Licensing VMware SRM 5.0

18 April, 2012 By 7 Comments

Had a small issue with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 today when performing a real failover of a single VM with a customer of mine. Nothing big, just using one VM one protection group, showing them that a failover would work. After recovery went fine, I started the reprotection and ran into a licensing error: “Not enough licenses”.

SRM

This customer had bought a 25 VM license pack and received one license key for this. I had entered this key in vCenter on site-A but I hadn’t entered this on site-B, because I was under the impression that in a Linked-Clone scenario the license could be used by both sites. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Disaster Recovery, Site Recovery Manager, VMware Tagged With: , , ,

vCenter DRS rules bug when downgrading license

13 January, 2012 By 3 Comments

Normaly when installing a vSphere environment for new customers, I wait with entering the correct licenses until the environment is ready and can be moved to production. Until today I never ran into any issues with that since most of our customers buy Enterprise or Enterprise Plus edition. Today I discovered that after entering a vSphere Standard license, you might run into an issue with DRS where the affinity rules stay in effect.

As best practice we usually put the vCenter VM on the first host in the cluster using a VM to Host affinity rule in DRS. A few days after entering the vSphere Standard license which doesn’t allow DRS, I tried to move the vCenter VM to a different host, but this wasn’t allowed because a VM to Host affinity rule was still active. When checking the cluster settings, DRS was still disabled. When I enabled DRS, without clicking OK, I could see there still was a host-affinity rule defined in the settings. [Read more...]

Filed Under: esxi, Licensing, Virtual Center, VMotion / DMotion, VMware Tagged With: , , ,

vSphere 5 licensing with vRAM isn’t that bad at all

13 July, 2011 By 63 Comments

I bet you all heard about the big news yesterday where VMware announced vSphere 5. Despite a lot of applauding for the great new features, there also a lot of noise on twitter about the new licensing for vSphere. VMware has decided to move to vRAM licensing without any maximums on the amount of RAM or the number of CPU cores. This PDF explains it all.

Biggest concern of the twitter community was that licenses would cost much much more for the new vSphere 5 than they did for the “old” vSphere 4. There are many theoretical scenario’s that can be thought of that show the new licensing model as much more expensive and existing customers wouldn’t upgrade to the new vSphere 5. I decided to call a number of my customers and ask them for the specs of their environment and then to a little math for them comparing the old and the new licenses. [Read more...]

Filed Under: ESX, esxi, Licensing, memory, VMware, Whats New Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Licensing problems with VMware VIEW4

5 February, 2010 By 8 Comments

Recently my colleague Jon Klaus was installing VMware VIEW4 with a customer as he ran into a problem. In his setup there where two ESX hosts that each held 10 VDI VM’s and when putting one host into maintenance mode, he received a number of error messages: “The licensing limit on the number of running virtual machines has been reached”. [Read more...]

Filed Under: VDI, Virtual Center, VMware Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is VMware becoming the bully Microsoft is known for?

5 June, 2009 By 15 Comments

For years lots of people accused Microsoft of being a bully whenever it suited them. They could change licensing policies to make it very hard for competitors to sell their products. Look at how difficult they have made it for VMware when it comes to supporting their products. VMware has been around with VMware Workstation 1.0 in 1999 and it isn’t until last year that they now fully support virtualization with VMware. All these years, Microsoft has done its utmost to keep VMware from gaining a lot of market share and VMware has been fighting it in many ways.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Licensing, Microsoft, VMware Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,