vSphere 5 licensing changes coming
- July 13th, 2011
- Posted in Uncategorized
- By Matt
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With the pending release of VMware’s vSphere 5 hypervisor, come some licensing changes… yet again.
Back in 2009 with the release of vSphere 4, VMware added another tier to the licensing model. Whereas Enterprise had been the top license level, VMware added another level, Enterprise Plus.
Enterprise Plus gave you additional functionality, such as allowing support for over 256GB RAM per host, up to 8 vCPU per virtual machine, support for physical CPUs over 6 cores (such as AMD’s 12 core model), as well as vDistributed switches and host profiles.
The release of vSphere 5 adds some more license restrictions including the concept of a vRAM restriction.
According to VMware, vRAM or virtual RAM is the total memory configured to a virtual machine. If you are licensed using the Enterprise model, you are licensed for up to 32GB in RAM allocated to virtual machines, per socket. These numbers can be aggregated across your servers.
Example:
If you have 4 hosts each with 2 sockets, and each host has 64GB RAM, you have a total of 8 socket licenses of vSphere Enterprise, and 256GB RAM. 256/8 = 32GB, or the licensing limit for Enterprise.
If you have Enterprise Plus, you would have the ability to license up to 48GB RAM per socket, and would be able to have 384GB RAM on those same 4 hosts.
Other editions of vSphere 5 (Essentials, Essentials Plus and Standard) have 24GB vRAM entitlements per socket. VMware is eliminating the vSphere Advanced licensing level.
VMware does not apply a hard ceiling on RAM restrictions, but the server will warn you if you are out of compliance.
For some good news, VMware has upped the vCPU restriction on the Enterprise licensing level. with vSphere 5, you will be able to run 8 vCPUs unlike in vSphere 4 where you were limited to 4 vCPUs.
View VMware’s vSphere 5 licensing and pricing guide at: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf
There has been a lot of discussion about the new licensing model. To alleviate any misconceptions, a VMware employee that e-mailed me put it best:
“vRAM is not so much a restriction as it is a liberator form the traditional Datacenter licensing. No more Cores/VM or max RAM. Also, one clarification… vRAM is consumed RAM (VM’s also needs to be powered on to be consumed), not how much RAM in in the Server. You were right to point out it is an aggregated resources across servers. It is the amount of consumed RAM across all ESX hosts in a vCenter (Good news, Linked Mode counts too). You get to pool your RAM across servers to define your available vRAM. It is not a Per Server number.
Also, because VMware vSphere 5 is still licensed on a per-CPU basis, customers can continue leveraging established purchasing, deployment and license-management processes.”
The following statement is direct from VMware’s Marketing Team:
“VMware is evolving the product’s licensing to lay the foundation for customers to adopt a more “cloud-like” IT cost model based on consumption and value rather than physical components and capacity. VMware vSphere 5 will continue to be licensed per processor (CPU), however, VMware is eliminating the current, restrictive physical entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM per server and replacing them with a single, virtualization-based entitlement of pooled virtual memory, or vRAM.
Pooled vRAM is the total amount of memory configured to all VMs in a customer’s environment. Each VMware vSphere 5 CPU license will entitle the purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, which can be pooled across the entire vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among VMs: a customer can configure many small VMs or one large VM. VMware vSphere has made it possible for customers to maximize hardware utilization and efficiency by pooling CPU, memory, storage and networking. With these licensing changes, VMware is extending the concept of pooling – one of the foundational elements of cloud computing – beyond technology to the business, allowing the pooling of licenses for maximum utilization and value”
–Matt