VMware vSphere

OK, now that the whole vSphere 5 launch has taken place and folks around the world are trying to digest everything,  I thought I'd share my views on the new licensing model (yup you got that right....a brand new licensing model....) being employed by VMware for vSphere 5 and beyond...

So... listening to the webcast yesterday and looking at the literature today, their main marketting line for changing the licensing is to enable...or make it compliant with how the cloud operates.. Makes sense right?? However if you peel off all the fancy marketting  paint, underneath they've just make changes

which im my opinion slightly favours VMware (yes more money in the bank....!!)

So the 'Goners' are

1. Removal of the number of cores per CPU for each licensing category = You can have as many cores per physical CPU irrespective of the license type
   
2. Removal of maximum memory limits (per ESX host) based on license category = you can have as much physical memory on ESX servers as possible irrespective of the license type
   

The new introduction is,

1. Licensing is still CPU based (per CPU) but now you have a cap on the maximum number of running virtual memory (active vRAM = memory allocated to all running VMs) at a given time. This is referred to as vRAM and is additive amongst the ESX hosts in the cluster.
   

The vRAM limitations are as below and are per CPU

          24GB vRAM per CPU for Essentials Kit
          24GB vRAM per CPU for Essentials Plus Kit
          24GB vRAM per CPU for Standard
          32GB vRAM per CPU for Enterprise
          48GB vRAM per CPU for Enterprise plus

This sounds complicated and VMware is obviously painting this as cloud friendly and user friendly...etc. But really this is going to make licensing vSphere more expensive to the average customers.

Think about it, the removal of maximum physical memory limit really is a distraction and delivers no real benefit to the customers because without (potentially) buying additional licenses you cannot really allocate those physical memory to running VMs??

Take the below as an example (a common setup amongst most of the VMware customers)

• 2 ESX servers, each with 72 GB pRAM & 2 quad core CPUs (HT enabled)
  
• 9 SQL VMs, each with 16GB of vRAM running on the ESX cluster
  

• Cost of the vSphere enterprise license at present = $3,495.00 per cpu  (same on vSphere 4 & 5)
  
• Cost of the vSphere standard license at present = $994.00 per cpu (same on vSphere 4 & 5)
  

The license costs under vSphere 4 licesing - Enterprise

• Total Number of CPUs = 4
  
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = 2875 x 4 =  $11500.00
  

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Enterprise

• Total vRAM requirment = 16gb * 9 = 144 GB
  
• Number of vRAM allowed "per CPU" = 32GB
  
• Hence the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = $144 / 32 = 5
  
• The new cost = $2,875 * 5 = $14,375.00
  

Thats an increment of 125% approx in licensing costs alone for vSphere 5.

This is even worst if you were on vSphere Standard

The license costs under vSphere 4 licensing - Standard

• Number of CPUs = 4
  
• Hence the license cost for 4 CPUs = 994 x 4 =  $3,976.00
  

The license costs under vSphere 5 licensing - Standard

• Total vRAM requirment = 144 GB
  
• Number of vRAM allowed per CPU = 24GB
  
• Hence the number of "per CPU" licesnes required = 144 / 24 = 6
  
• The new cost = $994 * 6 = $5,964.00
  

Thats is an increment of 150% approx

The way I see it, one of the main reasons why everyone prefers VMware (myself included) was because of the clever memory management techniques they employ which allows you to do memory over provision. The avaialbility of memory reclamation through memory single instancing (TPS), ballooning and compression are all pretty powerful ways that allows us to use more vRAM on a host than the available pRAM without substantial performance degration and it appears that VMware is now using this to manipulate their licensing costs.

So it now goes, the more memory you allocate to VM's the more you pay and while lot of large enterprise businesses may not care about this additional cost, VMware may be pricing themselves out of lot of SME's...(Microsoft...smell blood??)

Anyways this by no means would affect my loyalty to VMware as vSphere is still (and will be for a while to come) the best of bunch for the hypervisors out there. But the new licensing model is a bit of a sucker punch to the average customers and, in reality it is in stark contrast to how it is protrayed out on the marketting materials. instead I would have preferred if they'd come clean and said, here's a new version it cost us money to develop and we need to buy food so the licensing costs would go up a notch.

