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?

[JDLangdon]

Bilal wrote:

You may have noticed the core restrictions have been taken away, no applause for that from anyone. Why not?

The reason fwhy there is no applause is because the restriction was benn added to the amoutn of RAM.  There is no way I'm going to be able to convince my bean counters to buy 4+ CPU licenses of VMware vSphere 5 for a server that only has 2-sockets.

When you go buy winter tires for your car that only has 4 wheels, do you buy 6 or 8 tires?

[odonnellj]

Can anyone give an example how this would save any money?  I still see the need to buy CPU licenses. How can you reduce costs when you still have to cover your cpu and each cpu now has a capped vRAM entitlement?

I think it's true there will be lots of shops that have a surplus of vRAM. I would even counter if it's 90% or more why even bring this license in if it's not giong to make you much money. Instead it's alientating your biggest customers which is a very shorysighted thing to do. Is it really worth it to lose goodwill because of this?

But in the end, even with people who won't be affected now, many will take offense that a vendor is changing thier rules after many years and dictating how they should run their infrastructure. It's not VMware business to tell me how much RAM I should allocate a to a server and whether I should 'rightsize' it. Now they think it is, and frankly they will find out in 18-24 months who was right.

[RJC75]

I should clarify. This is not my poll, I came across it in linkedin and don't even know the person running it.

I would hope VMware monitor this thread and then they can run a poll themselves.

[JDLangdon]

If my calculations are correct and they probably aren't, my production environment current is licensed for 56 Enterprise licenses.  Under the new model, as my environment exists today, I should only need 40 Enterprise licenses.

The bad news however is I just received a request for 4 new VM's and each one needs 32GB's of RAM.  Under the 4.1 licensing scheme I'm good to go.  Under the 5.0 licensing scam, I need to purchase 4 new Enterprise licenses just to run these 4 VM's. :smileyangry:

[rjb2]

John,

I think the community would appreciate seeing the underlying customer survey data that VMWare used. Is VMWare willing to fully disclose that here? How many customers did you sample? What kind of hardware were they using? What were the workloads in your sample?

This is important because there are statements made about the majority of customers not being impacted by this change, that ratios are typically 5:1, and that this thread appears to be composed of the exceptional cases.

VMWare is asking us to survey our current environment and post the results, which in itself is a very narrow question, but I think everyone would like to see the details of the survey that was done prior to this announcement to support the claims that are being made.

Thanks

[vmmax99]

The new lic model really upsets me, indeed. It not only raises a lot of trouble with existing customers who will ask why costs jumped up in great leaps. It will worsen as time passes by, since I have absolutely no doubt, that Vmware will not push the vRAM limits in the same rate as prices for RAM will drop.

Has anybody seen a roadmap or official price prediction yet? At least I would like to have a regulation that binds the vRAM limit to a neutral mark. Something like:

vRAM limit = 50% of maximum RAM in midsize HP/IBM/DELL Server available on Jan of current year...(e.g./rough approach)

Cheers

[sergeadam]

They may technically fall under that, but how is a 4.1 vCentre going to enforce that?

[FREDYz]

Well. I am one more that didn't like this new model for the simple reason that for me VMware is trying taking too advantage on us customers and doing that intentionally.

Again some "genius" at their board came up with the idea of doing that to see how much money they would raise with vSphere 5 release but maybe that will have the inverse impact and the shares prices will go down showing them a lesson.

Things were fine with the previous model, it just needed to reduce the number of linceses to make it simple, not to put caps on the amount tof memory.

The CMO said on the webcast they have listened to their customers and changed the licenses model. I doubt customers have asked for something like this.

VMware is defending themselves saying things like this has been not interpreted in the correct way, that it won't impact most of the customers and also that there are new features available that make it worth. Well, excuse me , but we have been paying SnS in order you can come up with these new features not to raise the price or put caps on the license. Also it might not impact customers now but in a near future when people buy servers with more memory as it becomes cheaper.

