Calculated Cost Implications of vSphere 5 Licensing PDF Print E-mail
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Tuesday, 12 July 2011 23:09

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED. CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED ARTICLE

On July 12, 2011 at about 16:00GMT, VMware announced vSphere 5 and a bunch of changes surrounding the product suite. During the event, Twitter was ablaze with updates with regards to what was being revealed by VMware. However, one of the changes seemed to have caused some concern amongst the trusted virtualisation community. The change to the vSphere licensing model is what seems to have been discussed quite a bit on Twitter.

I’m not going to expand by giving details on the licensing changes, for more information on the new licensing model, see the link below:

http://wcc.on24.com/event/33/43/99/rt/1/documents/slidepdf/cloud_infrastructure_licensing_v2.pdf

At first I wasn’t going to write up on this as the blogging community already came out and published pre written posts as soon as the VMware NDA time expired at 16h00 GMT. Also, I’m pressed for time at the moment, so I’m rushing this one and the research done on this post in.

After doing some number crunching, I came to a disturbing conclusion. Unless my calculations are way off, and unless VMware is drastically going to reduce the “per license” price tag, the new licensing model will offer a raw deal to VMware’s customers.Surprised

As far as I am aware, VMware has not yet published the price list for vSphere 5. As I really wanted to see what implications the new licensing strategy was going to have in terms of today’s prices, I did some calculations using today’s vSphere 4 license costs. As I said, unless VMware reduces the price per license, it would be almost impossible to sell the product to some of my current customers who already think that VMware vSphere is too expensive in comparison to rivals such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Well, unless I’m very wrong, it’s about to get worse!

Now, bear in mind that I did these calculations in a rather short period of time. I’ve not done a whole bunch of research on the new licensing model yet, but went by what the PDF stipulates. I could have made a fundamental mistake somewhere, and I really hope that I am wrong on this.

Please, if anyone can find a major error somewhere in my figures, please let me know.

I based my calculations on the following template as most of my customers typically run a similar setup;

  • 2 CPU sockets
  •  12 Cores per CPU
  •  128GB per Host

I compared what the new vSphere 5 model would cost in comparison to the vSphere 4 licensing model. The results are truly staggering!

Also, to give vSphere 4 a level playing field in terms of memory assignment, I assumed that we would want to be able to use up to 100% of the physical memory in the cluster, as this would not carry any penalty in terms of vRAM TAX in vSphere 4. Now I know that the license on vRAM is on allocated and not on total physical memory, but for an apples and apples comparison on possible memory consumpsion, this was the most straight forward way of calculating the numbers.

Below are my results. Now if I have made some mistakes here, please let me know. I’m looking for constructive comments here! An argument is not going to help anyoneWink

 

1host

 

2host

 

4host

 

8host

 

10host

 

costgraph

Comments (11)
  • 2011-07-13 00:34:35 |Comment came from:87.194.23.xxx| Andrew Cooke  - Don't think it's apples for apples comparison

    Hi,

    Interesting article however you do need to think practically on this one. Do you honestly believe that you would use all 100% of RAM on a cluster that is being used for production workloads on a vSphere 4 environment? I think things would be running a bit hot if you did that, plus you would need to allow a small proportion of the RAM to the actual hypervisor anyway.

    Just my idea's so far..

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  • 2011-07-14 20:04:30 |Comment came from:98.191.75.xxx| Dan L

    "I think things would be running a bit hot if you did that, plus you would need to allow a small proportion of the RAM to the actual hypervisor anyway."

    The amount of ram you use does not affect heat output in any significant way, only CPU usage does that. Additionally, the amount of RAM that the hypervisor small enough (1-2GB) that it really isn't going to have much bearing on enterprise systems.

    The only reason you may not want to run systems even close to their memory limit is for stuff like failover, but even then the balloon driver and paging would ensure that hosts can handle the additional VMs.

    There's no way around it, the new licensing model is ridiculous and seems like vmware got cocky and became greedy. Thanks to them, I'm now being told "start getting comfortable with KVM!".