Cheers

Chan

Here's another example:

One of my clients is running vSphere 4.1 Enterprise.  We recently installed 4 blades in their datacenter, each with a pair of 6 core CPUs and 192GB of RAM.  They currently have 8 Enterprise licenses for a total cost of approximately $20,000 with 3 years of support (assuming 40% off list).

The client plans to use up to 576GB of their available RAM (1 host for failover) and has laid out an aggressive virtualization strategy to acheive this.  However, if they move to vSphere 5, they'll need to purchase either 10 additional Enterprise licenses for approximately $28,000 or 12 Enterprise Plus licenses for approximately $38,000.

This increases their licensing costs from $5,000 per blade with vSphere 4.1 Enterprise to $12,000 with vSphere 5 Enterprise or $14,500 with Enterprise Plus.

I love VMware's products but I fear this is going to push a lot of customers away from upgrading to vSphere 5 and many towards switching to Hyper-V between now and when vSphere 4.1 reaches EOL.

Hi Chan,

I don't think you've calculated this correctly. vSphere 5 is still licensed per CPU, but there is a 32GB limit per CPU license. Using your example of 3 hosts with 2 CPU's each, an Enterprise license will entitle you to 192GB vRAM. Remember this is pooled across the cluster, not per host.

Regardless of vSphere 4 or 5, you still need to license each CPU.

Yes you are correct about the calculation as I had a typo....changed that to 2 ESX servers now..

However I have taken the licensing per processor in to account. just didn't mention it because total vRAM / vRAM limit per CPU > total number of CPU's.

However the point still stands whereby if you oversubscribe memory this new licensing model penalises you which is a little unfair. Are they trying to say something??

I think in all VMWare products are becoming more expensive for organisations that are not cloud or IaaS service providers, but have deployed VMWare products for internal use only. All plug-in products (like Orchestrator etc) are licensed per VM, except for VC and Host license.

What does this licensing model have an impact on 'memory oversubscription', which was VMWare's key selling point. Some users have installed local NAND based flash drives and move the VM swap files to these high-I/O devices. This way they could have less physical memory on the hosts, but still able to oversubscribe memory (more than what exists on the host) to the VMs. Now oversubscription is still allowed as long as you do not cross the vRAM pool limit. What the $$#$$#??

IMO, VMware is going to have a LOT of enterprise customers up in arms over this (if they're not already). We just recieved 4 new 2U servers with 192GB RAM each for a View pilot. IF we were to go to version 5 for this (not sure when View will be updated) the cost per virtual desktop would go way up. We're looking to, eventually, virtualize up to 2000 desktops. IF VMware stays the course on this pricing, I believe the project is going to be inserious jeopardy of being stopped or shifted to a different platform. I also see us not moving to version 5 anytime soon. Even IF we want/need the enhancements it brings to the table. That is, unless they decide to make sure we keep under the virtual RAM usage... Issue I see with that is there will be times when your VM's use all the memory they're allocated. If you over-allocate in version 5, you'll have VMs going down due to license violations. Can't exactly have domain controllers going dark from this. Or Exchange servers, or SQL servers, or pretty much any server in our environment...

VMware needs to take note of the outrage being generated over this and address it ASAP. Otherwise, IMO, they run a very real risk of losing a LOT of long time customers.

golddiggie wrote:

We're looking to, eventually, virtualize up to 2000 desktops. IF VMware stays the course on this pricing, I believe the project is going to be inserious jeopardy of being stopped or shifted to a different platform.

The licensing cost for VDI remains the same. It has unlimited vRAM entitlement.

http://www.cloud-buddy.com/?p=402

Bilal wrote:

golddiggie wrote:

We're looking to, eventually, virtualize up to 2000 desktops. IF VMware stays the course on this pricing, I believe the project is going to be inserious jeopardy of being stopped or shifted to a different platform.

The licensing cost for VDI remains the same. It has unlimited vRAM entitlement.

http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2011/07/vsphere-desktop-licensing-overview.html

Keep in mind that:

"This  offer extends only to the purchases of new vSphere licenses.  All  eligible vSphere 4 (or earlier version of vSphere) licenses used for   desktop virtualization will not be upgraded to the vSphere Desktop SKU.   These licenses will be migrated to the corresponding vSphere 5 edition   and not to vSphere Desktop."