Really a shame there are such greedy people arouund. They could keep earning a good money with the market share they have without making peolple start loose their trust on what else VMware can come up in the future in terms of licensing.

[chanaka_ek]

Under the new licensing model, unless you change your licensing category, the cost WILL NEVER GO DOWN. The new licensing is designed to make you buy AT LEAST a license per each physical processor you have ( which is the current number of licenses you already own ) and additional licenses when you exceed the pooled vRam allocation on top.

So you will never pay less on the same licensing category but only more. This was designed to increase income from all vmware customers including the existing ones and that is an obvious fact (probably coz they'd thought they'd under valued the licenses in the first place. I see EMC written all over this unfortunately)

Sent from my iPhone

[tonybourke]

Bilal wrote:

One thing that we will also have to keep in mind that if we want a vSphere 6 down the road, the licensing has to change. Maybe the vRAM limits can be a bit more relaxed, I dunno. However its important for VMware to have such a licensing model.

You may have noticed the core restrictions have been taken away, no applause for that from anyone. Why not? A year or so down the road these quad cores will be the thing of the past (they already are in some cases) and we may be looking at 10 plus cores as the norm or even more. Wouldn’t that also mean the VM density will be further increased. The organizations will benefit from this but VMware’s revenue will continue to decline. I think for that reason we must understand that a model such as this is needed.

Besides with the new hardware, we may end up having fewer hosts, however with a vRAM model, we will still need more CPU license if we want to fully leverage the added cores in our new host. No you dont really have to buy more licenses this time, use the spare licenses from the hosts that no longer exist. So for instance if we had 10 host and with the hardware being upgraded we can run the same load on 5, use the remaining licenses from the 5 hosts that have been removed to increase your vRAM pool.

This way you still save money and the company whose hypervisor we all trust the most continues to do what they have been doing. If we dont accept the vRAM reality, we will kill vSphere 6. Perhaps a vRAM upgrade program or a  revised vRAM entitlement might ease of some of the anger.

Follow me @ Cloud-Buddy.com

Why no applause? I think the issue is that we got used the idea of being able to get 128 GByte and 256 GByte servers on our next refresh, giving VMs all the RAM they could want. Now, for the first time, we're going to be stingy with RAM. Adding RAM used to just cost the price of the physical RAM. Now it's a significant license issue.

Another issue that while RAM prices continue to plummet on a steady basis, the VMware licensing isn't likely to reflect this. If the license costs the same a year from now as it did today, RAM certainly will be cheaper, effectively making the license even more expensive when compared to competitors.

[sergeadam]

For years, density was pretty much constant and tied to both CPU and RAM.

Nehalem was a game changer. All of a sudden, you could do much higher density and not tax the CPU, all you needed was more RAM. So fewer ESX licenses were needed. At the same time, memory overcommit was always high on the list of what the other guys could not do. Most of us in the SME space can't afford to do N+1. We run lean and mean and overcommit the servers. I'm willing to trade the hit on performance in the event of a host failure for lower capex up front.

I get that a change was needed. But the logical way, that I'm sure we would have all understood, would have been to switch licensing from socket to pRAM.

I budget on server refresh every 3 years or so. If my environment remains stable, BIG IF, in theory, I could half my number of hosts every 3 years. More realistically, I keep the same amount of hosts, just run more VMs on them. For that, I need more RAM. More RAM = More licenses, my beancounters can understand.

The 'rightsizing' argument doesn't wash. I size my VMs according to the software manufacturer's instructions. It's easier for support. Today I do that confident that the software specs are most likely horses**t, but ESX will take care of it by using just what is needed. A few years ago, my standard template was a 2003 server, 20GB HDD and 1GB RAM. Today the same template is a 2008R2, 40GB HDD and 4GB RAM. Most of the time, those servers use almost no RAM, once in a while, they bubble up and use a lot more. ESX memory management used to let me count on not every server requiring all it's memory at once to size according to spec but not worry wasting RAM.

