esxi 5 free hypervisor?

[gallagauge]

I saw that there is a new version of esxi (version 5).

Will there be a version 5 of the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor or is this product going to stay at version 4.1?

[Mauro Bonder]

Version 4.1 will remain in the market for some time, but it is recommended to upgrade version. The version of ESXi, continues to have the trial version, and licensed.

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers. 

Mauro Bonder - Moderator

[gallagauge]

So just to be clear, is it safe to say that after esxi 4.1 there will no longer be a free version of vmware hypervisor?

[Mauro Bonder]

Check out the newly updated "Licensing, Pricing and Packaging" White Paper.

ESX(I) free will keep available.

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers. 

Mauro Bonder - Moderator

[nr122]

where in the new licensing, pricing, and packaging does it mention the free version of vSphere Hypervisor?

[DSTAVERT]

Hypervisor will still be available as a free product going forward

[nr122]

Thank you

[gallagauge]

So will there be a version 5 of vSphere Hypervisor or is this product now completely separate from the versioning of ESXi?

[Mauro Bonder]

Discussion moved from VMware vSphere Hypervisor to VMware ESXi 5

[Josh26]

Rememeber that "ESXi 4.1 free" or "ESXi 4.1 Hypervisor" is just "ESXi 4.1 without a purchase license". There should be no difference with this in version 5 - it doesn't make sense to talk about it as having different versions.

[rickardnobel]

Josh26 wrote:

Rememeber that "ESXi 4.1 free" or "ESXi 4.1 Hypervisor" is just "ESXi 4.1 without a purchase license". There should be no difference with this in version 5 - it doesn't make sense to talk about it as having different versions.

I think it is good to talk about it as different versions since it has created a lot of confusion about whether ESXi is free or not. It is more clear with different product names in my opinion.

Besides, there are some technical differences, you can not run writable remote CLI against the Free Hypervisor version for example.

[Leathal]

Sorry 4.1 will be only available for a while, but people can upgrade to 5... 4.1 doesn't support drives largers than 2TB, so how do you suppose people who want to take advantage of the 2TB+ system go with 4.1 and upgrade to 5 later without having to rebuild their systems?

Thanks

Andrew

[tschuld]

Well VMWare just shot themselves in their foot here.  I've got about a dozen 1 CPU/12G esxi 4.1 (free edition) development boxes here that I was thinking about upgrading to the standard edition if esxi 5 worked well on them.  Sounds like I'm just going to buy Hyper-V for them instead and call it done.

[tschuld]

Thought just occured to me...

If the solution for my Ent+ boxes (DL580's running 64G+ per socket) is to simply purchase another 1 CPU/48G sku and not assign the "5th, 6th, etc" socket, wouldn't that work for the free edition (Assign 2 free licenses to that single CPU test box) to increase the vram pool to 16G?  Which in turns begs the question why doesn't vmware issue a single 4 CPU/32G vRAM pool license for the free editions and be done with it?

[rcstevensonaz]

In regard to tschuld's comment on his configuration of 1CPU and 12Gb, this configuration matches any of the basic consumer LGA 1366 motherboards that is popluated with memory as follows:

4Gb stick in one DIMM bank

2Gb stick in both DIMM banks

If a person is using an LGA 1366-based motherboard (e.g. Core i7), this is about as basic as you can get.  The only lower option is 2Gb sticks in a single DIMM bank (6Gb).  Seems like VMware has not factored in tri-channel boards into their 8Gb limit.

[peetz]

You can already register for the download of the new version 5 of the Free VMware vSphere Hypervisor (the new name for ESXi), and you will get informed as soon as the product is released and available for download:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/overview.html

Andreas

- VMware Front Experience Blog

[Jackobli]

I did look on the mentioned site, but couldn't find any registration.

The link for the download of free Esx(i) still leads to 4.1. But hey, it's quite new. Who knows, perhaps they make it available the next some days or I have to complain in Las Vegas at VMworld ;-)

[RogerThomas]

It exists as VMware vSphere Hypervisor,

It's rather key limitations are

1) You can not make changes to an environment with anything other than the GUI - so no CLI.

2) VMware vSphere Hypervisor includes a VRAM entitlement of 8GB

Item 2 is a bit of a joke, how many people use ESXi with only 8GByte of RAM!

[rickardnobel]

RogerThomas wrote:

2) VMware vSphere Hypervisor includes a VRAM entitlement of 8GB

Thats too bad. I guess this will make the vSphere Hypervisor useless in almost all cases and will force all really small VMware users to Hyper-V.

[RogerThomas]

I expect to start looking at XENServer as there is no need to purchase MS licences and they have a good blend of features across their releases, but as a medium term solution as my current 4.1 licences will keep me going for a good year or so.

The new limit seems just a bit daft as it means I have more memory allocated to my VMWARE Workstation environment than I will be allowed to allocate to a 'VMware vSphere Hypervisor' system!

[rickardnobel]

RogerThomas wrote:

The new limit seems just a bit daft as it means I have more memory allocated to my VMWARE Workstation environment than I will be allowed to allocate to a 'VMware vSphere Hypervisor' system!

I was thinking of that too. I am having 16 GB of RAM in this PC running Windows 7 and VMware Workstation, really strange that it should scale better than the free Hypervisor.

I wonder what the reason for this could be. When Microsoft has the free Hyper-V version based on Server Core available for small business companies, it is somewhat unlogical for VMware to make the VMware product unavailable.

[DSTAVERT]

VMware 4.1 should be available for many years. Support should last for 7 years from initial release of the product although whether the free version is available that long is unknown.

[LucasAlbers]

http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/lifecycle/enterprise-infrastructure/index.html

• General Support – 5 years from general availability of a Major Release
  Support includes new hardware support, guest OS updates, bug and  security fixes, and technical helpdesk services. VMware will update the    Hardware Compatibility Guide with new hardware platforms that have been tested and certified.  Details are described in the table below.
• Technical Guidance – 2 years following General Support
  Primary assistance is available through the    self help page.  Customers can also open a support request online to receive support and  workarounds for low-severity issues on supported configurations only.  (Telephone support is not provided.) There will be no new hardware  support, guest OS updates, security patches or bug fixes. The phase is  intended for usage by customers operating in stable environments with  systems that are operating under reasonably stable loads.

*       General Support for selected new hardware technology (such as servers,  processors, chipsets, and add-in cards) is based on VMware’s  discretion, OEM partner input, and customer input. An 18-month hardware  support window is started when a major or minor vSphere release is  generally available. New hardware technology launched within the  18-month window will be supported in a compatible mode by an update to a  vSphere major/minor release; hardware technology launched after the  18-month window will normally not be supported by that release.

So:

VMware ESXi 4	General       Availability       (YYYY/MM/DD)	End of Support       (YYYY/MM/DD)	End of Technical Guidance       (YYYY/MM/DD)
ESXi Version 4	2009/05/21	2014/05/21	2016/05/21

GA + 18 months for guaranteed hardware support.

At some point the hardware vendors will not put much effort to support, ergo Dell Openmanage for example.

[vlho]

8GB vRAM max for freeware ESXi?

I'm shocked...

Little question: 8GB vRAM max. per CPU or per physical server?

[RogerThomas]

vlho wrote:

8GB vRAM max for freeware ESXi?

I'm shocked...

Little question: 8GB vRAM max. per CPU or per physical server?

That will be 8GB per physical server, but there does not seem to be a limit on the number of CPUs :smileyconfused:

[Jackobli]

RogerThomas wrote:

vlho wrote:

8GB vRAM max for freeware ESXi?

I'm shocked...

Little question: 8GB vRAM max. per CPU or per physical server?

That will be 8GB per physical server, but there does not seem to be a limit on the number of CPUs :smileyconfused:

No, definitively it is 8 GByte per virtual machine, not per ESXi host.

It has a socket/core limitation, but I was unable to find the number quickly. I am running a two socket, four core each machine.

[RogerThomas]

Urs wrote:

RogerThomas wrote:

vlho wrote:

8GB vRAM max for freeware ESXi?

I'm shocked...

Little question: 8GB vRAM max. per CPU or per physical server?

That will be 8GB per physical server, but there does not seem to be a limit on the number of CPUs :smileyconfused:

No, definitively it is 8 GByte per virtual machine, not per ESXi host.

It has a socket/core limitation, but I was unable to find the number quickly. I am running a two socket, four core each machine.

Are you thinking of 4.1 rather than the new 5.0 release?

No that is 8Gbytes of vRAM as stated at the end of this page

   http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

vRAM is the entitlement of pooled virtual memory used across all active virtual machines on the system (or that is how it is at least defined on the other versions of ESX 5.0).

