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NetJunkie has probably seen this as well, but over the last year companies have finally started to open their wallets for IT projects that have been sitting on the back burner during the recession. However, unlike years ago, they're not simply signing off on every purchase order you send their way. They want to sit down and scrutinize almost every item to justify whether or not they need to spend the money or not. Gone are the days of money being blindly thrown at IT projects. Everyone, from the top down, wants to save do more with less.
With VMware's massive price hike, they're quite possibly pricing themselves out of the market. While VMware may be the "BMW" or "Mercedes" of the virtualization world, there comes a point when any business is going to ask themselves "I can still get to where I need to go with the Ford Taurus. Why am I spending 5 times as much for the BMW?"
Lol...good analogy, but i'm not talking about the "bells and whistles." I'm talking about the core product. VMware, at the core, is simply a better product.
Believe me when I tell you I know all about PO's not being sighned off. I'm showing a $70k savings by going to UCS and it's still being held at the senior management level because it's not showing that savings in a quarter and there's an obvious initial investment. They don't care about a &70k savings because to them, it's only a $35k savings each quarter....i'm a tech guy so I refuse to understand that logic...lol.
Anyway, you also have the key partnerships that VMware has, especially with CISCO, obviously EMC..etc. They have positioned themselves quite well with these partnerships and enabling them to become the PREMIER solution to the cloud providers. As companies accelerate that journey they are not going to be buying services running XEN or Hyper-V, they will be buying services managed/running VMware software at the core.
This also goes for small businesses, because, too me, the SMB market really makes sense to move to the cloud. I'm not saying they do not have the same concerns but most SMB's to do not have Enterprise level data and data size to contend with.
So I took some time to look over our envrionments this morning to see how it will affect us. As of right now it won't cost us anymore but it might actually save us some money depending on a few things...
We don't have RAM dense machines. A big chunk of our ESXi Servers are PowerEdge 2950's 2 sockets with 32gb of ram each.
Our new servers we purchase are R610's with two sockets, 48gb of ram right now with room for up to another 48gb of ram.
So we will only get into issues with our R610 servers but we have a lot of capicity in our office because of the 2950's.
Here is a breakdown
Our office environment currently has a pCPU count of 26 giving us 832gb of vRAM
Our prod environment currently has a pCPU count of 10 giving us 320gb of vRAM
Now my big question is, when I deploy vSphere 5 will it still have any ties to pCPU counts? Because for our office environment under vSphere 5 licenses only needs 1 socket license per host now to hit the RAM requirements.
As of right now with vSphere 5 I would have an overhead of 544GB in our office. It would be nice to move some of that to our PROD vCenter server.
Yes, you still need to license each socket.
If your Office and Prod environment are both using the same vSphere edition then all your licenses will combine into one big vRAM pool you can use for any host.
Now my big question is, when I deploy vSphere 5 will it still have any ties to pCPU counts? Because for our office environment under vSphere 5 licenses only needs 1 socket license per host now to hit the RAM requirements.
As of right now with vSphere 5 I would have an overhead of 544GB in our office. It would be nice to move some of that to our PROD vCenter server.
Got my VCP5 beta exam invite.
Be sure to memorize all the questions and shoot them to me in an email .
Script to check how the licensing might affect you:
http://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/
2. My customers don't see things like DRS, HA, SRM, Storage DRS, etc to be simple bells and whistles. Those are the features that let them virtualize their Tier 1 critical systems.
3. My customers ALWAYS look at their options, it's just that the other options can't offer what they consider to be fundamental features to meet their requirements. In 3 years this will be a different discussion...just as it was with MS and Novell and that's my concern. The lower down in the market the more this will have an impact. I think increasing the vRAM per license a bit would help this.
4. It sucks for home lab configurations. This is one thing I keep pushing for. VMware needs a Technet-like program for people. VMware is REALLy REALLY good to the community. Very helpful, very open....the vExpert program is great, but there is nothing for people wanting to learn in the home lab. I'm continuing to push and I started a pretty good argument/discussion on Twitter last night about it.
I just watched a video on your blog that I guess you made at Cisco Live. You were nothing like I expected. Very ungeeky... I had this John Carmack type vision of you in my head. I am so disappointed you seem so normal -- now I'm going to have to rethink being seen with you in public.