Using Standard, a 2 CPU server can only use 48GB. If I have a SQL or Exchange server, there goes 32GB. Then 4 more 4GB servers and I'm done. 5:1 ratio. Are you f'ing kidding me???

What we need is pRAM licensing, with realistic pRAM allocation per unit. Me, I'd make it simple. make it a 32GB block, across all editions. Increase the price based on features.

[jondercikgdit]

I currently have 168 IBM 3850s that are 4 socket, 512 GB RAM that are fully licensed under the vSphere 4 sane licensing model.

We just ordered another 60 with 4 sockets and 1 TB of RAM that were fully licensed with licenses we already have based on socket count.  In order for me upgrade to vSphere 5 it will cost the following:

22 licenses for each 4 Core 512 GB server = 3495 * 22 * 168 = 12,917,520

44 licenses for each 4 Core 1TB server = 3495 * 44 * 60 = 9,226,800

Total upgrade cost = 22,144,320

How in the heck am I supposed to justify that HUGE of an expense especially when my SnS contract was supposed to take care of the upgrades but it does not appear to be worth the paper it was printed on.

F this upgrade, Hyper-V here I come.

[JDLangdon]

jondercikgdit wrote:

We just ordered another 60 with 4 sockets and 1 TB of RAM that were fully licensed with licenses we already have based on socket count.

Are you saying you just ordered 60 servers with 1TB of RAM each or 1TB of RAM in total?

[JDLangdon]

A lot of people here are saying that they will be switching to Hyper-V but I have to ask, have you even looked at Hyper-V yet and does it provide all the functionality that you are currently using with vSphere?

From what I've seen and read, which is very little, their vMotion type service is troublesome at best, their vSwitch fuctionality is horrible, their setup is not as straight forward, and their management tools are lacking.

[jondercikgdit]

1 TB each.

[ZeroGravity2011]

JDLangdon wrote:

A lot of people here are saying that they will be switching to Hyper-V but I have to ask, have you even looked at Hyper-V yet and does it provide all the functionality that you are currently using with vSphere?

From what I've seen and read, which is very little, their vMotion type service is troublesome at best, their vSwitch fuctionality is horrible, their setup is not as straight forward, and their management tools are lacking.

This is my impression as well. Using MS MMC to mange anything, I think, is cumbersome. But is it worth paying a premium over an already perceived premium to have those features?

[RogerThomas]

JDLangdon wrote:

A lot of people here are saying that they will be switching to Hyper-V but I have to ask, have you even looked at Hyper-V yet and does it provide all the functionality that you are currently using with vSphere?

From what I've seen and read, which is very little, their vMotion type service is troublesome at best, their vSwitch fuctionality is horrible, their setup is not as straight forward, and their management tools are lacking.

I can only speak for myself, I have always deployed vSphere in a very simple way - direct connected storage, real RAM rather than over commit and no real use of any of the fancy extras that come 'free'. As such I can look at XenServer as a option for much of what I do. Hyper-V could be an option with the next release, but it's not something I will look at this year.

[hellraiser]

Going by the other servers he has, I’d say it’s 60 with 1TB each..... ouch ☺

JD

[JustinL3]

VMware, you're not listening!  Most of the people on this thread understand the new licensing model so stop trying to re-educate us on it and telling us we don't.

We're your heavy VMware users, early adopters and up until now have been huge advocates of VMware.

We know our environments and we design and run them the way we do for a reason and this new model is in no way conducive with today’s hardware; much less tomorrows.

The customers you've based your new model probably don't even know about the licensing change yet.

It's sad no one is talking about the new feature set of the release; because we all know that under new current model, the first time we upgrade one of our 4.x licenses, we have to accept the v5 EULA and commit our entire environment to the new licensing model.

The only thing this model is going to do, is delay the adoption of v5 by your early adopters; and force them to look at other avenues and pave the way for migrations to other products.  Then the customers you've based your new model on will follow.

[Gabriel_Chapman]

you will notice none of them are