Big VMware Announcement!

What irks me is that although many customers may be able to upgrade to vSphere 5 without needing more licenses, most of them are stuck only being able to provision so much vRAM without buying more licenses where now they can provision to their heart's content.

Their initial cost to move to vSphere 5 may be nothing but they'll pay more down the road guaranteed (unless they never provision more VMs).

On top of that, when it comes to "right sizing" VMs, what about VMware's appliances? vShield, the new Linux vCenter, etc. all come in pre-packaged virtual appliances ready to go. It's in VMware's best interests for those appliances to come configured with more RAM than they actually need which will cause the customer to need more licenses.
 
Can somebody explain to me how the VSA will work. it is like a ZFS pool of all the disks? What happens if one disk fails? I am just confused about the method they use to pool and share all the local storage?
 
Does this new licensing remind anyone of say - data caps?

Sure for a considerable number of users (although I would not say that is the case with VMs) they are not likely to bump into the cap, but if you go over - be prepared to bend over! And if you are among those "few" bandwidth hogs you should be prepared to look for a new provider...

I dont know about you guys, but RAM is pretty cheap these days. One lucrative way to benefit from that is to license its use, as VMware has chosen. As a business critical service, I have to be sure my systems run exceptional all of the time, which means I must size my needs for worst case scenarios. Sure there is no hard cap (yet) for going over your vRAM allocation, but responsible businesses have to purchase enough licensing for all of their hardware, not just the percent being used currently. And unfortunately, because the processor license and vRAM are puchased together you cant have a pay-as-you-go type licensing that it seems VMware is trying to spin this as. This new model in no way benefits the customer - but as with data caps only lets us choose - bend over, or find a new provider?
 
AMD_Gamer said:
Can somebody explain to me how the VSA will work. it is like a ZFS pool of all the disks? What happens if one disk fails? I am just confused about the method they use to pool and share all the local storage?
Click to expand...

You can deploy the VSA on up to 3 hosts and it creates a logical array from those and will replicate data between them in case one host fails.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
So the total storage space is equal to one smallest HDD?
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I haven't used it yet but I'll have it real soon. The assumption is going to be that you are using hardware RAID in the server so you'll create a datastore over all the drives. Deploy the VSA with large VMDKs using the space and then it aggregates it.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
So are you guys excited about the Web based Client?
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Hopefully we aren't trading one shitty technology (java) for another shitty technology (Adobe Flex).

Maybe this will mean I can manage my environments from my mac!

EDIT-
Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.

Here's some screenshots
http://virtualisedreality.com/2011/07/15/vsphere-5-new-vsphere-web-client/
 
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.
Click to expand...

What happens to those same deployments 6-12 months from now? Sure, a lot of people might BARELY (90% of vRam entitlement allocated) be okay for now(and ONLY because of facts like DR sites), but their hosts can take more, a lot more VM's, usually limited only by RAM not CPU power. Not only that, but Ram will be cheaper, and CPU's will be more powerful.

As has been said before, alot of this would be solved by simply upping the vRam entitlement of each license some. My personal thought is it should be at minimum doubled(it was, after all "unlimited" in vSphere 4), but even a bump of 50% should sooth most of the most of the anger and issues.

[EDIT]
When I asked about the notion of a Moore's Law penalty based on every increasing RAM densities, Stephan and Farronato seemed to accept that effect, and felt that as hardware configurations increase in resources, VMware should also be paid more. I seriously doubt any of his customers are going to agree.
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LOL WAT? Intel, AMD, Samsung, IBM, Dell, Cisco, etc, etc. All sell new faster more capable hardware at relatively(after inflation) the same price each hardware upgrade cycle. Imagine if they had the same mindset, we'd be paying MILLIONS of dollars for that Nehalem Xeon CPU.

