NOT have paid SnS on 4 CPU's worth of licenses and gone with the View Premier Bundle back then (well, I proposed this to my boss anyway but that's another story).  This wouldn't be a huge problem if we could upgrade our View Add-ons and a couple sockets worth of Enterprise to the View Premier bundle but VMware says NO.

The new licensing as a whole will probably nog pose huge problems to the majority of users right now.  It will become a problem in the near future though and already is a problem for those who have very high densities of VM's.  Essentials (Plus) is crippled because there's a hard limit on vRAM now.  There's not even the possibility of purchasing more vRAM.  In vSphere 4.1 Essentials Plus had become a very interesting product with the addition of vMotion and HA but now it has become less interesting again.

All in all the new licensing may or may not be a problem to you, it's something that has to be decided case by case.  I know I won't be an exclusively VMware person though.

[aroudnev]

I still know that this change PROHIBITS Vmware 5 from all our environments. No way we cacn go with it; we will stay on 4 and then switch to another vendor if we can;t get out of new licensing model.

[ictvitrual]

Someone tried RHEV (RedHat Enterprise Virtualization)?

It's worth to take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyyPpfnRMRo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Good luck

[JohnnyLeung]

Do you guys know how manay vRam can I entitled for my situtaion?

3x physical server with 96GB RAM each

1 set of vsphere 5.0 essential plus licence for 3 hosts

Many thanks.

[Rumple]

Essentials is 192GB of RAM entitlement so you can pull some of that RAM out..or upgrade…

VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Kit for 3 hosts (Max 2 processors per host) and 192 GB vRAM entitlement + Subscription for 1 year

[pkuzma82]

That would mean 192 total for three hosts.. right?

[J1mbo]

"upgrade" in that context presumably meaning "research competitor products" - like the rest of us.

[Rumple]

Correct..its a pool of 192GB of RAM across the 3 hosts (64gb/server)

[RVP201110141]

I'll be sticking with vSphere 4.1 until VMware comes back down to earth. If I get to a point where I must upgrade and VMware has not changed its licensing model back to something similar to 4.1, I'll definitely be jumping ship. Too bad since I've been implementing ESX since the 2.5 days and have been a huge advocate for them. There's just no way to justify the cost for the 5.0 licensing model... Especially for SMBs using the 4.1 Essentials Plus kit.

[jfolkman]

I am out of the office today. If you need immediate assistance please call the office at 713-739-7007.

Thanks,

Jason Folkman

IT Manager

Crady, Jewett & McCulley LLP

[tomaddox]

As is so often the case, Dilbert makes everything clear:

http://www.dilbert.com/2012-02-19/

[pkuzma82]

Hah that is perfect. It is definitely an amazing product, but it was already the most expensive option.. and now it's even more. I was only looking at enterprise, but the essentials plus users are really getting screwed given their previous price point and hardware utilization compared to v5. Without the essentials plus option I was originally using I could have never transitioned to standard and now enterprise. I used essentials plus to show immediate roi which opened the door to move forward. I can see the increased cost for enterprise, but essentials plus gets company's hooked. And really what features in v5 for essentials plus really warrant the low vram limit?

Sent from my Verizon Wireless Phone

[RVP201110141]

That is perfect! Apparently some Dilbert like management has slipped into what used to be an extraordinarily well run corporation (VMware). Maybe it's the EMC influence... Never did like their approach to selling SANs (much prefer HP on the smaller end because of it).

[RVP201110141]

Couldn't agree more! vSphere 5.0 is simply too expensive/restrictive for a small/medium business now. And the whole RAM limitation (for any size business) is just ridiculous.

[cmacmillan]

And why would you pull memory out of any of these machines?

Let's assume your Essentials Plus needs required 192GB of Entitled VMs - that will require hosts with an aggregate of 240GB of RAM if you want to avoid violating best practices (host memory utilization less than 80%).  Now, that fits your 288GB cluster (96GBx3) pretty well.

Again, in the fail-over case, when your 192GB of workload HA's to a pair of hosts, you're running 192GB of workload in 192GB of RAM (this means TPS and compression better be your friend) and likely memory contention (i.e. much greater than 80% utilization). OK, again, you're borderline with three hosts in this situation, but workloads are still running.

Let's look at the vMotion value equation in the three host scenario. Memory contention and resource over utilization may not be viable in an on-line host update scenario (i.e. ESXi upgrade, CPU upgrade, etc.) so you've got to size your hosts to contend with the load or under subscribe (i.e. apportion resources for the 0 resource contention case during failure/upgrade.) In such case, you're looking at either 154GB of useful load across two hosts (and hence all three hosts), or all three hosts with 128GB of RAM each to get your 192GB useful workload (to survive 1-of-3 host failure without memory contention.)

OK, so pulling out memory would be a bad idea for most SMB mission critical clusters. In fact, you need more memory (128GB/host), not less, to support most workloads properly (unless you don't use vMotion for "daytime" maintenance.)

I know the hyperbole is fun, but in this case it's misleading...

[GeelongRob]

Your numbers are correct, but not necessarily the "pull some of the RAM out"

Essentials Plus allows for 3 hosts, max 2 processors per host = 6 processors, whether you have that many or not.

The vRAM entitlement is 32GB per processor = 192GB.

But, that is vRAM -  NOT the physical RAM in the hosts.

Assuming you want some physical RAM "spare" overhead (maybe the recommended 80% useage, maybe not), that means the total vRAM of your VMs must be <= 192GB.

The vSphere manager, Licensing, 'reporting' tab will tell you where you're at now.