[rickardnobel]

One of the two tabs next to each other is wrong then. The FAQ tabs says 8 GB vRAM total and the Compare tab claims 1 TB/vm. Which is correct?

[RogerThomas]

Rickard wrote:

One of the two tabs next to each other is wrong then. The FAQ tabs says 8 GB vRAM total and the Compare tab claims 1 TB/vm. Which is correct?

The 1TB/vm is the maximum amount that the VSphere 'engine' can now manage if you have the correct licensing in place. While the 8GB is the limit set within the licensing terms of the free edition of the hypervisor. The 8GB limit may not be enforced but if you go beyond it you break the T&Cs.

[rickardnobel]

RogerThomas wrote:

The 1TB/vm is the maximum amount that the VSphere 'engine' can now manage if you have the correct licensing in place. While the 8GB is the limit set within the licensing terms of the free edition of the hypervisor.

But the chart is to compare the free vSphere Hypervisor against Microsoft and Citrix. Since there is no license you could not have a "correct licensing"? :smileyhappy:

If the 8 GB vRAM is correct than the claim on the compare tab is a lie. If we look at the competitors in the chart we see that Hyper-V "only" has 64 GB/vm and Citrix 32 GB/vm.

[Walfordr]

Hopefully there is a typo on that FAQ page like there were on the VSA presentation - support for RAID5.

I hope that the listed entitlement is per CPU. 8GB per CPU would not be that bad.

All the other vRAM entitlement that I see listed are per CPU.

Case in point:

"Each vSphere Enterprise Edition license entitles to 32GB of vRAM. 4 licenses of vSphere Enterprise Edition provide a vRAM pool of 128GB (4 * 32 GB)"

vSphere 4.1and prior Per CPU with Core and Physical Memory Limits			vSphere 5.0 andlater Per CPU with Pooled vRAM Entitlements
Licensing Unit	CPU	=		CPU
SnS Unit	CPU	=		CPU
Core per proc	Restrictionsby vSphereeditions •6 cores for Standardand Enterprise, Ess, Ess+ •12 core forAdvanced and Ent. Plus	<		Unlimited
PhysicalRAM capacity per host	Restrictionsby vSphere edition •256GB for Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. Ess, Ess+ •Unlimited for Enterprise Plus	<		Unlimited
vRAM entitlement per proc	Not applicable	≠		Entitlementby vSphere edition •24GB vRAM forEssentialsKit •24GB vRAM forEssentialsPlus Kit •24GB vRAM for Standard •32GBvRAM for Enterprise •48GB vRAM for Enterprise Plus

[rickardnobel]

Robert Walford wrote:

I hope that the listed entitlement is per CPU. 8GB per CPU would not be that bad.

Well it would still be very low. The kind of environment that would run vSphere Hypervisor would be very small customers and not likely multiple CPU sockets in these hosts.

If a CPU now could host 8 to 12 cores then it would be quite a waste to install several physical processors but still only use 16 GB of RAM for the virtual machines.

[Walfordr]

I agree that it is still low (very low), but would be better than a hard entitlement of 8GB.  I currently have 3 ESXi 4 hypervisors running sparse dev environments (to prove the technology of course).  They are loaded with over 32 GB RAM and utilizing 90%.  So out the box with vSphere 5 Hypervisor I would be past my entitlement vRAM.

I think this is an effort to push us to purchase licenses for the hypervisor.  They know that lots of people are running it in a production environment and they are loosing money on it.  After all their plan for releasing it was to "[enable] IT professionals to become familiar with the technology and prove its value in their own companies."

I am not compelled to upgrade to hypervisor 5 for our dev environment. I will not have enough resource to prove the technology behind vSphere hypervisor 5.0...

Lets hope they fix this.

[Jackobli]

RogerThomas schrieb:

Are you thinking of 4.1 rather than the new 5.0 release?

No that is 8Gbytes of vRAM as stated at the end of this page

   http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

vRAM is the entitlement of pooled virtual memory used across all active virtual machines on the system (or that is how it is at least defined on the other versions of ESX 5.0).

Yes, I am thinking of 4.1 and I would be greatly disapointed, if VMware would lower the limits. There is already a growing market of other solutions.

[rickardnobel]

Where did you find the information about the 8 GB vRAM limit?

In this chart, which is for vSphere Hypervisor 5, it says that a virtual machine could use 1 TB of RAM.

See the bottom:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/compare.html

However, there are errors in the chart, for example claims that Storage vMotion and Storage DRS would work, but clearly not since they are vCenter technologies.

This also seems a bit strange:

"Ability to reclaim unused memory, de-duplicate memory pages, compress memory pages" .. great features of course, but not much use if the total configured memory limit is 8 GB.

[golddiggie]

RogerThomas wrote:

It exists as VMware vSphere Hypervisor,

It's rather key limitations are

1) You can not make changes to an environment with anything other than the GUI - so no CLI.

2) VMware vSphere Hypervisor includes a VRAM entitlement of 8GB

Item 2 is a bit of a joke, how many people use ESXi with only 8GByte of RAM!

It's a rather poor joke at that. I'm only running 7 virtual servers on my current ESXi 4.1 host, but I'm using 10-12GB of RAM (16GB in the host)... I'm looking to increase the host memory (or add another host) so that I can run more VM's and/or have HA.

Is that 8GB per socket/CPU or total?? IF per CPU/socket, then it's not as bad. It's still a bad joke, but it's not too hard to get around (and have a decent amount of VM's running in a home lab)...

[rickardnobel]

golddiggie wrote:

Is that 8GB per socket/CPU or total??

From the small amount of information that seems to be available it is 8 GB of the now infamous "vRAM", that is the total amount of RAM that you could give to your VMs together.

[medic29]

Although this may significantly defeat the purpose of new features in v5, but can anyone speculate on the vRAM being disabled and v4 individual physical server memory allowances be used? I have a PE 2950 with 32GB installed available as a dogfood server and would love to put v5 on when it is available for a test drive. But if only 8GB will be available I can't see the logic in even considering it.

[einstein-a-go-go]

I believe that the new limit for VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.0 (ESXi 5.0) is 8GB ram total per server.

VMware have stated that the Free version of VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.0 (ESXi 5.0) should be used for Test and Development purposes ONLY, and not Production.

After you have completed testing, you should purchase a license to upgrade the vRAM entitlement.

Just my $0.02c

[swamisant]

Please provide me a link with details for ESXi free. Specifically 8GB vRAM limit.

[rickardnobel]

swamisant wrote:

Please provide me a link with details for ESXi free. Specifically 8GB vRAM limit.

The free version of ESXi  is called "VMware vSphere Hypervisor" as a product and the information could be found here:

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

in a small final question at the bottom of the page:

"How much vRAM does a VMware vSphere Hypervisor license provide?

A vSphere Hypervisor license includes a vRAM entitlement of 8GB."

[KingsX]

Goodbye vmware! I'm off to XEN or Hyper-V

[GVD]

I'm not ready to say goodbye, but yes, I do think this will mean that a lot of "testing the water" setups will now be ignoring VMWare's solutions. 8 Gb might be OK for a brief test drive, it is by no means sufficient to do a prolongued test in a real working environment.

Quite frankly, all our codemonkeys have more RAM in their laptops than this Hypervisor allows the VMs to use (combined!).

[rickardnobel]

It is still somewhat unclear if there is almost unlimited RAM available (up to 1 TB per virtual machine) or 8 GB of vRAM in total.

VMware says both things: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

[RogerThomas]

Rickard wrote:

It is still somewhat unclear if there is almost unlimited RAM available (up to 1 TB per virtual machine) or 8 GB of vRAM in total.

VMware says both things: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

Considering the fact that even where you purchase the top of the range version of ESX 5.0 you only receive a grant of 48GB of vRAM I would go with the 8GB limit :smileyhappy:

To licence a ESX server to 1TB you are looking at 21 top end enterprise licences with list at about $110,000 before SnS fees.

[ZeroGravity2011]

Rickard wrote:

It is still somewhat unclear if there is almost unlimited RAM available (up to 1 TB per virtual machine) or 8 GB of vRAM in total.

VMware says both things: http://rickardnobel.se/archives/620

Read the other features listed on the Compare page, that list is listing the technical features of ESX not necessarily the licensed features. It's pretty straightforward.

[rickardnobel]

ZeroGravity wrote:

Read the other features listed on the Compare page, that list is listing the technical features of ESX not necessarily the licensed features. It's pretty straightforward.

It is not pretty straightforward. Look at the top of the chart which very clearly states that is features of the "VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.0" listed. The whole page is about the free version. The chart obvious gives incorrect information regarding the differences between VMwares free version and Hyper-V and XEN.