If Microsoft and Citrix were looking for a way to entice customers away from VMware, they were just handed one--in a Tiffany box, on a silver platter, all wrapped up and ready to serve.
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http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/operating_systems/231001638?pgno=2
 
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Top is our PROD site, bottom is our Office site.

two different vCenter servers, different AD sites, not linked.

vsphere5.PNG


We have purchased Enterprise Licensing. As of right now we have no issues.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Hopefully we aren't trading one shitty technology (java) for another shitty technology (Adobe Flex).

Maybe this will mean I can manage my environments from my mac!

EDIT-
Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration.

Here's some screenshots
http://virtualisedreality.com/2011/07/15/vsphere-5-new-vsphere-web-client/
Click to expand...
Thanks for the link, that looks pretty cool. It also strangely looks like the Hyper-V management.:confused:
 
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AMD_Gamer said:
So the total storage space is equal to one smallest HDD?
Click to expand...

Assuming you use some form of RAID on the underlying Hyper-visor(ESXi), the VSA if deployed on 3 systems(the max) will create 3 datastores, each datastore mirrored and replicated on one of the other VSA's.

Your total storage space in the end is half the available space after RAID split into 3 datastores. Read the whitepaper here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-Storage-Appliance-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Top is our PROD site, bottom is our Office site.

two different vCenter servers, different AD sites, not linked.

*picture*

We have purchased Enterprise Licensing. As of right now we have no issues.
Click to expand...

Hopefully I'm assuming wrong, and the environments aren't dual socket servers, since that would mean you have less than 28GB vRAM allocated per server (22GB for second site).

What are the actual environments?
 
Going to update my home lab to 5 this evening now that I'm done with the Security course.
 
NetJunkie said:
Unfortunately, free ESXi will be 8GB. I just confirmed that. That's.....terrible to be honest.

No one says you ever HAVE to upgrade...just depends if you want the features or support. I estimate you'll be able to get support for 5 more years (with extended support contracts)...good for 3 more years on regular support:

http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/lifecycle/enterprise-infrastructure/eos.html
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That is BS! home labs are going to suck! This is interesting though because I am considering purchasing another ESXi host and if you can only use 8GB than why get ram? i should just split my 16GB I have now,
 
Something I noticed in the lab. If you add a VI4 host to vCenter 5 you get the new HA agent installed on that host. So you get the much better HA functionality.
 
AMD_Gamer said:
I thought you could still use HA with the free version?
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HA is not at all free.

As far as vCenter being required, HA can run without vCenter, as vCenter can even be a virtual machine. HA can restart the vCenter VM if it were to be on a host that died. The problem is, vCenter is required to get the HA agents installed and to do the configuration.
 
Netwerkz101 said:
+1 ... I have put a good amount of time reading through your blogs...very infomative!
I plan to reference it as i build out my lab.

The licensing is becoming more clear ..... so yes... may maybe a little hasty on the backlash to the
changes.
Click to expand...

Perception is 99% of reality though and the stink is in. People easily get the vRAM vs pRAM thing confused, too. I read Jason's post over on his blog. Well written/thought out. I chuckled at the part where he said he thought they would go to a strictly per VM licensing based model, but didn't advocate directly for that in this case. I think being able to buy vRAM only entitlement licensing at a lower cost is an option, but I still disagree with the per socket licensing altogether.
 
adi said:
Hopefully I'm assuming wrong, and the environments aren't dual socket servers, since that would mean you have less than 28GB vRAM allocated per server (22GB for second site).

What are the actual environments?
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In our office they are all dual socket systems except for two servers. 2950's with 32gb of ram each, two of them have 64gb of ram.

most of it is older equipment leftover from when the company used VMware Server. About a year ago most were upgraded 32gb of ram (8gb sticks were still too costly at the time) and I moved from VMware Server to ESXi.

Now in our production site they are R610's with 48gb of ram with the ability to add an additional 48gb of ram later if needed. The density there is much lower for planned growth.

We don't overcommit memory too often and don't like to take the hosts past 70-75% memory usage.

prod_07182011.JPG

office_07182011.JPG
 
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