Everything you have today even if you use it for VDI will have vRAM limits.  The only thing that will be unlimited will be VMware Desktop licenses purchased after 5 is released.  So as long as you re-purchase you entire VDI infrastructure licensing yes you will have unlimited vRAM resources.

Even right-sizing VMs still hurt on cost and when you throw in all the DR systems setting idled, it’s going to get expensive there is no way around it!

I'm interested in how vBlock UCS plays a role in this now, the flexible Cisco B230 M1 caps out at 256Gb, M2 512gb, so that’s one ESXi host so 2-3 per cluster and the vRAM Cost vs VM ratio will still not work out at 40:1 - M1 - 6gigs per VM with one host (not to mention the risk and having to have other systems with these specs for HA (vmotion/DRS))! Take SharePoint and SQL deployments (core business apps) cost will sky rocket!

You will have exceptions but the exception shouldn't become your license norm which equals dollars!

@Anyone

Can someone help me understand this better.. maybe i'm missing something.......?

UCS Blade Comparsions - look at the memory numbers - how can you justify buying this and doubling up on cost with VMware?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps10280/prod_models_comparison.html

That's just the example I was running through.  Let's say you have a pretty typical, recently shipped ucs chassis with 8 blades, 256g/blade, dual socket.  Ad let's say you are ultra conservative in sizing the environment and don't plan to use tps, memory compression, or ballooning for overcommitment.  You turn on admission control to enforce a one host failover policy, and only plan on using the remaining cluster capacity.  Cluster capacity for ram would be 256 * 7, or 1792 gigs.  You bought licenses under the 4.x model, so you have 16 processor licenses.  Let's say you picked enterprise plus, just to give vmware every benefit on the next calculation.  Your new vsphere5 licenses would cover 768gigs of ram, out of your cluster capacity of 1792 gigs  leaving you out of compliance by 1024 gigs.    You now need 22 more licenses.  Yay!  Now maritz would say, you probably aren't using all that ram yet, just pay us now for what you use today, and pay us tomorrow for what you need the day after tomorrow.  But you would not have bought all that ram if you weren't planning to use it within the fiscal year, so you've only got 2 options. 1.  Put 2/3 of the virtualization project off until next year and hope the licenses make it through the next budget cycle 2. Talk management into paying a huge, unbudgeted vtax to save your project.   Or there is an option 3, hold tight on 4.1 for the life of the environment.  I just don't take that option seriously, since as the rest of the stack evolves over time compatibility issues will take out the environment.  Nw guest os releases, firmware, storage, etc.

I would object to your conclusion.  This is not moving VMware license cost "up a notch".  Up a notch would be double their existing per license costs and leaving the old model in place.  This increase is huge and will scale up as you add ram to physical servers.

(enterprise plus license model)

2 CPU server with 512GB ram = 2 (ver 4) licenses

2 CPU server with 512GB ram = 10 (ver 5) licenses

Removing list cost from the picture that is an increase of 400% over the old license model.  400% is NOT a notch.

Doubling the list cost of each license would have doubled the cost for any VMware implementation but would have protected existing customers with maintenance.  As it is what I could run yesterday with version 4 is a pale comparison to what I can run tomorrow on 5.  After paying maintenance on the product VMware is stripping me of capability during the upgrade process.

So is anyone looking at upgrading? I haven't really seen any big benefits for us (at least until Apple changes their licensing model).  We have four 2 cpu servers with 148gb of RAM in them, with the new model I'd have to buy at least 1 more license for each server.  For what? I guess we'll stay at vSphere 4...

As a small shop we're in the same boat. We have 3x2 socket boxes with 144GB memory each. We'd have to buy another THREE Ent Plus licenses to utilize the full 144GB and another SIX licenses to utilize the full capacity of the servers. I'm going to stay at vSphere 4 while I test Hyper-V and other products.

I will be testing alternatives for virtualization. I cannot continue to patronize a company that introduces a licensing model that blatantly targets customers deploying 2 CPU, 256GB RAM servers or even larger. This would require at least twice the licensing for an upgrade to vSpere 5. VMware's marketing has made it clear that their customers owe them a percentage of their virtualization savings from now on.

I disagree. If VMware wants to cash in on my company, they need to buy stock in it like everyone else.