[medic29]

I just found this link for an article more or less explaining vRAM.  One of the sentences which jumped straight out was - if no more vRAM is available, the VM will not be powered on.

Well... if this stays true for an 8Gb limit then yeah I would say the only thing the v5 DVD will be good for is target practice.

Although if the v5 install follows the same method v4 uses, then running it in unlicsensed mode for however long (60 days?) may be a workaround to not limit 'Free mode'.

http://thinkcloud.nl/2011/07/13/vmware-licensing-vram-entitlement-explained/

[GVD]

It's only logical, medic29. If the Essentials and Essentials Plus has a hard limit (the other licenses do not), then the free Hypervisor will also have a hard limit. It would cause an even larger riot if the free version had more rights than the Essentials...

[rickardnobel]

GVD wrote:

then the free Hypervisor will also have a hard limit. It would cause an even larger riot if the free version had more rights than the Essentials...

It is still kind of unusual to try to make the competitors look bad for "only" allowing 64 and 32 GB per VM and for your own product only allow 8 GB in total.

There is something serious incorrect on the information page for vSphere Hypervisor 5 at the moment. It would be nice if VMware could give information what is true, 8 GB total or 1 TB per VM?

[GVD]

I'd say that the 1 TB limitation is the platform (architectural) limitation. The 8 GB is the licensing limitation.

Capable of 1 TB with the right license (like what? 21 Enterprise+ licenses? :P), but without a license it's only 8 GB.

I hope I'm wrong, but I've seen no one refute this.

[Bernhard_Diener]

Roger, the vRAM limit means guests can use up to 8 GB, right? The server itself can use up to 256 GB RAM (at least version 4.1 could).

[rickardnobel]

the vRAM limit means guests can use up to 8 GB, right? The server itself can use up to 256 GB RAM (at least version 4.1 could).

If the 8 GB vRAM limit is correct then all guests together can use 8 GB of RAM.

[Bernhard_Diener]

No. Our server (4.1 free) uses 24 GB and the guest nearly use all of it, much more than 8 GB.

[rickardnobel]

Bernhard Diener wrote:

No. Our server (4.1 free) uses 24 GB and the guest nearly use all of it, much more than 8 GB.

The 8 GB vRAM limit is for the upcoming 5.0 free Hypervisor, the 4.x version had no such memory limits.

[RogerThomas]

Bernhard Diener wrote:

Roger, the vRAM limit means guests can use up to 8 GB, right? The server itself can use up to 256 GB RAM (at least version 4.1 could).

This new vRAM limit seems to be the total amount of memory that can be allocated to all VMs on a system running the free hypervisor, regardless of the number of processors on the system.

I have to say I've already upgraded my ESXi test server from 4.1 to XenServer 5.6. I have to say things like the GUI are not as feature rich but it seems to run VMs without any issues.

[golddiggie]

I just started reading the install doc for xen 5.6... Talk about F'd up... You want to run Linxu VMs? You need to install this extra item. Plus, the footprint of xen 5.6 is freakin HUGE compared with ESXi... Needs 16GB (according to the docs) for local drives. Pretty much forget about installing to flash/USB thumb drives. Plus, IF you want to use anything above the free version, you MUST setup a license server. That went away, for ESX/ESXi, when v4 came out...

While I do think that the VMware product IS superior to the others (technology based) I have a feeling that more companies/organizations will be shifting away from it simply due to costs. Why would I need to pay 12k to be able to fully utilize my servers/hosts (previously spending <6k) when I can spend just 5k on the highest version of xen?? Xen is licensed per host server, not CPU's, RAM, etc... Physical box there... VMware needs to take notice at how pissed off people are over their shift. We accepted the per CPU licensing before, because we could justify it to the powers that be. Now, with it being limited by how much vRAM is being used (easily being more than the pRAM in the hosts) we're hosed.

[wdroush1]

golddiggie wrote:

Needs 16GB (according to the docs) for local drives. Pretty much forget about installing to flash/USB thumb drives.    

Are your ordering your USB drives from 2004?

Though I agree XenServer falls back on a few things, it doesn't fall back nearly enough for me to justify paying $1000 so I can run ESXi at home.

[einstein-a-go-go]

I don't think we will be see-ing many folk upgrade Free ESXi 4.1 --> ESXi 5.0 servers, but as the upgrade process is so easy, with an easy in place upgrade that detects the ESXi 4.1 installation, and your upgraded in 10 minutes from CD-ROM, this is bound to cause many issues for Home Labs, as now way back to VMFS3 from VMFS5!

I'm sure there will be some, scratching their heads, why they cannot use more than 8GB, on these very forums in the future, asking why!!!!

[ITGeezer]

I think they've missed a trick here.

I agree the free hypervisor with the 8GB limit is next to useless ... but I for one would be willing to pay for a 16GB or even 32GB limit ... but I wouldn't pay for Essentials at £430 + Tax in the UK because (a) that's a lot of money and (b) I don't need everything it includes.

I'd be quite happy however to pay something similar to what Workstation costs (£150 + Tax) for single server dual socket 16GB or 32GB with none of the extras - i.e. just the Hypervisor but with a higher memory limit.

[spiralscratch]

ITGeezer wrote:

I think they've missed a trick here.

I agree the free hypervisor with the 8GB limit is next to useless ... but I for one would be willing to pay for a 16GB or even 32GB limit ... but I wouldn't pay for Essentials at £430 + Tax in the UK because (a) that's a lot of money and (b) I don't need everything it includes.

I'd be quite happy however to pay something similar to what Workstation costs (£150 + Tax) for single server dual socket 16GB or 32GB with none of the extras - i.e. just the Hypervisor but with a higher memory limit.

I'd rather they ditch this insane new licensing scheme and go back to counting CPUs, but I might be willing to consider something like that. However, I think that those limits are still too low for the prices stated. Some OSes (e.g., Windows Server, FreeNAS) can simply eat RAM, and virtualizing them makes no sense if the ratio of virtual machines (or vCPUs) to cores is less that 1:1. Even for a basically unsupported "testing" product.

I feel that the bare minimum vRAM limit for the free product to be useful would probably be 16GB (though I'd rather see 32GB). This would be much closer to v4.1's limits IIRC. It also lines up fairly well with the capabilities of current low-end server hardware (e.g., a Xeon E3 system). As proposed, upgrades above that could be at some cost. Maybe ~$100 per 32GB? And if I'm paying for it, I'd better be able to get real support, not just these forums.

And if they're sticking to the vRAM model, adjust the limits of the other products upwards as well. The current levels are way too low for the price.

[rickardnobel]

ITGeezer wrote:

I'd be quite happy however to pay something similar to what Workstation costs (£150 + Tax) for single server dual socket 16GB or 32GB with none of the extras - i.e. just the Hypervisor but with a higher memory limit.

I am running 16 GB of RAM on my ordinary PC with Windows 7 and VMware Workstation, this makes it more powerful than the vSphere "Hypervisor" 5.0. If I would like to have a dedicated host only running VMs at home I would look at free Microsoft Hyper-V that seems to fit the purpose.

As I know very little of marketing and similar, but from my perspective for people that will not (for any reason) want to buy a full licensed product, it would still be valuable to a company (VMware or Microsoft) that they choose their free version instead of the competitor.

[Bernhard_Diener]

What do you mean?

As I wrote, we use 4.1 free. Our server has 24 GB and the guests’ RAM adds up to more than 20 GB.

@ricnob

Sorry, I did not read your whole message. Ok, I understand that they created a vRAM limit in version 5. But really for all machines 8 GB in total as Roger says?

I cannot believe it.

Message was edited by: Bernhard Dien…

[rickardnobel]

Bernhard Diener wrote:

What do you mean?

As I wrote, we use 4.1 free. Our server has 24 GB and the guests’ RAM adds up to more than 20 GB.

What do you really mean? The thread is about the changes in the upcoming free version 5.0, which will have a 8 GB vRAM limit for all guests in total.

[Bernhard_Diener]

See my editing above.

Well... then it's 8 GB in total. Wow...

[Bolgard]

Feelin' a bit tricked here actually. Just recently upgraded my server to quadcore with 12 GB RAM and installed ESXi 4.1 on a internal USB-flashdrive. It's been working great so far. We're running three virtual machines, and had actually planned a maintenance upgrade this weekend. I was thrilled when ESXi 5 was released, thought I should install it directly. Turns out I won't :smileysad:

Is there any other free virtualization platform which is installable on a USB-flashdrive (8GB), supporting the Dell RAID-controller without this stupid limit? I guess I was fooled into this VMware-environment... even if we did have the money to do an upgrade, I sure as hell ain't going to do it now. I'd rather by Hyper-V than buy VMware, which is really sad. It's a great product. I'd actually imagined hosting a licensed vSphere-environment with paid licenses when this company has grown in the future.. it all went to dust :smileysilly: :smileysad:

[spiralscratch]

I had been planning to set up one or two test/trial machines using v5, but the limit of 8GB on vRAM absolutely kills it. I can't imagine any kind of substantial setup that could fit within so little vRAM. It makes more sense to go with physical servers instead.