4. It sucks for home lab configurations. This is one thing I keep pushing for. VMware needs a Technet-like program for people. VMware is REALLy REALLY good to the community. Very helpful, very open....the vExpert program is great, but there is nothing for people wanting to learn in the home lab. I'm continuing to push and I started a pretty good argument/discussion on Twitter last night about it.
Now that's not really fair. Over the last 3 years of me selling EMC products they have done nothing but push pricing DOWN. Licenses for things like RecoverPoint/SE are a FRACTION of what they used to be. Same with Avamar...same with Data Domain after the acquisition. They bring out technologies/features like FAST VP that allow me to deliver a storage to a customer for 1/3 less money than without those features.
EMC doesn't tell VMware what to do. This was a VMware decision.
I'm confused, how does that let us allocate more than 8GB vRAM?Don't worry about the home lab. Just keep applying Eval licenses every 60 days. That's what I was told to do on the Twitter-fest last night.
I'm confused, how does that let us allocate more than 8GB vRAM?
That would work assuming there is no hard limit during eval. I've never actually let the 60 days expire before, how do you apply an "eval" license again?You get the full-blown features until the trial expires, which is the 24 GB per socket.
That would work assuming there is no hard limit during eval. I've never actually let the 60 days expire before, how do you apply an "eval" license again?
AFAIK when you download it gives you a key, but you don't have to enter it until the 60 days is up. After you enter it, you are stuck in the free version, with 8GB vRAM. I'm still confused.I believe when you DL it and put the trial key that's given, it automagically gives you the 60 day trial...........nothing extra needed if memory serves me.
<snipped for brevity> Most of us our running our own internal clouds, if we wanted to pay per virtual guest, we wouldn't roll our own clouds, we'd go buy space from a vendor that offers it.
A question. How many of you have actually run the powershell scripts to see what licensing requirements for your actual work deployments is going to be?
So far, I've found ~one~ (out of 30 major environments) that required more licenses for current utilization. Most required the same, and a couple required less than they currently have, given that they have DR sites that can pool the vRAM over to prod (light use ftw).
Honest question. Have you run them to see? Remember, you only want 75-80% utilization for HA to work as well as it should and have capacity for system loss... Especially on RAM.
Paste the output if you have, vs what you're currently running. Lets just say that I find the licensing ... "odd"... and I'm trying to see what the real world says about true usage.
I didn't run a script, I did it all manually. I then verified it by having 2 others recheck my numbers. We're all eplus, so it was simple math. The hard part was taking a look at VMs that *might* come on, vs currently powered on, vs templates that stupidly show up in the host and clusters virtual machine listing :>.
We came out OK, not ahead, but just 'OK'. We don't have the highest or lowest consolidation ratios.
You have any idea how much this 'controversy' would be alleviated by simply decoupling the licensing from the pCPUs. Even without increasing the vRAM entitlement? I think that should be upped too, but VMware should focus the licensing around the virtual machines. Having the licensing tied to any physical component makes no sense for you guys. That would add tons of flexibility and still increase revenue.
So I just got off the phone with one my companies customers. Fixing a couple things with their backups of the VMs and such. We got to talking about the new licensing, they are running a UCS system with I believe he said 2 blades with 2 physical cpus with 12 cores and 192GB of ram in each blade. They are running enterprise licensing right now. So, assuming they were not over provisioning at all on memory, they would need 12 licenses in v5 licensing compared to 4 licenses in v4 licenses. Is this really correct?
Depends. Are they using that much RAM? Are they maxing both blades or are they only using 50% so they can fail over? You only pay for what you USE.
Depends. Are they using that much RAM? Are they maxing both blades or are they only using 50% so they can fail over? You only pay for what you USE.
I believe it is based on how much you actually provision for VMs, it's not even how much you are really 'consuming' by the VM's it is by how much you are provisioning. Please do correct me if I have read that wrong.
I guess my real point on the 12 licenses versus the 4 licenses was that in order to be able to even think about utilizing as much vRam as they have physical ram they would have to have 12 licenses where as today with v4 they only need 4 licenses.
In general, most environments don't run hosts at 100% - no failover capacity. So when you add another host, additional licenses are required, and now you have more vRAM capacity as well.And if they don't use it all right now, they will have to factor in the license cost to use the rest of their already purchased hardware that would have been free under the previous model.
VMware would have been smart to announce this license model 6 months ago so people knew not to purchase more than 24-48GB per socket.