**Note to VMware moderators--please don't respond to this post with comments that I don't understand and that I need to "right size" my environment because I don't get it. I am a VCP with over 5 years of VMware experience. I get it, but VMware will not "get it" from me.

We''ll i've just had a customer cancell a massive order for Vsphere enterprise+ due to the new Vmware licensing scheme.

Congratulations Vmware you just gave the opposition a massive advantage!

This would be like Apple putting the price of the Iphone up 500%, who would benifit? Google and MS and all of a sudden Iphone sales would plummet.

Also had another customer complain and I had to recommend that they dont renew their Enterprise systems license which expires soon, more $$$ lost for vmware.

What the hell were they thinking???????????????????

This probably is a very good lesson for most of us for putting all eggs in one basket. I for one would definetely going to start eval'ing Hyper-V as a potential candidate for future workload consolidation. MS has traditionally been very good at coming out with a less than perfect product and then working on improving it with SP1...etc and I think hyper-V now has gotten a lot better.

This will hurt VMware...... (if anyone has any stocks in Vmware... now is the time to sell i'd say.....)

Yes Sir, I agree with that, nothing is last forever :-)

ChanEK wrote:

This will hurt VMware...... (if anyone has any stocks in Vmware... now is the time to sell i'd say.....)

FYI, they're actually in the green today.  Granted this is going to hurt many and it is a shot in the nuts to people that have purchased hardware based around VMware licensing.

I really wish they would either raise the vRAM limits OR take away the CPU & vRAM limits coupled together.  If they're going to charge for "utilization" then I shouldn't be paying for the CPU licenses on standby hosts sitting idle.  At least if those two metrics weren't coupled together people could get creative to find ways to save but if you keep your CPU counts exactly the same then it can only stay the same or go up, there is no option to go lower.

We're probably the rare case of an organization that will not have an impact from the licensing, but it didn't save us either as that option doesn't exist for anybody.

However, my largest concern was VDI licensing and I assumed they were going to kill their VDI solution but the vSphere Desktop licensing model actually cuts our costs in half.

Perhaps there is a different angle to this?

You've heard of wintel, perhaps this is the start of vimtel.

Under ESX4 its been cost effective to increase your density with 12 core AMD CPUs over the 6 core Intel.

With ESX5 a Enterprise Plus license you only get 48GB vRAM per CPU making an allocation of;

AMD 4GB/core

Intel 8Gb/core

Assuming a 1/5 over physical allocation in a blade config your 8 cpus will effectively have 60Gb vRAM each capping your per core to;

AMD 5GB/core

Intel 10GB/core

I've seen a lot of enviroments move towards AMD in the last 12 months to reduce the cost of physical hardware, licensing and power, the savings have been substantial.

Before you ask, I do not work for any of the companies involved, I have no inside information.

I'm just basing this on the fact that having a very dense enviroment under vmware is no longer as good as it used to be and Intel have got a hsitory of playing dirty.

Ashley16 wrote:

Perhaps there is a different angle to this?

You've heard of wintel, perhaps this is the start of vimtel.

Under ESX4 its been cost effective to increase your density with 12 core AMD CPUs over the 6 core Intel.

With ESX5 a Enterprise Plus license you only get 48GB vRAM per CPU making an allocation of;

AMD 4GB/core

Intel 8Gb/core

Assuming a 1/5 over physical allocation in a blade config your 8 cpus will effectively have 60Gb vRAM each capping your per core to;

AMD 5GB/core

Intel 10GB/core

I've seen a lot of enviroments move towards AMD in the last 12 months to reduce the cost of physical hardware, licensing and power, the savings have been substantial.

Before you ask, I do not work for any of the companies involved, I have no inside information.

I'm just basing this on the fact that having a very dense enviroment under vmware is no longer as good as it used to be and Intel have got a hsitory of playing dirty.

Joked with a friend about this too, he linked me this:

http://vmwareintelalliance.com/

Important note:

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this, but when calculating the new licensing requirements remember this is active vRAM (not physical RAM in each host). Why does that matter?  Well, you are surely not overcommiting on every host. What about HA?  You are going to leave capacity for at least one host failure, or two. Therefore don't think you need to purchase enough vRAM licenses for every host at full commitment.