The licensing scheme across the entire v5 line is absolute insanity.

I'm now looking towards Xen or KVM instead.

[prostar]

Hard limit of 8GB makes vSphere Hypervisor next to useless. Time to familiarize myself with Xen ... and with that all my customers.

[admin]

The vSphere Hypervisor is entitled to 8GB of vRAM per proc and has a limit on physical RAM per server of 32GB. The product is meant for small first time deployments

[spiralscratch]

Alberto wrote:

The vSphere Hypervisor is entitled to 8GB of vRAM per proc and has a limit on physical RAM per server of 32GB. The product is meant for small first time deployments

And what I and others are stating is that the present limits are wholly inadequate It is simply not possible to do a proper "small first time deployment" with only 8GB of vRAM. It can't even be used for a proper proof-of-concept depoyment.

Obviously, no one expects to be able to build up a server room using the free product.

[golddiggie]

So if I decided to increase my current test lab host above 16GB of RAM (where it's at now) since it's only a dual socket system, I won't be able to actually USE that extra memory I've purchased?? Very poor form... Especially since I can increase the host RAM, under version 4.x, to whatever I want, or the hardware will accept. So VMware has decided to hamstring test labs, or VCP's labs, where we could test out deploying new servers with the current (v4.x) release with the future releases... NOT good...

Unless VMware intends to offer a less limited version/license to VCP's for use with v5 and beyond, they're not earning any points.

[rickardnobel]

Alberto wrote:

The product is meant for small first time deployments

Can you please elaborate this? What kind of "deployments" has VMware in mind?

[GVD]

Alberto wrote:

The vSphere Hypervisor is entitled to 8GB of vRAM per proc and has a limit on physical RAM per server of 32GB. The product is meant for small first time deployments

So 4 CPU + 32 GB vRAM can be done? How about running 1 CPU + 32 GB vRAM using the same principles that govern Standard/Advanced/Enterprise/EnterprisePlus licensing? Is it just bad wording and can you just tack on more Hypervisor licenses without having the CPU sockets populated to match?

Is it more like Essentials/EssentialsPlus, where you have a 144GB vRAM pool to allocate even if you don't have the pCPU to match? (in this case a vRAM pool of 32 GB to allocate on the single Hypervisor host, regardless of pCPU population)

Can we get an official reply on this?

[JurgenD]

Where is it to download, because I am tired to test out 4.1, which lacks support for custom hardware.

I hope this time, without any excuse, there is a broad way to support all hardware.  It is nonsense, to say, the hypervisor need specific hardware.  Besides, it would be much better to switch your kernel base to the xxxBSD. Not only You can have a much better network throughput, You can make advance of the ZFS file system, which is currently the best option in town to store files.

[wdroush1]

JurgenD wrote:

Where is it to download, because I am tired to test out 4.1, which lacks support for custom hardware.

I hope this time, without any excuse, there is a broad way to support all hardware.  It is nonsense, to say, the hypervisor need specific hardware.  Besides, it would be much better to switch your kernel base to the xxxBSD. Not only You can have a much better network throughput, You can make advance of the ZFS file system, which is currently the best option in town to store files.

5.x AFAIK isn't going to support more hardware. ESXi is probably the most restrictive hypervisor for hardware. XenServer is a lot better, with Hyper-V probably being the best out of the box(it's bloody Windows), XenServer may actually be better but I'm not familiar with the driver sets it comes with, but being Linux you should be able to plug anything into it.

As for rewriting vSphere's kernel: not going to happen, we have XenServer for that. However I wish they did allow for open development of drivers. Also I'd never trust local file systems in a production environment, and on a home environment ZFS is overkill (and can be achieved through a VSA anyway).

However, I've had really good luck with ESXi 4.x running on all kinds of garbage, but your mileage will vary.

[JurgenD]

The ZFS Raid is not an overkill, especially when You do use to protect your data in a raid.  So when one virtual disk is corrupted, the ZFS raid can restore that virtual disk.  That's why I do use it. I don't trust a single virtual disk, if it gets corrupted, I co loose a lot of data, netiher iI do want to take all the time snapshots or backups of the virtual machine.  So the me, ZFS Raid is necessary in the guest, and to me, it would be perfect if it was included in ESXi on the host side. Because this way, I can protect the host as well. ZFS is great in this regard You can take snapshots of Your filesystem, and to backup, clone your filesystem in a quick, efficient way.  So it would be a great filesystem to run on the host side too. The snapshots of VMware could even be replaced as well, with the use of ZFS, this way, the footprint of ESXi would be even smaller as well. As ZFS does provide NFS functionality, which could be use to have shared folders, without to have a large foorprint. Another major issue, because even Microsoft is paying an University to have a NFS v3 driver for their OS.

I do known the VMware products from day they were born.  Actually I am amazed they did develop from a small company to a nice, big company. Maybe I should talk again with them to push them to a new frontier... I just need to find the one who I did talk too. But those guys are open to critics, comments and aprovements. I do belief in the product of VMware. If You can hold te market for several years, it does mean something. Of course some things need to be improved, but I am sure they will manage. And don't forget, with their products, they did a MAJOR push forward to have more efficient computers, servers and they did help to have a better, nice and green environment.  Well, in this regard, I do support them.

The product was one of the first hypervisors, and they did major evolution in different directions.  As I did suggested a lot in those days too. One of those things did form the base of VMware server etc.  I did suggest that in times, when the site did look like pretty Russian with a lot of servers on the frontpage. I did have some good debates with the developers, to transform VMware workstation to bare metal.  A pity, it looks like they did choose some linux os, it would be much better to start from the BSD kernel, which is still, much stronger as the linux kernels in many aspects, where the network stack if very good as well.  In this regard, there could be a native port for the BSD community too.  Now we need to stick with a linux version, which does not run as smooth as a native version on FreeBSD.  To me one of the best server OS is FreeBSD.  Reason why there are such great products such as pfsense, FreeNAS, maybe soon a native hypervisor, named BHyVe.

I did try Xenserver, but I was disappointed about the limitations.  More, I see, the VMware product van manage perfectly FreeBSD ZFS with 64 LBA in the host.  Xenserver as Virtualbox can not manage that at all for some reason.  VMware does ! My FreeBSD 64 bit is running with GPT formatted ZFS raid. Other hypervisors do deliver me an int13_harddisk: function 42. Can't use 64bits lba As there are to much limitations on the free version of Xenserver.

Besides, Xenserver is a Citrix product, they are standing too close to Microsoft. Reason why remote desktop products and hypervisors of Microsoft were actually at start, degraded versions of CItrix products.

No, I do use VMware for developement.  And I do want to run ESXI, because in this way, I can swap very easy, virtual machines from ESXi to VMware Workstation, so I can run the virtualized, development server on my laptop when I am in hotel, and move it quickly to the server when I am back from projects at home.

But I have a lot of questions related to the hardware comptability.  the ESXi should run on every server, every computer.  Without any excuse. They can provide warnings, that some drivers do slow down the hypervisor, but a low cost server, workstation should run ESXi. So I am looking forward to the ESxi 5, where there is the possibility to make your custom hypervisor, so You can load all drivers, which should be needed to run on a lowend computer.

[wdroush1]

JurgenD wrote:

The ZFS Raid is not an overkill, especially when You do use to protect your data in a raid.  So when one virtual disk is corrupted, the ZFS raid can restore that virtual disk.  That's why I do use it. I don't trust a single virtual disk, if it gets corrupted, I co loose a lot of data, netiher iI do want to take all the time snapshots or backups of the virtual machine.  So the me, ZFS Raid is necessary in the guest, and to me, it would be perfect if it was included in ESXi on the host side. Because this way, I can protect the host as well. ZFS is great in this regard You can take snapshots of Your filesystem, and to backup, clone your filesystem in a quick, efficient way.  So it would be a great filesystem to run on the host side too. The snapshots of VMware could even be replaced as well, with the use of ZFS, this way, the footprint of ESXi would be even smaller as well. As ZFS does provide NFS functionality, which could be use to have shared folders, without to have a large foorprint. Another major issue, because even Microsoft is paying an University to have a NFS v3 driver for their OS.

