Update: VMware made an official announcement on August 3, 2011 and I've covered it in detail here.
Since the announcement of vSphere 5.0, and the new licensing terms, much of the focus on the launch has sadly not been around the great new features but the changes in licensing terms. In fact, the many loyal customers in this thread on VMware forums are threatening to, or actually looking at alternatives, such as XenServer, Hyper-V, or KVM.
I have it on good authority that VMware is taking these complaints seriously and next week will announce some changes to address the situation.
The rumored changes may include:
1. Doubling the vRAM entitlements for Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions to 64GB and 96GB respectively. For example, a dual socket Enterprise Plus server would add 192GB of vRAM to your pool.
2. Essentials and Essentials Plus vRAM entitlement increased from 24GB to 32GB.
3. Capping the vRAM amount that counts against your licensed pool to 96GB per VM, even if the VM is allocated more, such as 1TB. Drops the cost of a 1TB VM from $75K to $3.4K for Enterprise Plus pools.
4. Licensing high water marks will be captured on a yearly basis vice a monthly basis.
Customers that have an ELA (enterprise licensing agreement) may be able to negotiate better terms, and should certainly try to do so with their rep if they feel the new licensing scheme will cost them additional dollars. Of course the details may change before the announcement, so take this information with a pinch of salt until something official comes out, probably next week.
Will this make everyone happy? No, but it is probably a good compromise and shows VMware does take feedback seriously. When the official changes are announced, the community scripts that have been floating around to estimate the licensing impact will need to be updated.
Let The Rumor Mill Begin!
ReplyDeleteIt shows they still care mostly about money.
ReplyDeleteNo mention of an increase for Standard, so many SMB customers are still getting a raw deal.
No ability to pool across levels still means a fractured licensing system for those with different licenses in their environment. Adding undue complexity.
Good Luck VMWare, converting a VM to Xenserver was very easy. It just takes time.
What's better. Xen or Hyper-V. My company has Hyper for free due to Microsoft eCal. Until now we have used vmware because it's the best, no doubt, but in v5.0 it has became to expensive.
ReplyDelete"Good Luck VMWare, converting a VM to Xenserver was very easy. It just takes time."
ReplyDeleteHowever in the world of business, time is money. So there is a cost associated in that conversion. Not only is there the time involved in the conversion but there is also the time involved in learning to support Xenserver. I am not saying it is or isn't worth that time, just reminding all to keep in mind the cost of the time involved.
Good, so they are changing the licensing before vsphere 5 is available. Means they really listen to everybody out there. I cannot imagine Microsoft or Apple doing this.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe it and won't until I hear it from VMware. Too many rumors start this way.
ReplyDeleteHopefully those who move off VMware onto a competing hypervisor such as Hyper-V and XenServer know what they are getting into. I don't think most people know what life is going to be life on the other side of the fence after using VMware. The sticker price may be cheaper but that's not the only component of a TCO calculation. Go if you must but I'd expect at least half of those leaving to abort the migration plans once they exercise some due diligence.
ReplyDeleteHave you seen Windows 8 Hyper-V yet? It gives an excellent opportunity to move to Hyper-V now. All those add-ons that VMWare have such as VMotion, etc are all baked in free and the option to use any storage for remote snapshots will be unbeatable at no cost. It's just a matter of time until the competition catches...but it does.
ReplyDeleteWe are also changing the vRAM entitlement for Standard, so don't be affraid ;-)
ReplyDelete"Have you seen Windows 8 Hyper-V yet?" No, where can I buy it ?
ReplyDeleteAll the people explaining here that they have migrated very easily... you didn't do that because the new VMware licensing did you ? In under 3 weeks, a full migration to a new infrastructure product, from initial decision to implementation ?
If you really did migrate, you started way before the vSphere 5 announcement, and you did so for different reasons. If you didn't, you're just BS'ing, or maybe even astroturfing for a competing vendor.
Ok, so they're addressing the restrictive and costly vRAM entitlement issues, which is great. I told our VMware rep that we wouldn't touch vSphere 5, or even renew our support next year, unless they backed off these new restrictive policies.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I still haven't gotten an answer from him or anyone else about how the support costs will be affected by the Advanced -> Enterprise change. We have well over 6 figures in purchased Advanced licenses, and yearly support is charged as a percentage of those licenses costs. If we're moved from Advanced to Enterprise forcefully with vSphere 5, and suddenly our support renewal demands us to pay a percentage of the list price of Enterprise instead of Advanced for all of those licenses, we're looking at upwards of a 50% increase in yearly support (and that 50% will be tens of thousands of dollars). That's a huge hit to my budget, and leaves me still wanting to switch to Xen or Hyper-V due to yearly OpEx costs to run our virtualization "cloud".
Can anyone tell me how support renewal costs will be calculated?
"Good Luck VMWare, converting a VM to Xenserver was very easy. It just takes time."
ReplyDeleteHowever in the world of business, time is money. So there is a cost associated in that conversion. Not only is there the time involved in the conversion but there is also the time involved in learning to support Xenserver. I am not saying it is or isn't worth that time, just reminding all to keep in mind the cost of the time involved."
It is not only time. The technology/vendor change is also a big risk and you have properly implemented Change Management you will need to justify thoroughly all conversion costs (time, risks).
VMWare and other VMWare fan boys, do not forget, the competition eventually catches up! Short term gain vs long term growth, pick!
ReplyDeleteA good comprimise? We still have to pay more for each license and still have to pay for ram licenses with full blown processor licenses. At a time when vmware's numbers are better than ever with no sign of a slowdown. All this change does is kick the can down the road for some customers. It's still dumb to charge 1 ent+ processor license for 1 vm guest if that guest is 96gb of ram or more. This model still screams to people not to virtualize tier 1 applications with vmware because of tco issues.
ReplyDeleteVMware HAD to listen to feedback. Virtually none of the new features/enhancements were talked about, it was ALL negative feedback on license changes. This has to be the biggest marketing failure of an IT company in recent times.
What competition?
ReplyDeleteThere is no alternative with regards to availability, security, scalability, efficiency, control and choice ...
What good news to hear recently.
ReplyDeleteVmWare should add another licensing model for adding extended memory if they really want to change the licensing scheme to vram entitlement.
VMware already broke the trust with their customers. Even if they increase the entitlements it's more like a band-aid and it was pretty good that this f**k up was more spoken than the new features showing VMware that they can have the best product in the world and they can not take a piss on their customers because at the end of the day what matters is how much it costs not what is the very best.
ReplyDeleteBoy, those VMWare affectionados sounds like the fan boys of old days of Novell. If you recall, those certs / credentials went away long ago when competition eventually caught up. The baked-in features offered for free, that gets better over time, eventually replaces expensive toys. From a performance standpoint alone, most of the competition already caught up. Look for "Compare VMWare Hyper-V XenServer Proxmox VirtualBox" Competition has to get caught up with performance, then availability (which most now do), and additional features.
ReplyDeleteVery nice blog who censor simple comments with the fear or hear anything back form VMware. A shame.
ReplyDeleteVirtualNomad,
ReplyDeleteAs we had to build / test / migrate when we went from ESX 2 -> 3.x -> 4.0 -> 4.1 we can do the same thing with a server at a time to Xen.
Nobody has to convert 300 VMs overnight .. we can do it over the next fiscal year.
This will correspond quite nicely with our server replacement budgets and maintenance costs; what we would pay VMWare we can now pay Cisco for C460 servers.
For some folks Hybrid or Electric cars make sense even with their higher upfront costs, for others cheap all the way works best.