When do you think companies will start using vsphere5?

chickenlicken09

Hi,

When do you think companies will start using vsphere5?

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cyberguypr

When they fix the stupid licensing model no one likes.

scott28tt

cyberguypr wrote: »

When they fix the stupid licensing model no one likes.

Actually, most customers are not affected by the new model at all, and have plenty of "headroom" to grow their VM population further.

Scott.

cyberguypr

scott28tt wrote: »

Actually, most customers are not affected by the new model at all, and have plenty of "headroom" to grow their VM population further.

Scott.

That is the exact same argument VMware is using. This excerpt from their boards sums up my point of view:

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

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

There are also many of these cases:

"We very recently bought $1M worth of hardware and $250k worth of VMware Enterprise Plus "entitlements" as a part of our $4M refresh. For some companies that is not a lot of money to invest in a datacenter refresh, however for our company that is a significant investment. I built the business case for standardizing on vSphere vs using the free XenServer or Hyper-V we had been using. I had to tell our CIO yesterday that we would not be entitled to use all of the new hardware we purchased without buying more licenses at some point. This did not go over very well at all."

There's a possibility the ones complaining are a very vocal minority which I'm part of, but without empirical data, how would we know that? If you have any details on this I'm all ears.

blargoe

It will affect smaller customers. If you don't see that, you are blind. The customers that are virtualizing highly transactional apps or other CPU-bound apps aren't affected as much, since they were already licensing a bunch of CPU's. It impacts the people virtualizing the more commodity VM's like file/print, AD, monitoring, test and dev environments a bit more.

I don't have a problem with the new model per se but I think they are using outdated numbers on which to base it. If a customer is shelling out big $$$ for Enterprise Plus, they are almost certain to be also shelling out $$$ for servers that have more than 96GB of RAM (for a 2 socket server). It's almost like they decided to use these ratios a year ago and haven't adjusted for whatever todays equivalent of Moore's Law is. For the folks buying Standard, you can't virtualize very much at all with 48GB (2 sockets x 24GB) anymore. Today's Microsoft OS and server apps are VERY memory hungry.

Zaits

Does anyone know how this works for over committed memory? Say I have 2 Enterprise Plus licenses that will give me 96GB that I can allocate to my VM's and I have a max of 96GB of Physical RAM to use. If I allocated more than 96GB of RAM to my VM's would I have to buy additional licenses?

blargoe

It's been confirmed that it's the amount you have configured per VM. If it's powered on, the amount of memory you have configured for it counts against the total.

Overhead memory doesn't appear to count against the total.

stevets

Using one of the licensing calculators that are floating around the blogosphere, one of our Senior Admins plugged in the appropriate info for our environment and it worked out to something like this:

Current Vsphere 4 Enterprise licensing cost: ~103,000

Vsphere 5 Enterprise Cost: ~155,000
Vsphere 5 Enterprise Plus Cost: ~125,000

Those numbers are correct.

Somehow moving up to Ent. Plus would be cheaper than maintaining Enterprise on 5. However, this still constitutes ~25% increase in licensing costs. Although I'm sure you could make the case for all of the additional entitlements that we did not have before...

ETA: We're running around 25 hosts; 2 sockets and 96GB of RAM per host. He assumed 100% physical RAM commitment when working out the vRAM allocation.

scott28tt

Out of interest, why did he assume 100% pRAM commitment for vRAM? Is that what you use today? Your actual pRAM commitment would typically be lower to cater for host failures with HA, and maintenance. Reducing the vRAM to something more realistic would obviously reduce the $$$ to something more in-line with your current license in most cases.

Tackle

eddo1 wrote: »

Hi,

When do you think companies will start using vsphere5?

Probably never. We started with Virtualization about 3 years ago. Now we are on ESXi 4.1. Our biggest server has 48GB ram.

Paying for these licenses is not going to go over well with management. (Unless vmware has a free version of 5 that will allow that much ram?).

Our company has only 50 employees. There is no way to justify the cost. Will probably look for cheaper alternatives eventually once ESXi 4.1 becomes outdated.

azjag

eddo1 wrote: »

Hi,

When do you think companies will start using vsphere5?

Still need to understand the new licensing model and how it affects our environment. we are currently going through a host refresh right now and that adds a level of confusion to the situation. The DL980's are 8 socket with 1tb of ram. Licensing has always been a headache with vmware.

I will probably upgrade our sandbox environment first and see how that turns out.