    FML

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  • 2011-07-14 21:59:39 |Comment came from:212.183.140.xxx| Rynardt Spies  -  Don't think it's apples for apples comparison

    Hi Andrew,

    Thank you for your comment.

    With respect, I don't think it's about me "honestly believing" anything. It's about me recognising that what I see in many environments today. I agree, the 100% "utlization" figure in my post could be misleading. It should have read 100% allocation.

    It is completely reasonable to calculate figures based on allocating 100% of physical memory in VMware vSphere. The technology allows us to do that and it even allows us to over allocate vRAM (allocating more memory to VMs than what is physically availble in the host or cluster). Just because we "over allocate" memory doesn't mean that we will actually use 100% of the memory.

    The new vSphere 5 licensing doesn't take into account how much vRAM we are using, but how much vRAM we have allocated to powered on VMs.

    The main reason for the recommendation not to allocate 100% of physical memory to virtual machines is as Dan L said in his comment. It is to allow and account for the possible host failure in the cluster.

    Just becuase we shouldn't really allocate memory, especially in production environment, doesn't mean that there aren't administrators out there who do over allocate on memory. The technology allows for this to happen, and in vSphere 4 it won't cost you extra money. In vSphere 5, it could!

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  • 2011-07-13 01:45:58 |Comment came from:75.138.161.xxx| Tom  - Excellent review!!

    The new licensing's sole purpose is to make VMware rich from Big Business and drive away SMB business (small business) to XenServer and Hyper-V.

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  • 2011-07-13 06:40:43 |Comment came from:195.43.32.xxx| Andrey Vakhitov

    Hello. I suggest that vRAM is pRAM+MO (Memory Overcommitment).
    For real price comparison we need to increase vRAM capacity up to 20% and correspondingly increase the price of vSphere 5.

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  • 2011-07-13 08:53:02 |Comment came from:65.113.40.xxx| Carter Shanklin

    Hi,

    vSphere 4 was licensed per CPU socket up to a certain amount of cores. If your socket had more cores than that amount you needed to apply multiple licenses. Importantly, core counts are not pooled systemwide, so you have to do the calculation per socket then multiply by the number of sockets.

    So in your first table the number of Ent+ licenses should be 2 as you've written (it is max 12 cores / socket), but the number of Enterprise license is actually 4 (it is max 6 cores / socket).

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  • 2011-07-13 09:02:32 |Comment came from:212.183.140.xxx| Rynardt Spies

    Ah yes!! Well spotted. I totally forgot about that! I almost only deal with Ent+ in real life, so didn't take that into account!

    My tables need to be reworked :x

    Thanks for the comment! :D

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  • 2011-07-13 10:37:39 |Comment came from:194.178.124.xxx| Hugo Peeters  - Script

    Here's a script to help you calculate license requirements for vSphere 5:
    http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/vmware/calculate-vsphere-5-licen ses-with-powershell/
    Hugo

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  • 2011-07-13 12:42:34 |Comment came from:142.206.2.xxx| Ravi Shanghavi

    My understanding is that the licensing is to be coming down and it will benefit the SMBs and the Enterprise customers both. Cheers, Ravi Shanghavi, Ottawa

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  • 2011-07-14 20:09:17 |Comment came from:98.191.75.xxx| Dan L  - Flaw in pricing?

    I just noticed that you are claiming a standard license can cover a 12 core CPU, this isn't true, you would need two licenses per 12 core CPU. The exception (and probably the case) is with hyperthreading; hyperthreading gives you an extra CPU per core, but doesn't require a license. If that's the case, you need to modify your information to say 6 cores per CPU.

    If nothing else, at least this new pricing levels the field between AMD and Intel as far as pricing goes (AMD doesnt have hyperthreading).

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  • 2011-07-14 22:01:29 |Comment came from:212.183.140.xxx| Rynardt Spies  - RE: Flaw in pricing?

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for pointing this out. This was fixed in my next post on licensing entitled A Deeper Loon into vSphere 5 Licensing.

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Last Updated on Wednesday, 13 July 2011 22:21