Last few weeks a lot of talk has been about the new VMware licensing for vSphere 5. Many reported how this would work against VMware’s principle of running as many VMs on one host as possible. After the dust had settled, people started checking their own situations and found that things weren’t as bad as they looked in the first place but for some the new licensing policy would still mean a substantial cost impact.
When reading all the comments, people weren’t complaining about the vRAM model, but mostly about the entitlements. A vSphere 5 Enterprise license would give you a 32GB vRAM entitlement per CPU and 48GB vRAM on Enterprise Plus. Many thought this was much too low.
Well, there is some great news. I picked up on a rumor which will make a lot of people happy. Personally, I never thought VMware would change the licensing policy and especially not in such a short time. A big company like VMware would need weeks and maybe months to change their plans, but I stand corrected. VMware used the customer feedback and changed the vRAM entitlements. My compliments!!!
The new policy:
- VMware vSphere 5 Essentials will give a 24GB vRAM entitlement
- VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus will give a 32GB vRAM entitlement
- Max vRAM in Essentials / Essentials Plus will be maxed at 192GB vRAM
- VMware vSphere 5 Standard vRAM entitlement has changed to 32GB ( <- my assumption)
- VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 64GB
- VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus vRAM entitlement will be doubled to 96GB
The amount of vRAM that counts against your vRAM license pool will be capped to 96GB per VM !!! In other words, even if you assign 256GB or the new 1TB limit of RAM to a VM, it will only count as 96GB for your license.
See: http://derek858.blogspot.com/2011/07/impending-vmware-vsphere-50-license.html
This would be great news. I think the most important piece would be the 96GB VM cap.
Good thing it is not April 1st today. Otherwise I would have hard time to believe VMware can change their mind that quick.
Good thing it is not April 1st today. Otherwise I would have hard time to believe VMware can change their mind that quick.
If it gets official that’s a good news but it would be also a way to make us swallow an new license model by giving limits that will make everyone scream and then change it to please everyone. However, I’m quite satisfied with the new limits and if it was announced like this, I wouldn’t be angry about that.
glad Ive already done my VSP5!
Gabe: What’s your source on this, have an official link?
Would love to see the doc with the change! Thanks for sharing
I thought they would change to per core model. That would scale.
Gabe, do you have a link or source for this? If true, it takes out my biggest complaint. But I’ll wait for an official announcement. (maybe at a certain conference?)
How does it work on additional memory, let’s day we have 2 CPU servers with 256Gb memory
can you buy additional vRAM licenses ?
Gabe, I do know there has been an enormous about of discussion within VMware regarding the pricing change announcement and the feedback they have received. If this or something similar turns out to be accurate then a lot of the credit needs to go to those in the community who were willing to take the time to understand the announced pricing, run the numbers for their environment and provide rational, reasonable feedback that VMware could use in their internal discussions.
Thanks will also need to go to VMware for taking the time and resources to listen to their customers, evaluate the feedback and to make adjustments.
I first have to see an official VMware statement before i really believe this. It would be a good reaction from VMware, the best would be to change the entitlements more, with Enterprise Plus have no vRAM entitlement at all!
It doesn’t change anything. You can have as much memory as you want in your host servers. The vRAM is just the amount of provisioned RAM to VM in your Datacenter. If you have for example 4 servers with that configuration (Enterprise +), your current official licensing will grant you with 384GB of configured VM. If the revised licensing gets official, you will be able to provision 768GB of VM in your virtual Infrastructure. You could have 1TB of RAM per host, it doesn’t matter. The licensing is exclusively limiting configured RAM on VM.
I think Gabe is doing a disservice to VMware and the VMware partner he works for by spreading rumors even if they turn out to be true. Definitely not the actions I would expect to see from a vExpert.
If true, yes, great. But I have a hard time believing this until I hear it from my VMware rep. Who did you get this from?
Why?
If
true, why not just wait for VMware to announce it publicly? What does this
solve except for spreading rumors and igniting a fire around this all over
again?? As a vExpert and working for a VMware partner I would have thought Gabe
might have seen no advantage to posting this expect to speculate and create a
new line of debates on vRAM when there’s no reason to at this point.
It
did nothing but get him hits on his website and twitter account.
I’ve seen a disturbing trend over the past few years where bloggers are getting heavily influenced by VMware through bestowing titles (vExpert) and granting special access. Let’s not forget that Bloggers are not VMware PR, but independent unofficial news and opinion sources. Kudo’s for passing along the information. If it’s not true, than too bad. I will put a little less stock in future Gabes World articles. If it is true than it’s both great news.
Got a call from a VMware employee this afternoon. I asked him about the potential licensing changes. He said “stay tuned next week.” I really hope this turns out to be true. It will be a very good sign that VMware truly listens to their customers. VMware’s big non-technical advantage has always been there community and ecosystem of partners.
Gabe is our PI on virtualization. I think this post is absolutely appropriate for this blog. Thanks Gabe!
Wrong, people complain about vRAM model. They wan a model which license physical things such as pRAM, sockets, cores, and so on, and not non-existing spirits such as vRAM. VMWare long pushed people to use as much vRAM as they need by the ballooning etc technologies, and now it wants to break it all and punish people for using them…
New model looks as Windows put limits on the swap files size, instead of having it on the physical memory. vRAM is just _SWAP FILE SIZE_.
You are a jack ass Gabe and if you are a vExpert or a partner you should be stripped of both!
“I think Gabe is doing a disservice to VMware and the VMware partner he works for by spreading rumors even if they turn out to be true. Definitely not the actions I would expect to see from a vExpert.”
Well said. It’s idiots like Gabe that ruin it for the rest of partners. I hope you or the company you work for gets stripped of all your partner access.
Right, because this looks totally looks like an opinion of someones.
You’re right because when was the last time a PI in general was synonymous with being responsible?
take his vExpert away for spreading rumors, at least wait until hard facts are available and then try to be the first to post.
Not true at all. VMware partners are often given information well in advance of public announcement. This gives the partner sufficient time to prepare to educate customers about announcements on day zero.
When leaks like this happen the entire partner community takes a hit and future information could not be shared. In turn we are not prepared to work with our customers. This slows the whole adoption process down.
The title of vExpert should carry some level of integrity but it’s pretty obvious in Gabes situation this isn’t the case.
I hope something is done by VMware to ensure this doesn’t happen again. I hope it hasn’t damaged VMwares view of all the partners.