In regards to VDI / VMware View environments, these are typically the ones with the most vRAM with hundreds or thousands of Window 7 VM's. But VMware View licensing includes vSphere for Desktops and you don't have limits on the number of ESXi hosts or vRAM as you license per user.

Ray Heffer wrote:

but when calculating the new licensing requirements remember this is active vRAM (not physical RAM in each host). Why does that matter?  Well, you are surely not overcommiting on every host. What about HA?  You are going to leave capacity for at least one host failure, or two. 

It is true that you would leave room for perhaps one HA failure and keep the memory load on about 75% on the hosts, depending on the number of hosts in the cluster. But, that would be physical memory on the host. We still do not know how much vRAM that is given to the guests, which very well could be far above the physical memory limit and taken care of by the TPS.

Another important note:

It is based on vRam "Allocated", not active or consumed ram.

So does this means if that I do not have enough license, I won't be able to allocate the additional physical memory capacity into my VMs ?

what a waste :-|

The whole issue that this isn't that bad because most of us don't use all of our physical ram is pointless.  If I own the hardware I want the option of using the hardware whenever I want.  Would you purchase a hard drive and then license it per GB?  Most of us don't fill up the HD because it hurts peformance.  You always have some free space on the HD so why not license it per GB used.  The reason is that when the time comes that you need to unzip an ISO or something like that you need the extra space and you don't want to have to purchase a software license to be able to use the hardware you already own.

If I own the hardware I want to be able to use the hardware whenever I want and for whatever I want.

It is quite apparent that VMWare has ruffled a lot feathers. Just by the length of this post, it is apparent there is alot of unknowns and uncertenties. This in my oppinion was a bad business decision that I feel they will regret. Human nature is if people are unsure about something, they will stay away from or second guess the need of using the product. I can see it happening in my company. That is too bad since I really believe in the product. however,  believing in the product, having total faith in it is not enough to keep it in a datacenter. Every business around the world knows we are all as a society going thru financial turmoil. This is not the time to add to the problem. Just my .02.

On the plus side I was fretting over next years problem of upgrading the real estate to V5, but this license change means I'll stay 4.1ESX & 4.6View. And if after a year I haven't had a need to call support, because I've made all the changes I'm likely to (aka being in cookie cutter mode), I will then not renew VM support. As such, this could actually save me budget. Thx VM, finally you'll start saving me bucks ^_-

View 5's licensing isn't changing. It will stay as it is today. This is a very good thing.

At yesterday's VMUG I had the chance to talk with some VMware people. It is their opinion that VMware should have removed the CPU socket from the way it's going to be licensed. Or at least word it better. Icstead of X vRAM/CPU it should X vRAM blocks purchased. If the pricing was done correctly, I think people would have less issue with the shift.

Such as:

Today: x CPU licenses limited to y core count per host.

Tomorrow: z vRAM allocation unlimited by host, CPU, or core count. Or put the cap on how many VMs you can have running in the cluster. Similar to how View is licensed now.

Prices should at least be stable for your current environment. But if you change host servers, you might need to get more vRAM allotments purchased.

IMO, VMware either needs to revamp the new licensing model, or at least word it better. Remove the ties to CPU socket count. At least for the purchased editions, or at the very least Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

golddiggie wrote:

View 5's licensing isn't changing. It will stay as it is today. This is a very good thing.

At yesterday's VMUG I had the chance to talk with some VMware people. It is their opinion that VMware should have removed the CPU socket from the way it's going to be licensed. Or at least word it better. Icstead of X vRAM/CPU it should X vRAM blocks purchased. If the pricing was done correctly, I think people would have less issue with the shift.

Such as:

Today: x CPU licenses limited to y core count per host.

Tomorrow: z vRAM allocation unlimited by host, CPU, or core count. Or put the cap on how many VMs you can have running in the cluster. Similar to how View is licensed now.

Prices should at least be stable for your current environment. But if you change host servers, you might need to get more vRAM allotments purchased.

IMO, VMware either needs to revamp the new licensing model, or at least word it better. Remove the ties to CPU socket count. At least for the purchased editions, or at the very least Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

You're looking over the vSphere 5 desktop edition sir.  It is actually going to cut our VDI costs in half.