I do known the VMware products from day they were born.  Actually I am amazed they did develop from a small company to a nice, big company. Maybe I should talk again with them to push them to a new frontier... I just need to find the one who I did talk too. But those guys are open to critics, comments and aprovements. I do belief in the product of VMware. If You can hold te market for several years, it does mean something. Of course some things need to be improved, but I am sure they will manage. And don't forget, with their products, they did a MAJOR push forward to have more efficient computers, servers and they did help to have a better, nice and green environment.  Well, in this regard, I do support them.

The product was one of the first hypervisors, and they did major evolution in different directions.  As I did suggested a lot in those days too. One of those things did form the base of VMware server etc.  I did suggest that in times, when the site did look like pretty Russian with a lot of servers on the frontpage. I did have some good debates with the developers, to transform VMware workstation to bare metal.  A pity, it looks like they did choose some linux os, it would be much better to start from the BSD kernel, which is still, much stronger as the linux kernels in many aspects, where the network stack if very good as well.  In this regard, there could be a native port for the BSD community too.  Now we need to stick with a linux version, which does not run as smooth as a native version on FreeBSD.  To me one of the best server OS is FreeBSD.  Reason why there are such great products such as pfsense, FreeNAS, maybe soon a native hypervisor, named BHyVe.

I did try Xenserver, but I was disappointed about the limitations.  More, I see, the VMware product van manage perfectly FreeBSD ZFS with 64 LBA in the host.  Xenserver as Virtualbox can not manage that at all for some reason.  VMware does ! My FreeBSD 64 bit is running with GPT formatted ZFS raid. Other hypervisors do deliver me an int13_harddisk: function 42. Can't use 64bits lba As there are to much limitations on the free version of Xenserver.

Besides, Xenserver is a Citrix product, they are standing too close to Microsoft. Reason why remote desktop products and hypervisors of Microsoft were actually at start, degraded versions of CItrix products.

No, I do use VMware for developement.  And I do want to run ESXI, because in this way, I can swap very easy, virtual machines from ESXi to VMware Workstation, so I can run the virtualized, development server on my laptop when I am in hotel, and move it quickly to the server when I am back from projects at home.

But I have a lot of questions related to the hardware comptability.  the ESXi should run on every server, every computer.  Without any excuse. They can provide warnings, that some drivers do slow down the hypervisor, but a low cost server, workstation should run ESXi. So I am looking forward to the ESxi 5, where there is the possibility to make your custom hypervisor, so You can load all drivers, which should be needed to run on a lowend computer.

ZFS is pretty much enterprise level data protection, the things it protects against aren't really going to show up in a home lab environment, and anything that a home environment needs can be protected with simple hardware RAIDs or any cheap VSA setup. I mean, I agree... I love ZFS, but to act like I'm being kicked in the balls for not having support on it for my ESXi free version is kinda silly.

Have you tried KVM in that case? If limitations are your problem, KVM will blow them away. :smileywink: I'd complain that EMC buying VMWare is terrible too, not to mention... Paul Maritz? :smileysilly: Practically Microsoft here. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if the latest licensing blunder is to get more market share TO Microsoft.

Why not run a VSA if you really want ZFS support (cheap software RAID too at that)? I've heard the performance hit is negligible, especially on home labs.

How do you propose ESXi run on hardware that there are no drivers for? I mean you can put unsupported hardware in ESXi, it just may not see it. It can't pull magical drivers out of the aether to communicate with 3rd party hardware devices... and I get where you're coming from, I wish there was better hardware support, I mean there are brand new quad port gigabit NICS that ESXi wont detect without a lot of configuration hacking and at the end of the day having questionable stability.

"I am looking forward to the ESxi 5, where there is the possibility to make your custom hypervisor, so You can load all drivers, which should be needed to run on a lowend computer."

Where have you read this?

[GVD]

I've just had feedback from Dell (acting as our VMWare representative):

The Dell VMWare licensing "experts" said that it is 8 GB vRAM is "per socket" to a maximum of 4 populated sockets. Which means:

• 1 pCPU & less or equal 8 Gb vRAM = OK
• 2 pCPU & less or equal 16 Gb vRAM = OK
• 3 pCPU & less or equal 24 Gb vRAM = OK
• 4 pCPU & less or equal 32 Gb vRAM = OK
• 1 CPU & 9 Gb vRAM = NOT OK!

Which  quite frankly is pretty retarded, since it encourages you to buy more  cheap CPUs rather than one expensive one, rather than saving money in  power consumption which is a part of the benefit of virtualization.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but Intel must be smiling for this particular change.

Personally,  our standalone DEV & QA servers are 2 pCPU and 24-36 GB pRAM.  Meaning we now can provision less vRAM than we have memory. Needless to  say, we won't be upgrading to Hypervisor 5.0...

[mauirixxx]

GVD wrote:

I've just had feedback from Dell (acting as our VMWare representative):

The Dell VMWare licensing "experts" said that it is 8 GB vRAM is "per socket" to a maximum of 4 populated sockets. Which means:

• 1 pCPU & less or equal 8 Gb vRAM = OK
• 2 pCPU & less or equal 16 Gb vRAM = OK
• 3 pCPU & less or equal 24 Gb vRAM = OK
• 4 pCPU & less or equal 32 Gb vRAM = OK
• 1 CPU & 9 Gb vRAM = NOT OK!

Which  quite frankly is pretty retarded, since it encourages you to buy more  cheap CPUs rather than one expensive one, rather than saving money in  power consumption which is a part of the benefit of virtualization.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but Intel must be smiling for this particular change.

Personally,  our standalone DEV & QA servers are 2 pCPU and 24-36 GB pRAM.  Meaning we now can provision less vRAM than we have memory. Needless to  say, we won't be upgrading to Hypervisor 5.0...

So basically 1 pCPU w/ 4 cores is still only good for 8GB vRAM? Or does  that take into consideration the amount of cores involved as well?

[rickardnobel]

mauirixxx wrote:

So basically 1 pCPU w/ 4 cores is still only good for 8GB vRAM? Or does  that take into consideration the amount of cores involved as well?

From the information available it seems like you could have a host with 1 CPU with 16 cores, but a total of 8 GB of vRAM.

[mauirixxx]

ah .... all I can say now is ... bummer :smileysilly:

[rcstevensonaz]

It would be nice if the limits at least took into consideration tri-channel motherboards and not just dual-channel.

I'm just playing with this for home use and have an single CPU motherboard (i7 930) and the 6 memory banks populated with 2Gb modules.  This puts my very humble machine over the 8Gb limit.  So on a tri-channel board, you can either only populate one-half of the DIMM slots or you need to find 1Gb sticks instead of 2Gb sticks.

Seems like they should go wtih at at least 12Gb to allow 2Gb sticks on dual (i.e., 4x2Gb) and tri-channel (i.e., 6x2Gb) motherboards.

[GVD]

GVD wrote:

I've just had feedback from Dell (acting as our VMWare representative):

The Dell VMWare licensing "experts" said that it is 8 GB vRAM is "per socket" to a maximum of 4 populated sockets. Which means:

• 1 pCPU & less or equal 8 Gb vRAM = OK
• 2 pCPU & less or equal 16 Gb vRAM = OK
• 3 pCPU & less or equal 24 Gb vRAM = OK
• 4 pCPU & less or equal 32 Gb vRAM = OK
• 1 CPU & 9 Gb vRAM = NOT OK!

Which  quite frankly is pretty retarded, since it encourages you to buy more  cheap CPUs rather than one expensive one, rather than saving money in  power consumption which is a part of the benefit of virtualization.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but Intel must be smiling for this particular change.

Personally,  our standalone DEV & QA servers are 2 pCPU and 24-36 GB pRAM.  Meaning we now can provision less vRAM than we have memory. Needless to  say, we won't be upgrading to Hypervisor 5.0...

So, I contacted VMWare with the information quoted above. They did not contradict this.

Their feedback was that they are aware that there's an issue there and that they're receiving feedback on this, which has caused them to internally review their choices again.

They encouraged people who had issues with this (especially existing deployments in 3.5 or 4.1) to contact the Licensing Support desk and give feedback on how this is affecting them. If enough feedback is given, the licensing terms might change.

So give feedback guys! There might be some hope...

[WendellGee]

GVD wrote:

They encouraged people who had issues with this (especially existing deployments in 3.5 or 4.1) to contact the Licensing Support desk and give feedback on how this is affecting them. If enough feedback is given, the licensing terms might change.

I need to go poke through the new licensing scheme, I think.

