@mlodge - mentioned cloud rent license vs the new VSPP license - someone should inform all that if the cost goes up for the cloud ISP then the customer cost will go up too.... not sure what I’m missing there!
The gentlemen in this article seems lost, they may not back down but they will lose business! It’s happening right now.
http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/07/understanding-the-vsphere-5-vram-licensing-model.html
What happen to customers are right. the old way of doing business has been lost and bullying has started on a new level! VMWare has preached the "sky is the limit" well i guess not, the limit is your pocket's deepness and their board table.
The model is somewhat stellar if you are on the other end and making the cash. What; is VMware about to not hit there Wall Street numbers?
Look i pay for something doesn't give you the right to control how i use it, if i want to over subscribe my environment then so be it! It’s the risk that I decide if I can take.
Reality is there are other hypervisors that do a good job; most can do the job without VMware. ISP - cloud can't. Others will provide most of the performance as VMware but the cost will come back on the training and learning and migration end.
this will be a big war with people vs big box company....
Some or most of the features of 4.x will do for most and they won't upgrade, they will start to look at other hypervisor before their support runs out. This has happen to Microsoft as well - Linux desktop/apple... Reality is you will have mix/match environments and tool sets with less people and lost time! Less face it VMware made things somewhat standardized and simpler to maintain.
I agree that most do not do capacity planning and just throw virtual resources at problems but it doesn't make it right and 2 wrongs don't make right!
We were forced by hardware limits on a single server, which was a reason for exploring virtual but now it may be costly to think like this or turn back!?!?!?
I would like to see VMware post their number of sales from Jan to June and then July to Dec… just to see how well things look at the end.
Well for now i will begin to sharpen my other hypervisor skills! I'm sure i will need them as well as my VMware......ones
Regardless of how VMware got to vRAM, the allocated amounts for the various licenses were shortsighted. For customers to get the most out of their new virtualization-optimized high-core-count processors for the past year or more they have had to deploy upwards of 4-6 guests per core. In an Enterprise where your average guest uses 2-4GB of RAM a 12 core system today at a conservative minimum would eat up 2 Enterprise Plus licenses. That's today. I ran my calculations, and my current allocations are just barely under what I have licensed, leaving me no room to grow on my existing hardware without buying more. I have a system that I sized and licensed for 5 years of growth last year, and in a year VMware capped my growth.
There's no misconception about having to buy what the hardware supports as Mr Balkansky puts it. The reality of enterprise deployments are that you deploy to the max utilization of your hardware with room for HA, and you purchase licensing that is in line with what you plan to deploy. Therefore yes, if you want to use your hardware to its full potential (a founding justification for virtualization) then you must license to the full potential of your hardware. There's no getting around that by saying that you only need to license what you allocate.
Furthermore, telling customers who bought unlimited hardware licenses under Enterprise Plus 4.x that their supported upgrade path now only gives them a maximum that is at the very low end of what today's hardware is capable is sheer lunacy. Dual socket hardware today is capable of upwards of 512GB of RAM or more. In a large scale cluster deployment you should be getting 70% or more out of your hardware and so would allocate accordingly. The only time an Enterprise Plus vRAM license makes sense today is if that 2 cpu host has less than 128GB of physical RAM. That's a middle of the road deployment, not an Enterprise Plus deployment. At 96GB allocated and in use, my dual socket Intel westmere processor machines aren't even breaking a sweat. I run them today at close to 150GB allocated. And again, that's today. I planned for this system to meet my growth needs for 3 to 5 years.
The only reason I'll sneak by at 93% of my vRAM when I upgrade is because I have a few development small clusters that have to reserve more for HA. The pooling "feature" of this licensing model is my only savior. If I ever want to upgrade the physical RAM on them to match the need of my organization, then I will have to buy more Enterprise plus licenses. VMware has not separated the physical server capabilities from the licensing as they propose because the very nature of virtualization, the very reason we started down the path to VMware, was to use our hardware to its fullest. The very nature of IT is to meet the demand of our customers' growth. VMware has taken away years of growth potential from my company that we previously budgetted and bought VMware licenses to provide, and they level set us at todays low end numbers. People here and in other forums have griped about the impact on SMBs, but I think the impact will be felt even more at large entities that really tax bigger hardware. The cap on Enterprise Plus is too low. Unless they double it I'm going elsewhere. I already have to purchase Windows Datacenter licenses to support installing many windows VMs per host, so a move to Hyper-V is a $0 proposition. I'll learn to live without a few VMware features for that price.