And as exactly discussed in your usergroup meeting the CPU count should be removed if they are running the vRAM model to get people for utilization.  The worst part about this new scheme is the "best case scenario" is that your organization will pay exactly what they are paying now but less isn't an option if you're maintaining the same hardware.

slaclair wrote:

golddiggie wrote:

View 5's licensing isn't changing. It will stay as it is today. This is a very good thing.

At yesterday's VMUG I had the chance to talk with some VMware people. It is their opinion that VMware should have removed the CPU socket from the way it's going to be licensed. Or at least word it better. Icstead of X vRAM/CPU it should X vRAM blocks purchased. If the pricing was done correctly, I think people would have less issue with the shift.

Such as:

Today: x CPU licenses limited to y core count per host.

Tomorrow: z vRAM allocation unlimited by host, CPU, or core count. Or put the cap on how many VMs you can have running in the cluster. Similar to how View is licensed now.

Prices should at least be stable for your current environment. But if you change host servers, you might need to get more vRAM allotments purchased.

IMO, VMware either needs to revamp the new licensing model, or at least word it better. Remove the ties to CPU socket count. At least for the purchased editions, or at the very least Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

You're looking over the vSphere 5 desktop edition sir.  It is actually going to cut our VDI costs in half.

And as exactly discussed in your usergroup meeting the CPU count should be removed if they are running the vRAM model to get people for utilization.  The worst part about this new scheme is the "best case scenario" is that your organization will pay exactly what they are paying now but less isn't an option if you're maintaining the same hardware.

I think the issue is that VMWare wants a piece of both pies: people that rely on RAM, and people that rely on CPU, so they're trying to choke both at the same time.

Finally...... Our effort to give VMware a reality check with these unrealistically low vRAM limits may be paying off...

The (potentially) new licensing limits would make Ent 64 and Ent plus 96GB with a CAP of 96GB per VM regardless of the vRAM allocated???

Sounds a little fairer than the current (ridiculous) model?? if this is true, I can now start looking more in to vSphere 5 now

http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/impending-vmware-vsphere-50-license.html

Any vExpert / VMware moderator want to confirm whether this is tru or gospell??

I have seen that rumour as well but I not read anything yet that confirms it.

Pete

------

www.liquidwarelabs.com

www.thevirtualheadline.com

Well my supplier / reseller just called vmware are announcing it tomorrow

Lets wait and see if the figures are correct

Sent from my iPhone

I just came across this article saying the same thing, that an announcement was coming this Wendesday.

http://www.crn.com/news/data-center/231003052/vmware-set-to-unveil-vsphere-5-licensing-changes-again.htm

Pete

------

www.liquidwarelabs.com

www.thevirtualheadline.com

Rejoice people, VMware is changing their licensing scheme now: http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/vmware-changes-vram-licensing-on-vsphere-5-after-customer-feedback-on-vtax/

I just recieved an email as well from VMware outlining the vRAM entitlement changes. I put up a summary on my blog site as well.

Pete

-------

www.liquidwarelabs.com

www.thevirtualheadline.com

Yes, just read mine.... Essentially VM have taken away my right to 256G per VM, then gave me back 48G per VM, and are now trumpeting the fact they have generously raised it to 96G. C'mon guys ¬_¬ all of this ill will just to get Cloud Providers and Super Enterprises to pay more... it's a PR disaster.

They can't have their cake and eat it too. It should either be an all vRAM based license or a CPU based license, not a highly restrictive combination of the two. As it stands, this new scheme is a vTAX on scale-up, but not quite as expensive as scale-out. Really the only people this benefits are the larger cloud providers who tend to deploy scale-out deployments (yes those 100+ host farms) not the vast majority of VMWare customers who are scale-up (more ram, fewer hosts higher consolidation ratios).

It's going to be a very hard sell to upper management that the benefits of vsphere5 are worth the near doubling  of costs. The magic number from what I can tell is 75% for memory utilization. Once you go past that with 128GB dual socket hosts then your costs rise significantly.

I for one think that at a bare minimum, the Ent+ memory limit should be raised to 64 if not 96GB per CPU. This would cover the vast majority of the scale-up customer base who are building blades with dual sockets and 128GB of RAM or 2U boxes like the 3950X5's from IBM with 192GB of RAM.

Gabriel Chapman wrote:

8GB hard limit essentially makes ESXi a non-starter for using it as a platform for anything other than feature testing. Its simply going to be a test drive version instead of something you can use for home labs, test/dev.