I was looking forward to building a single-quad system at home to use myself as the guinea pig for a future ESXi 5 upgrade deployment in the government lab where I work, but this would kill that dead (I am spec'ing my hardware to have 16 GB RAM, and most of our production app machines could not run a meaningful test ESXi deployment as they are dual-quad CPU, 48 GB RAM).  RAM is cheap and big systems are using more and more of it, so demo systems need to be able to keep up.

The licensing folks will definitely hear from me (and probably my boss too).

[timarbour]

I'm going to stay on 4.1 as long as I can and then move to XenServer.  I have 3 servers with dual 6-core processors and 128GB RAM each running Essentials Plus.   First off, I chose Vmware for it's economic reasons as it WAS priced reasonably.  Pricing is just ridiculous now - I payed $1400 for Essentials Plus 2 years ago and now it's $5700+.   In these economic times, you can't jack pricing up that much.   I'm going from a payed customer (revenue for Vmware) to somewhere else.  Now, after all that, Vwmare has just priced itself out of the market and with the version 5 licensing changes, and with my hardware, it's become almost useless for me.

[mrudloff]

Seems all clear to me (not that I like it)

Now, bottom of the FAQs

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html

"How much vRAM does a VMware vSphere Hypervisor license provide?

A vSphere Hypervisor license includes a vRAM entitlement of 8GB."

Now .. vRAM entitlements

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

" Depending on the edition, each

vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity

entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM

configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM

entitled to the user."

[rickardnobel]

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

[MindTheGreg]

Rickard wrote:

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

8GB of vRAM is still useable. I'm glad they aren't killing it off OpenSolaris style.

[mauirixxx]

I ran our 2 ESXi 3.5 servers with 8GB of ram for quite awhile, as it was all we needed at the time to do what WE wanted / needed it to do. We're a very small company (10 employees!) that figured we could stop running multiple physical servers (1 AD login, simple file server, Exchange 2k3, dedicated backup server, sharepoint server, linux web / database server).

It was possible to run a company with that much memory ... just not a very large one :smileysilly: Now we're up to 32 and 24 gigs in our 2 ESXi 4.1 servers, and it looks like we'll be moving up to v5 (Essentials / Essentials+ vRAM limitations doesn't affect us). The 60TB luns are something we (ok, my I.T. department consisting of me, myself, and I) are looking forward to, as we've almost exceeded 2TB of saved data in our file server VM.

I feel for the guys in big companies / schools (heck anyone NOT running a small busineess setup such as ours) that are looking at doubling their costs just to stick with VMware. If I came to my boss with THAT request, I'd either be laughed out of the office, or probably fired :/

Good luck to you guys, I'm hoping VMware changes their stances on this before VMworld - otherwise there's going to be a lot of unhappy people trying to enjoy Vegas, but pissed off over licensing woes :smileysad:

[wdroush1]

Greg wrote:

Rickard wrote:

VMware has on the forums confirmed that it is 8 GB per physical CPU on the free vSphere Hypervisor. Since few people would buy a expensive two way server with only 16 GB of RAM this would not help much.

Since this is a FREE product VMware could of course do what ever they like and we can not really complain about it. My personal view is that it is just sad that they remove the opportunity for the smallest businesses to run VMware products.

I also belive it would be much better if they removed the free product all together. To keep it, but place limits which mades it almost useless, just makes it looks stupid.

8GB of vRAM is still useable. I'm glad they aren't killing it off OpenSolaris style.

*OpenIndiana (and not dead)

Which we still have derivitives we're running, you can't beat it's ZFS speed. Oracle aquiring Sun made me some money from their stocks, but I honestly like Sun a lot and would have easily eaten my investment for that company to thrive on it's own.

<3 Fishworks.

[Leathal]

I see that VMWare has decided to not go with the 2TB+ LUN option in ESXi 5 and vSphere 5. This is a major set back; I may have to take a closer look at Microsoft's product and go with that...

A.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

vSphere supports larger than 2 TB LUNs.  Virtual disks are still limited to 2 TB.

[mauirixxx]

Dave Mishchenko wrote:

vSphere supports larger than 2 TB LUNs.  Virtual disks are still limited to 2 TB.

As long as you're using an RDM setup you can go past 2TB luns, was my understanding. If you don't use RDM, you're still stuck @ a 2TB lun.

Am I mistaken?

I got that from the vmfs-5 blog entry:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/07/new-vsphere-50-storage-features-part-1-vmfs-5.html

[Leathal]

People from my work went to some show this year that VMware was at. We use VMware ALOT for our own stuff and the clients the company I work for that we support also use it. Anyhow when they asked VMware about the 2TB+ LUN support in v5 they were told VMWare decided not offer it.

A.

[DSTAVERT]

No one would have been able to provide any official information about 5 until it was publicly announced a few weeks ago. VMFS 5 is not limited to 2TB LUNs.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

It's 2TB + for datastores as well.  It worked just fine in the beta including upgrading VMFS3 to 5 and then expanding that beyond 2 TB.

[mauirixxx]

Dave Mishchenko wrote:

It's 2TB + for datastores as well.  It worked just fine in the beta including upgrading VMFS3 to 5 and then expanding that beyond 2 TB.

wait, so I *don't* have to mess with RDM to make an 8TB iSCSI or RAID-whatever LUN?

Sweet!

The blog I referenced earlier made it sound like that was the only way to get past bigger then 2TB. Seems I need to re-read and comprehend it better.

Thanks for the clarification Dave.

Aloha!

[freefall]

So I wonder if with the new increase to 32GB of vRAM people will still be wanting to move from the free version?

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

[rickardnobel]

I belive the new limits (described here) makes the free Hypervisor an attrative choice for a reasonable time. 32 GB is very fair for a totally free product.

[alex555550]

Well but 32GB isn`t really much today. Thanks to $ <> € RAM is cheap.

[GVD]

freefall wrote:

So I wonder if with the new increase to 32GB of vRAM people will still be wanting to move from the free version?

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

For my personal use, it is sufficient for at least 2 years, so I will be upgrading. Most likely this will still fall outside some people's expectations, but I think 32 GB vRAM/pRAM will be sufficient for most users of the free hypervisor.

There's still questions about Moore's Law of course, so while it's a stop gap now, it might not be valid in a few years anymore.

[J1mbo]

Maybe the FAQ hasn't been updated, but that says 8GB per CPU, up to 32GB max.

[GVD]

J1mbo wrote:

Maybe the FAQ hasn't been updated, but that says 8GB per CPU, up to 32GB max.

If that was the case, they wouldn't have mentioned it as a change on http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/08/changes-to-the-vram-licensing-model-introduced-on-july-12-2011.html#_edn2

[J1mbo]

To be fair, that page is ambigious at best.  Obviously like you I hope it is 32GB on a single socket.

[FredPeterson]

According to the FAQ it is not 32GB / socket for the free version, its 32GB total per server.

This sucks, I had a project coming where the server is going to have 48GB in it with nearly all of it assigned and I wanted to avoid buying licenses.  Looks like I still will have to.  argh.

[Walfordr]

I think 32GB of pRAM and vRAM for the free hypervisor is fair.  I got an email about the updates this morning.

[TonyBerry]

Robert Walford wrote:

I think 32GB of pRAM and vRAM for the free hypervisor is fair.  I got an email about the updates this morning.

I think 32GB per host is fair. It just so happens I use a Dell blade server at home and 4 of the 1955 blades are dual Xeon quad cores with 32GB of RAM (the developement cluster) and 4 are 1955 dual Xeon dual cores with 16GB of RAM (the sandbox cluster). The remaining 2 1955 blades are non-ESXi physical servers.

I haven't installed v5 on the sandbox cluster yet, maybe this weekend. I'm not too enthused about the v5 pricing model though. Pricing by allocated VM vRAM is not very fair. Worse case should be pricing by pRAM in the host. VMware knows where the greatest impact (i.e. $$$) is.

[GVD]

TonyBerry wrote:

I think 32GB per host is fair. It just so happens I use a Dell blade server at home and 4 of the 1955 blades are dual Xeon quad cores with 32GB of RAM (the developement cluster) and 4 are 1955 dual Xeon dual cores with 16GB of RAM (the sandbox cluster). The remaining 2 1955 blades are non-ESXi physical servers.

Keep in mind that the 32 GB is (still) a vRAM limit (as well as pRAM limit) unless I'm mistaken.

This means that if you install Hypervisor 5.0 on your machines with 32 GB physical ram, you will NOT be able to overcommit your RAM. Of course, in some scenarios this is not important, but I just wanted to point that out.

Personally, I will not be using Hypervisor 5.0 on machines with more than 24 GB physical RAM. Running 32 GB vRAM on a 24 GB pRAM machine is still a fairly low overcommit that in most scenarios will not give you any trouble at all.

