vSphere 5.x Licensing – Awesome (if you’re rich)
July 13, 2011
VMware just released the vSphere 5.x licensing details.
When I originally created this post, I was mistaken, and had a good deal of inaccurate information. In the interest of clarifying the vSphere 5.x licensing information, here are some excerpts from the PDF linked to above:
vSphere 5.0 licensing removes all restrictions on physical cores
and physical RAM
We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based
entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere
configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory
configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created,
it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM)
available to the virtual machine. 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. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity
can be distributed among virtual machines: a customer can
configure many small virtual machines or one large virtual machine.
The entitled vRAM is a fungible resource configured to meet
customer workload requirements.
vRAM entitlements can be shared among multiple
hosts. There are no restrictions on how vRAM is consumed
across virtual machines and CPUs. At any given point in time,
the amount of vRAM consumed by active virtual machines on
a CPU could exceed the base entitlement of the vSphere 5.0
license assigned to that CPU. As long as the total consumed
vRAM across all virtual machines managed by a VMware vCenter
instance or multiple linked VMware vCenter instances is less or
equal to the total available vRAM, vSphere is correctly licensed.
Creating the vRAM Pool
For this example, a user has two 2-CPU hosts that they wish to
license with vSphere Enterprise edition. Note that the vRAM
entitlement for vSphere Enterprise is 32GB per CPU. Each physical
CPU requires a license, so a minimum of four vSphere Enterprise
licenses are required. More licenses will be required if the user needs
to use more vRAM than the 4 x 32GB = 128GB of vRAM that is
entitled with the four licenses. So far the user has yet to create any
virtual machines, so 128GB of vRAM is more than adequate. In sum,
the user purchases and deploys four licenses of vSphere Enterprise,
yielding a vRAM capacity of 128GB of vRAM
Also, here are the price points for the various licenses:
So, I apologize for the miscommunication before, and I’ll try not to let something that grievous happen again
Posted in System Administration, Virtualization
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July 13th, 2011 at 11:48 am
Having just purchased and set up vSphere 4 a couple months ago, I’m feel that the rug has been pulled out from under me. I’m not sure how I’ll be explaining to management that after spending tens of thousands of dollars on vSphere licenses that we need to go spend several thousand more to upgrade to vSphere 5 because the license changed. All the hype about facilitating chargeback for VM’s doesn’t help me, as we don’t do chargeback.
July 13th, 2011 at 12:13 pm
I am utterly against the new license model, but I wanted to correct one thing There is no specific license per vCPU – only the same limitation of “x” vCPU’s based on edition. In vSphere Enterprise Plus 5.x, this is up to 32 vCPUs per VM. I’m using that same PDF to establish this.
The specific change is the vRAM model, which is disgusting for individual customers who have no purpose for chargebacks, etc. Equally, I’m seeing some “cloud” vendors who are also saying they’ll be hurt by it.
This is an unabashed money grab by VMWare, and if it weren’t for the features of Enterprise Plus that we actively use to a great degree, I’d think of moving away. As it stands, I may have to think twice before exercising my upgrade entitlements. I may not be able to afford it!
July 13th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
And that’s when I decided that using Xen made much more sense.
July 13th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Chuck – Please make sure to re-read the post.
July 13th, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Wow. I really feel like I dodged a bullet moving from VI 3.5 to XenCenter a year or two ago. They wanted to retroactively charge us for a year of lapsed maintenance in order to get vSphere 4 licenses. In effect, we were getting a worse deal than we would have as a new customer, so it prompted us to reset our strategy on virtualization.
July 13th, 2011 at 1:19 pm
Yes, I really don’t see how this won’t affect a majority of customers, either immediately or within a very short time period. The majority of users, small or large, will not enjoy the “memory cap” now installed. If they simply charged for the memory in blocks and no processor, we might have something that works pretty well, but by putting BOTH a processor and a memory block assigned to a license, it annoys everyone. The customer who builds smaller server will be annoyed since he will feel he is not getting his money’s worth since he won’t hit the memory he is permitted, and the customer who builds the larger higher memory server will be annoyed because he will have to pay for multiple licenses when he used to only pay for one, and he will have lots of leftover processor license components. All servers will have to be built to the sweet spots in order to get max license usage and not have leftover memory or processor vRam or Processors.
From this point forward, a server will need to have no more than 48 gigs of RAM per processor (so a dual socket processor will have 96gigs, and you should build a 4 processor machine if you want to put in 192, and for now that’s where you should probably stop, since a 256gig machine would require at least 2 more licenses and would leave you with 2 proc licenses leftover).
And for a smaller customer, who usually buy dual processor servers, even if using standard edition or essentials or essentails plus, should use 48 gigs of ram, not 32 and certainly not 64. And always max out the cores, 6 / 8 / 12, since there is no limit.
But for many customers who build to the 4.x licensing, they are screwed. I would sat that 90% of my customers are going to be paying more, because they break out of that sweet spot range because we tend to build high memory per server. Even my smaller customers who might use standard edition are using 32 gigs of ram today, so they would have to double their license count per host to keep using what they have, or yank memory out of each box to get below 24 gigs.
let’s see what happens, but we will all be rewriting specs and probably going to a lower density of vm’s per host in order to compensate….if they don’t come to the conclusion to migrate away to someone else (most likely Xenserver at this time).
July 13th, 2011 at 9:11 pm
I think I’m pissed about this. I have two Dell R610s with 64GB of RAM two days from being delivered and I just ordered my first VMWare bundle, the Essentials Plus bundle to build our first virtual environment outside of a single esxi free host.
Basically I’m getting jobbed out of 16GB of RAM per server if I upgrade, which I will have to do whenever they EOL 4.X. I’m thinking I may have my rep at CDW-G stop the VMWare order at this point and look at Xen.
I hate software companies.
July 17th, 2011 at 6:14 pm
Ian – you get 144GB pooled with Essentials + so as long as you do not go over that you will be fine. Another way to say it is you can allocate 72GB per server for powered on vm’s
Still it is just blatant and absolute greed the way they are doing this!
August 2nd, 2011 at 5:38 am
A little late on this one, but initially I didn’t think we’d be affected too badly by this money-grab. As it turns out we could be up for a $10k hit just to stay compliant.
I think VMWare have taken a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the foot with this one. Even if they pull the new license model (possible as it’s not ‘released’ yet) a lot of people will have started looking at alternatives and many will have found them. Next go round the life-cycle I think VMWare will notice a drop in renewals.
Personally I’m a little down about all this. I’ve supported ESX environments since v1.5; it has formed a valuable experiance asset and currently still is….but how long for? I’ve no objections to learning about new hypervisors, it’s just a bit frustrating that it’s all triggered by a badly thought out money-grab.
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