Where did you find the 8 GB ram limit?

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

I can only assume this is new since it is using the new vRAM term. Uncool.

They could of at least provided some vLube prior to the announcement.

LOL! :smileylaugh:

I missed that one on reading up on the vSphere 5 licensing change. Wow only an 8 GB entitlement for vSphere Hypervisor. I would agree that makes it only usueful for feature testing or maybe hosts with a few VMs.

www.thevirtualheadline.com

VMware has been very successful in marketed the ability of ESX to make the most effective use of hardware (memory and CPU) and this has allowed them to become the leader.   It now appears they want to cash in on the popularly the product has generated but, the thing they have missed is that companies have been holding off the “accounting” types because we have been able to keep lowering TCO by pushing more and more VMs on to servers with more and more memory and faster and faster CPUs.   If our costs of  vSphere 5 go way up we are going to be forced to move to other solutions (Microsoft) even if it’s not the best solution because in the end TOC wins (remember we also pay maintenance every year to keep new version of the product coming too)…...  I also hope things change because right now I know our View VDI infrastructure is dead because of how we have been using over allocations of memory to make to the costs per desktop work.  

Please take 2 minutes of your time to fill out this vSphere 5 migration survey:
http://wuffers.net/2011/07/18/vsphere-5-migration-survey

We need more data! Results will be posted in the main vSphere 5 licensing thread over at VMTN:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/320877

I have a question, and I would like to haven an answer

At this moment I'm running 2 hosts with each 1 quadcore CPU and 96 gb of memory.

At this moment thes hosts run with a Vsphere 4 stanard license.

These hosts are running all VM's containing Oracel Enterprise Linux with on top of it Oracle DBMS

All these VM's have one thing in common huge memory usage.

With the new licensing of Vpshere 5 we've got an big issue.

I may use only 48 gb for VM's and that is to less for my environment.

Instead of ht whole 192 gb of memory.

I know that I'm not going to use the complete 192 gb but 96 gb is the sweet spot for me.

Please advice me how i can use Vsphere 5 in de futur without any extra investment.

If this is not possible then VMware turns his back towards client who run Oracle DBMS on VMware products

Exaclty the same way Oracle does against client that run Oracle DBMS on Vmware in a licensing way.

Regards

Marcel

Even if 95% won't pay more for their licensing today, that is probably because at least half won't move to v5, today.

Within a year I would have thought that 80% would be paying more (or have started at least a move elsewhere).

If your vSphere 5 upgrade or upcoming projects would be adversely affected by licensing changes contact your VMware or partner sales ASAP.  Don't just complain about vSphere licensing changes on blogs, forums & Twitter; talk to VMware weal real number's if it negatively impacts you.  They are listening to feedback.  Will it cause them to change anything? Who knows but they are listening and discussing it internally.

Here is reality:

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, I can't even use all of it if I upgrade to V5.

Another PAID customer gone....   Thanks to the EMC mentality...

timarbour wrote:

Here is reality:

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, I can't even use all of it if I upgrade to V5.

Another PAID customer gone....   Thanks to the EMC mentality...

I have a coworker that has dealt with EMC takeovers before (they keep ruining products we're interested in), he says it's likely they're running VMWare into the ground to rebrand it.

Pure speculation, but the license changes support it, there is no way people are paying 5-6x as much as they can get XenServer for, especially with XenServer 6 coming out.

Emc rebranded their network discovery product under vmware. I don't think they're trying to ruin the brand.

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The new licensing model really willing impact the high density deployment customers.   VMware may just beleive the low density depolyment customers will generate the most revenue for them and they don't care the high density customers.   They may also just beleive the high denstity customers have no other way to go but just must stay with them.

Citrix and Microsoft should be extreamely happy at this moment because it's the time they have been waiting years.  Thank you for balance the market.  :smileylaugh:

As the lics issue has been ground down pretty hard, I'll just add one other point: Although VM say they have no upper limit on physcial ram in the box, the hardware manufacturer do. Wasn't I surprised when HP told me I could no longer order a DL380G7 with 256G ram, as they would now only support 192G ram config (heat issues). My point being we may not, in some circumstances, even be able to take advanatge of the unlimited P-ram option of V5 lic, which takes away one of its few advantages.