[WendellGee]

Fred Peterson wrote:

According to the FAQ it is not 32GB / socket for the free version, its 32GB total per server.

This sucks, I had a project coming where the server is going to have 48GB in it with nearly all of it assigned and I wanted to avoid buying licenses.  Looks like I still will have to.  argh.

Well hey, I'd like to get everything for free too, but realistically if they just gave away enterprise-class capabilities, nobody would buy it out of the goodness of their hearts...

32 GB seems like a happy medium to me.  I think the vast majority of single-socket boxes and even most duals are not using more than that yet, and if you have a 48 GB ESXi server, well, that's not really a demo system is it?  I've always looked at the free edition as a way to get VMware's foot in the door in orgs that don't really get it yet ("look, give me that old server in the corner and the software is free"), and also as a way to quickly set up a test/dev environment.  It's not for doing production deployments.

The bottom line is yeah, they pooched up the new licensing at first, but from my point of view it's good enough now that I'm back to planning to upgrade to ESXi 5 rather than going to my management and suggesting Xen or Linux KVM.

But while I'm in wish-for-a-pony mode, can we get a certificate good for one gold bar with every free-edition license key? :smileyhappy:

[biged95]

Thanks to all the feed back.  I was going to download and set up a server using ESXi 5.0, but after reading this thread I will install in 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. Looks like I will slowly be moving to Hyper-V.  I get Educational Pricing, so it makes since.  I have not switched before because I believe ESXi is a better platform, but the new license is just not acceptable.

[tschuld]

The new adjusted vRAM license levels announced late last week aren't acceptable??  :smileyconfused:

The free edition is now a flat 32G if I understand it correctly and the paid editions had a significant vRAM upgrade.

I went from needing 6 licenses per DL580 back to my original 4 for enterprise plus - I couldn't be happier about these changes (Well if they removed the CPU socket limits and just went with vRAM costing I'd be dancing in the streets).  Large VM's won't count more that 96G worse case against your vRAM entitlement (edition dependant I think) so the $22k plus in extra licensing argument for a single 1T VM argument dies there.

If cost is your only concern, vsphere's edu sku was never less than a Hyper-v one (we pay $340 roughly per socket for 2008R2 Data Center) and you would have needed to purchase DC licenses anyway in your vmware farm to be cost effective hosting Windows server VM's (if we run 4 servers per socket it's a break even cost with buying Windows Enterprise).

For me the math works out great:  I build 64G per socket, the entitlement is 96G giving me roughly a 33% overall oversubscription rate.  I buy one Ent+ and one Windows Datacenter per socket so I can stack my 20 Windows/Linux VM's per socket average on it.  I can't imagine trying to manage up to 80 mixed Vm's per Hyper-V host....

[GVD]

Todd wrote:

The new adjusted vRAM license levels announced late last week aren't acceptable??  :smileyconfused:

The free edition is now a flat 32G if I understand it correctly and the paid editions had a significant vRAM upgrade.

I went from needing 6 licenses per DL580 back to my original 4 for enterprise plus - I couldn't be happier about these changes (Well if they removed the CPU socket limits and just went with vRAM costing I'd be dancing in the streets).  Large VM's won't count more that 96G worse case against your vRAM entitlement (edition dependant I think) so the $22k plus in extra licensing argument for a single 1T VM argument dies there.

If cost is your only concern, vsphere's edu sku was never less than a Hyper-v one (we pay $340 roughly per socket for 2008R2 Data Center) and you would have needed to purchase DC licenses anyway in your vmware farm to be cost effective hosting Windows server VM's (if we run 4 servers per socket it's a break even cost with buying Windows Enterprise).

For me the math works out great:  I build 64G per socket, the entitlement is 96G giving me roughly a 33% overall oversubscription rate.  I buy one Ent+ and one Windows Datacenter per socket so I can stack my 20 Windows/Linux VM's per socket average on it.  I can't imagine trying to manage up to 80 mixed Vm's per Hyper-V host....

This is a thread about the free hypervisor. Waving Enterprise Plus licenses around won't get you a whole lot of sympathy & understanding. :smileyhappy:

For most people, the free hypervisor will work fine for their purposes at 32 GB vRAM, but it's not hard to imagine scenarios where previous free 4.1 gave you a lot more resources to play with than the new and 'improved' 32 GB vRAM of Hypervisor 5.0 gives you.

[tschuld]

Yes I did seem to get quite a bit OT there - sorry bout that :smileyblush: - been writing too many briefs and updated status reports and lost my way on this thread.

I was happy to see the 32G on the free edition - saved me from having to rebuild my 12 remote County Center hosts with Hyper-V.

The biggest issue I can see with 4.1 vs 5 though is that with vRAM oversubscription, a free V5 won't be of much use to an existing free V4.1 host with more than 24G of physcial RAM.

What's going to suck for me is my prototype/training host 32G box (ESXi free edition running ESXi trial editions within it for training/research) where I'm oversubscribed on my ram by 70% - I may have to drop my ESXi VM's down to 3G per of vRAM to make it work.

...Or just leave it V4.1 and install V5 ESXi trials inside it :smileyhappy:

[wdroush1]

Todd wrote:

The new adjusted vRAM license levels announced late last week aren't acceptable??  :smileyconfused:

If you're not interested in setting money on fire, yeah. :smileywink: No but seriously, some of us were like "hey, maybe VMWare will match their new v5 with competitive pricing" when rumors of v5 were floating around. Now anyone outside of essentials (and some in essentials) are going to have to pay more if they want to maintain the ability to grow.

At least I can use free version at home again (8GB makes it so I'm at my pRAM, which means I can't overallocate, which means I might as well run XenServer since it comes with XenCenter).

[rickardnobel]

wdroush1 wrote:

At least I can use free version at home again (8GB makes it so I'm at my pRAM, which means I can't overallocate, which means I might as well run XenServer since it comes with XenCenter).

It is not 8 GB and you can overallocate with the free product, since the change.

[wdroush1]

Rickard wrote:

wdroush1 wrote:

At least I can use free version at home again (8GB makes it so I'm at my pRAM, which means I can't overallocate, which means I might as well run XenServer since it comes with XenCenter).

It is not 8 GB and you can overallocate with the free product, since the change.

That's why I said "at least I can use it again", 8GB made it pretty useless compared to putting another hypervisor that comes with more features for free on it.

[0v3rc10ck3d]

This is really quite ridiculous, I've been looking on vmwares website for about 3 hours and can not for the life of me find a download link for ESXi 5.0 or vSphere HyperVisor 5.0

On this website http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-and-esx/faqs.html

It talks about ESXi 5.0, and theres even a link that says "learn how to download ESXi...which leads nowhere, to the faq, that doesnt tell you how to get it.... This is really frusterating, I want to upgrade my hosts from 4.1 to 5.0...how?

[rickardnobel]

0v3rc10ck3d wrote:

This is really quite ridiculous, I've been looking on vmwares website for about 3 hours and can not for the life of me find a download link for ESXi 5.0 or vSphere HyperVisor 5.0

The product has not been released yet, so that is the reason for lack of download links. Rumors says it will be quite soon.

[tschuld]

It's only been announced, not released yet...

[0v3rc10ck3d]

Ah... I see..

I've seen screenshots of the install process and people installing it with the ESXi 5.0 splash screen and everything...figured it was available. VMware also talks about it on the main page with links for "how to download it" that go nowhere, kind of misleading.

[tschuld]

Those are the Beta/NDA folks.

Best rumor is sometime before VMWorld 2011 in Las Vegas (August 29th) but the pessimist in me thinks they'll wait until August 29th so that everyone is "out" when the vmware.com site gets crushed from all the downloads.  :smileylaugh:

[LucasAlbers]

The vmare engineer at a recent vmware dog and pony show mentioned the 22nd.

[GVD]

LucasAlbers wrote:

The vmare engineer at a recent vmware dog and pony show mentioned the 22nd.

Licensing costs will be modified on the 22nd of August. As such, I think it's highly likely that we'll see the official release of vSphere 5.0 on that date as well. Since Hypervisor 5.0 is a free product, it's not necessarily released on the same day though, but it'd be weird if that were not the case.

[roglar]

GVD wrote:

Licensing costs will be modified on the 22nd of August.

Did you get that information from VMware? That should be the vSphere 5 licensing?

[GVD]

roglar wrote:

GVD wrote:

Licensing costs will be modified on the 22nd of August.

Did you get that information from VMware? That should be the vSphere 5 licensing?

From a partner.

And yes, that will be vSphere 5 licensing, but that also means that if you want to downgrade to 4.1, you'll still be paying 5.0 prices.

