Big VMware Announcement!

wow, the new licensing model will be a punch in the throat to our 256GB R810 builds that are heavily populated..
 
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?"
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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 signed 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.
 
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Vader said:
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.
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Even when you forget about the add-on products, vSphere 5 is going to cost an arm and a leg. How many companies are going to shrug their shoulders and pay VMware 200-400% more for VMware? Zero. They're all going to look for ways to reduce costs. This could be done by bringing in a competing product to use for Test and Dev, such as Hyper-V. It could be by moving boxes back to physical machines or canceling plans to virtualize some servers.

In any case, VMware loses and the competition wins. Hyper-V and Citrix may not have the features that VMware has, but when push comes to shove, for many shops they might just be "good enough" when you compare the massive licensing costs of vSphere 5. As the competition gains more traction in the market place they're going to release more features and close the gap with VMware.

vSphere 5 was VMware's chance to further their lead in the virtualization market. Instead, they handed MS and Citrix a big win by alienating their customers.
 
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.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
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.
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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.
 
I'm not going to go through and quote all the messages I'm about to address. I'm tired (still at Cisco Live) and sitting in a good "Interconnecting Data Centers" session...so I don't have the attention span. :)

1. I see a lot of numbers thrown around on increase in licensing. So far most of the models I'm seeing range from "the same, to 20% or 30%" more...not double or anything like that. Are there cases where it could double? Absolutely. But I think those are edge cases.

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 don't think it's the "end of days" catastrophe that some are claiming but I'm not a fan. A big reason I'm not a fan is that it complicates the sizing and design process. I hate licensing anyway...and this puts it in your face when you are trying to size and design a new environment. I also wish they had included a stripped down version of CapIQ so you could see your VM allocation and usage.
 
Child of Wonder said:
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.
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Figured as much, unfortunately our office and prod environments are completely independent of each other and this will bite us when it comes to licensing.

We have two separate vCenter servers running in non-linked mode. The Active Directory sites are completely independent. :(
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
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.
Click to expand...

A 2-socket box will still need two licenses.
 
defuseme2k said:
Be sure to memorize all the questions and shoot them to me in an email :D :D.
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I don't think I'm going to take it. It's live NOW and goes to the 24th. I don't have time to deal with that right now while preparing for VMworld and some other projects.
 
NetJunkie said:
Script to check how the licensing might affect you:

http://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/
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That would help if I were allowed to use it :p. I should just copy and paste the text and say that I wrote it personally, haha.

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. :)
 
NetJunkie said:
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.
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You are absolutely right. Some of these features are required in our environment. Without them our virtualization efforts would not have gone as far as they have.


NetJunkie said:
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.
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If they are going on a vRAM licensing model then they need remove the socket portion of it. Base it strictly on vRAM or base it strictly on sockets. Don't do both.


NetJunkie said:
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. :)
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I agree completely. Something similar to Technet would be great. For those like me where you work with these technologies in a production environment it would be nice to be able to setup a home lab for learning purposes since you don't want to be learning on your production environment. Cisco should really do this as well.
 
defuseme2k said:
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. :)
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Yeah, he doesn't appear as geeky as you would think. I met NetJunkie a couple of years ago. He was selling me a lower receiver for and AR15 so I guess it is hard to look too geeky when you are dealing with guns.
 
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.
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Something that I haven't seen brought up here on [H] yet, free ESXi 5.x will be limited to 8GB vRAM. Absolutely destroys home/training labs. Rumor is that it is a hard limit, and not a "you have allotted more than licensed, you are bad"

From the FAQ last question.

To upgrade my home lab as it sits now it will either be $495 to have the same functionality, or $1800+ to start to play with HA features, or $3800 to have HA features between two hosts with more than 24GB ram.

ETA: if hyper-v can get opensolaris/Solaris11 working out of the box, they will take over home hypervisor use (not that it is a paying market, but it will help push hyper-v from the ground up)
 
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.
 
Thanks for the non-geek comments. ;) I hate myself on camera. I also did two interviews for Train Signal earlier that day and I just cringe at that stuff. They'll be online probably next week when we launch the new course.

Being a gun guy in IT is fun. :) I don't golf so I take people to like sporting clays. Already have the next one lined up...
 
NetJunkie said:
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.
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Joseph M. Tucci is the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of EMC Corporation AND Chairman of the Board of Directors of VMware Corporation. Yep no influence at all. ;)

Nothing personal NetJunkie. I am full of koolaide and refuse to drink anymore.
 
Will most organisations suck up the pricing? I reckon they will, and opt for cheaper hardware. It'll be interesting to see AMD server pricing in the near future.
 
shiznit said:
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?
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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.
 
MassiveOverkill said:
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.
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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.
 
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.
 
The problem is VMware been telling us for years that we're fine to overprovision memory without issues because it handles it, so we go and create guests to meet application vendors specs without complaints since we know it won't really use all of that memory anyway but if we need support on the application from the vendor, we can show that we meet the specs.

Now, VMware has changed its tune and told us that we should be "right sizing" our boxes and not using the overprovisioning features so much. I shouldn't have to worry about "right" sizing vRAM within my clusters as boxes become larger and larger and vendors require more and more RAM for their applications.

If they think pCPU and pRAM are the limited factors, then charge us for pCPU and pRAM, have add in packs for each, and we can "right size" our licensing for our physical boxes. But to change the licensing to match physical sockets and allocated virtual RAM is just a straight money grab, choose one or the other, either you license it per virtual guest or per physical host. 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.
 
ND40oz said:
<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.
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I am sitting here wondering if that may be part of the plan.. but I guess I am
just a conspiracy theorist. :rolleyes:

I say money grab too ... Unfortunately ... a lot of companies will be stuck to
paying for the new licenses as they have too much time/effort/money into
their current environment to jump ship.

Oh well.... I guess it is the price you pay the "best" if you want the "best".

My success at predicting the future is a complete and utter failure, so I am just
going to wait and see how this all plays out.
 
lopoetve said:
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.
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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.
 
I got to thinking about this even more... let me give you a real world example of how this could be beneficial.

Lets say during the day your vCPUs drive up causing contention, but at night, the usage goes way down, significantly down. At this point, you're leveraging DPM. If licensing were not tied to pCPUs, you could easily add hosts simply for lowering the consolidation ratios during the business hours, and then during the off hours (the larger part of the day) you could scale back much further. DPM works for this either way, but this gives MUCH more flexibility to the design by allowing more hosts without a pentalty.
 
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?
 
defuseme2k said:
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.
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Not arguing it at all, just trying to figure out how it's going to apply in the real world. I'm a tech guy, not a licensing guy.
 
AceXsmurF said:
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?
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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.
 
NetJunkie said:
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.
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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.
 
NetJunkie said:
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.
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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.
 
AceXsmurF said:
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.
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Powered off does not count against the limit. :)
 
adi said:
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.
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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.
 
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