[Asteroza]

I don't know about you guys, but the download link below is live for me, though you need to be both registered and logged in.

https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1

Scroll down and expand the binaries line, and you have under manual download links

1. VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0-469512.x86_64.iso

     the ESXi 5 installer ISO

     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0-469512.x86_64.iso

2. VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0-455964.exe

     the new vSphere client

     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0-455964.exe

3. VMware-tools-linux-8.6.0-425873.iso

     the new linux tools ISO

     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-tools-linux-8.6.0-425873.iso

There goes the rest of this week and my weekend...

[GregecSLO]

Hi!

Is this free hypervisor as well?

Will license key for 4.1 work with it?

Regards,

Greg

[Asteroza]

GregecSLO wrote:

Hi!

Is this free hypervisor as well?

Will license key for 4.1 work with it?

Regards,

Greg

Just tried to put a 4.1 key into a fresh 5.0 install and it refused. I haven't tried an upgrade test from 4.1 to 5.0 to see if the 4.1 key is persistent, but I assume not.

When are they going to start releasing 5.0 keys? The download page still only shows my 4.1 ESXi free license entitlement. I suppose I can run around with the 60 day trial mode for a while...

[einstein-a-go-go]

ESXi 5.0 and vSphere 5.0 keys are different.

New Keys will be issued at the end of the week!

[GVD]

einstein-a-go-go wrote:

ESXi 5.0 and vSphere 5.0 keys are different.

New Keys will be issued at the end of the week!

The correct term is Hypervisor 5.0 for the free version, not ESXi 5.0. :smileywink:

(blame vmware for thatone)

[stinklyonion]

what is the difference between Hypervisor 5.0 and ESXi 5.0 anyway?

[FredPeterson]

stinklyonion wrote:

what is the difference between Hypervisor 5.0 and ESXi 5.0 anyway?

There is none.

vSphere 5 is the first version that does not have a "Hypervisor" and "ESXi" version.  ESXi is the only choice now.  USB/SD boot OR installed to a local hard drive OR PXE boot.

Or do you mean the difference between the "free" version and a paid for?

[mauirixxx]

LucasAlbers wrote:

The vmare engineer at a recent vmware dog and pony show mentioned the 22nd.

Close .. off by 2 days :smileysilly:

Interestingly, the viclient.exe is a larger download then the vmvisor.iso is ... byt a good 60 megabytes.

bloated? or is there just that much more stuff included now?

[wdroush1]

Todd wrote:

Those are the Beta/NDA folks.

Best rumor is sometime before VMWorld 2011 in Las Vegas (August 29th) but the pessimist in me thinks they'll wait until August 29th so that everyone is "out" when the vmware.com site gets crushed from all the downloads.  :smileylaugh:

Signs a NDA, discloses everything.

:smileywink:

[JohnADCO]

Simple question......     I het reply to, but this is not addressed to anybody in particular....

We run free ESXi with 2 physical procs, 12 cores, 64GB of ram.

Would I just need to by one "Standard" stand alone license for this host to continue working on ESXi?

If so......

What is the cost of one stand alone Standard license?

Our most common hosts, even in our Enterprise data center are 2 procs, 12 cores, 64GB ram.    So I think this is OK under the new licensing.  Right now, it's the normal 6 CPU 4.1 license.  Even if this was essentials, we would be OK as well correct?

[wdroush1]

JohnADCO wrote:

Simple question......     I het reply to, but this is not addressed to anybody in particular....

We run free ESXi with 2 physical procs, 12 cores, 64GB of ram.

Would I just need to by one "Standard" stand alone license for this host to continue working on ESXi?

If so......

What is the cost of one stand alone Standard license?

Our most common hosts, even in our Enterprise data center are 2 procs, 12 cores, 64GB ram.    So I think this is OK under the new licensing.  Right now, it's the normal 6 CPU 4.1 license.  Even if this was essentials, we would be OK as well correct?

You'll need to buy two (for the two physical processors) minimum.

That also only gets you 64GB of vRAM, so if you're overallocating or have TPS you're missing out on pRAM usage.

Standard licenses run $995 each IIRC.

[JohnADCO]

So I take it for my stand alone host,  I would be able to buy 3 sockets of standard and get my 96GB ram to cover my over commitment?

Ouch,  Nearly $3K to cover what I am doing for zero right now.    Bummer because the host does nothing ever, unless we need true Disaster Recovery or are testing our Disaster Recovery.

[timarbour]

My guess at Vmware pricing today, they will want 10 million per server

Tim Arbour

Director of Technical Services

MEDDATA / MEDTRON

120 Innwood Drive

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Local: 985-893-2550

Toll Free: 877-893-2550

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[GVD]

JohnADCO wrote:

Simple question......     I het reply to, but this is not addressed to anybody in particular....

We run free ESXi with 2 physical procs, 12 cores, 64GB of ram.

Would I just need to by one "Standard" stand alone license for this host to continue working on ESXi?

If so......

What is the cost of one stand alone Standard license?

Our most common hosts, even in our Enterprise data center are 2 procs, 12 cores, 64GB ram.    So I think this is OK under the new licensing.  Right now, it's the normal 6 CPU 4.1 license.  Even if this was essentials, we would be OK as well correct?

Free ESXi (now called Hypervisor 5.0) cannot support 2 pCPU with 6 cores each and 64 GB pRAM.

The cheapest way to cover such a machine is a "normal" Essentials kit. If you try to cover it with "normal" Standard licenses, you'll need 2.

If your datacenter is covered with one standard license per CPU, you are indeed covered for this scenario.

Asteroza wrote:
I don't know about you guys, but the download link below is live for me, though you need to be both registered and logged in.
https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1
Scroll down and expand the binaries line, and you have under manual download links
1. VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0-469512.x86_64.iso
     the ESXi 5 installer ISO
     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0-469512.x86_64.iso
2. VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0-455964.exe
     the new vSphere client
     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-viclient-all-5.0.0-455964.exe
3. VMware-tools-linux-8.6.0-425873.iso
     the new linux tools ISO 
     https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/activate.php?p=free-esxi&lp=1&a=DOWNLOAD_FILE&baseurl=https://download2.vmware.com/software/vi/&filename=VMware-tools-linux-8.6.0-425873.iso
There goes the rest of this week and my weekend...

A few days later than expected, but nice to have. :smileyhappy:

Now that hardware restrictions and licensing issues have been clearified, time to order me a new DEV server. :smileysilly:

GregecSLO wrote:
Hi!
Is this free hypervisor as well?
Will license key for 4.1 work with it?
Regards,
Greg

A 4.1 key is unlikely to work with the free Hypervisor 5.0. I don't see why you're asking though, since you only need to register & activate the product to get a free key for the 5.0

[JohnADCO]

Thanks...    I think that makes me feel a little better.  I forget about the essentials offerings.

Se really less than 1K for the stand alone host and I get some basic management too.   $300 re-occuring charge each year as well. 

Thanks,   I am starting to catch on.

[Manu2]

I'm sorry but I've checked and search without success, where can I get the non-paid licence for ESXi 5 ?

I had the free version for version 4.1 and jsut upgraded after reading that there would still be a free version, but now I can't ssh to my host anymore (apparently this feature has been retired for trial/free edition :-/ ) and I'm getting a reminder about the remaining days I can use my host.

[golddiggie]

You just need to register for the key on the VMware vSphere Hypervisor pages. Once you've done that, you'll see a product key on the page where you'll be able to pull down the binaries. Pretty straight forward IMO...

[Manu2]

Thank you, I've found my key.

I  find it's really difficult now to find a simple thing as there is so many different products and name that are too complex and approximately the same.

I used the search box too while I should have use the Products menu.

[milton123]

I think 32GB per host is fair. It just so happens I use a Dell blade server at home and 4 of the 1955 blades are dual Xeon quad cores with 32GB of RAM (the developement cluster) and 4 are 1955 dual Xeon dual cores with 16GB of RAM (the sandbox cluster). The remaining 2 1955 blades are non-ESXi physical servers.

Cheers, Yours Udin

[GregecSLO]

Yup only ESXi 4.1 keys are issued, thats why I asked :smileyhappy:

Well I will download and install 5.0 next week register and enter license...

BTW is there still 8GB vRAM limit present or they raised that?

Regards,

Greg

[einstein-a-go-go]

Total 32G vRAM for Free.

[GregecSLO]

As I tought...

Thanks guys! Now lets upgrade :smileyhappy: (test machines lol )

[GregecSLO]

I can`t find any difference at all.

I suppose we download this: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere_hypervisor_esxi/5_0

Wait till VmWare start to issue reg. keys, enter key into it and thats it.