After Complaints, VMware Revises VSphere 5 Licensing 80
msmoriarty writes "Three weeks after IT shops began complaining loudly that the licensing changes with vSphere 5 would cost them significantly more, VMware has revised the requirements (although not as much as some users would like)."
Good news, but.. (Score:2)
...I still think this was nothing more than a cash grab by their corporate parent, EMC.
As if mugging you for all your lunch money at disk-adding time wasn't enough for EMC, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not really. There is competition (NetApp, and a bucket of smaller companies), but thing is, they all act like that now.
Re: (Score:2)
As if mugging you for all your lunch money at disk-adding time wasn't enough for EMC, right?
Oh, wait...
Re: (Score:3)
For storage, EMC is pretty much dead in the water; it was a leader ten years ago but it's over now. With SSD and SAS drives price dropping quickly, the name of the game is now sub-volume tiering, a technology that EMC promised (and licensed) a long time ago with FAST2, but has yet to actually deliver, while the competition is already there (like the impressive Compellent, now part of Dell).
For large enteprise, the top dogs are now IBM (with the V7000 that has built-in storage virtualization) and Hitachi (wh
Re: (Score:3)
> HyperV is still way too far behind right now
What do you mean by that? From my experience both products are now pretty close.
I've done a lot of work with both, using all kinds of mid- and high-end hardware, and performance-wise there is no clear winner. Also there is no feature in one that the other does not have (vMotion, dynamic resource allocation, failover, virtual and pass-thru disks, name it). SCVMM is about the same as VC. Both have robust scripting and automation capabilities. Support for hyper
Typical EMC Licensing Scheme (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate to say it but EMC has finally influenced VMware.
Of course the new licensing model doesn't limit CPU. That is because there are VERY FEW VMware deployment that max CPU. RAM is usually the cap. But trying license based on physical RAM would be too easy for them. Let's license on what everyone uses most. Virtual (non existant) RAM. I know in my environment everyone that wants a server says they need XX GB of RAM and they use about 1/4 of the RAM they request. So rather than argue with them, I give their server the XXGB of RAM knowing that I can over subscribe the RAM. This is the greatness of VMware. Effeciency.
So now they are going to license us on the one thing that we don't really use. We aren't licenced on what we own or what we use but what we "MIGHT" use. Ridiculous scheme trying to squeeze every dollar out of their market share. This is what EMC does. To get any real funtionality out of their products you have to license more and more features that are already right there in the product. And we see how well that has worked for them. They are bleeding customers. VMware really doesn't have any competitors right now. If they keep this model, they will.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Neither are their customers. Many have budgets to stick to, and cant just throw bags of money around becasue "VMware said we had to"...
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't like it quit whining and use something else.
They're not a fucking charity.
Read the last line of my post. The are opening the door for competitors to come in and take their business. I was suggesting that they would lose my business if they continue down that path. I guess I should be more clear so the trolls can't come in and try to change the meaning of what I meant. VMware is shooting themselves in the foot with this licensing money grab. I thought they would have learned better from their parent company (EMC) that is bleeding customers right now.
Re: (Score:1)
I doesn't matter how "clear" you are, someone will find a way to twist your words.
Conception that unused RAM is wasted RAM (Score:2)
Our product uses all RAM to build a giant disk cache if it has no better use of it.
Do you mind if I use your post as an example in the next discussion on Slashdot where one poster complains about the overuse of RAM by Windows technologies such as SuperFetch and the other claims that unused RAM is wasted RAM?
Re: (Score:2)
It's an anonymous so I guess that means yes... Oh and by the way... Hear, hear!
Re: (Score:2)
Do you mind if I use your post as an example in the next discussion on Slashdot where one poster complains about the overuse of RAM by Windows technologies such as SuperFetch and the other claims that unused RAM is wasted RAM?
Your argument is going to be "here's an unlikely scenario you could run into that proves you are wrong"...?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
It's because of people like you we had to stop supporting installs on VMWare altogether. Oversubscribing the RAM will result in excessive paging where no paging is expected (I was able to trace this), causing dismal performance. Our product uses all RAM to build a giant disk cache if it has no better use of it.
Sounds like your product is a very poor candidate for virtualization. Not all applications are good virtualization candidates. But, virtualization is great for oversubscribing without causing any problems with well behaved applications that only use what they need instead of what is available to them. My VM environment is highly over subscribed on RAM (probably about 2X what I physically have) yet I have yet to have a single incident where paging at the hypervisor level was a problem. Not once has the p
Re: (Score:1)
Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? (Score:2)
I hate to say it, so instead of my bill being someplace between 2-3x of what it is presently, it will end up being around 2x..... So Anyone have a pretty gui built around one of the open source/free hypervisors with all the same basic features as vCenter (live migration, live storage migration, performance reporting)? oh, and the GUI needs to be easy for a windows person to use.
Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but you could look a Citrix XenServer. They are behind on features, however they license per SERVER. Unlimited cpus, unlimited cores, unlimited RAM. From a technical implementation perspective, they are second to VMware. Hyper-V is third technically, but of course will likely surpass XenServer in a year or two due to Microsoft's continued heavy investment.
Re: (Score:2)
Evidence?
Re: (Score:2)
The Virtual reality check product has published whitepapers with detailed performance comparisons between VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer. To summarize them all, they show XenServer has much better performance than VMware for VDI [XenDesktop]. Basically, faster, and you can therefore consolidate more VMs per host than with VMware.
Re: (Score:2)
Unlimited cpus, unlimited cores, unlimited RAM.
That wasn't always the case. I suspect someone came along and informed them that their software is open-source [xen.org].
Re: (Score:2)
It's been a while since I looked at Xen so I decided to do some searching to see what additional value XenServer adds to it. I found this document [infotech.com], which says:
Differentiation between virtualization offerings, and between Xen offerings, comes from the value added management features enabled by the parent console.
...and not much else. They took an open-source project, "bought" it for $500 million, did nothing more than put a GUI on it, and were then shocked to discover that no one wanted to buy it. Corporate incompetence never ceases to amaze.
Re: (Score:1)
There is always Redhat Enterprise Virtualization. Runs on KVM and has a nice web GUI (the GUI only runs on windows thought).
Re: (Score:3)
Red Hat is rewriting RHEV to be all open source and will no longer require Windows. I work with it for close to a year. [watson-wilson.ca]
Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? (Score:5, Informative)
KVM supports live migration and live storage migration, although we have not used either feature. The virt-manager GUI you can use with KVM is easy enough - create, clone, start, stop, change settings, and view and interact with the virtual machines all with clicks in the GUI. I'm sure VMWare has earned its impressive reputation, but free is always nice. Good luck.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hell, if it was just about a GUI, that would be almost easy to replicate. Live migration of VMs or Storage is hardly a "basic" feature for someone to develop even if they are just manipulating the API on the hypervisors.
Of course, you can't do Storage vMotion in 4.1 without an Enterprise Plus license anyway, so that being premium is hardly new.
Re: (Score:2)
Um.... Storage vMotion on VMware is an Enterprise feature, not Enterprise Plus.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/editions_comparison.html [vmware.com]
(Yeah, I know, 5.0 instead of 4.1 - I couldn't find the 4.1 chart right off)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
(Disclaimer, though I don't work for the mentioned company, I do stand to benefit for business they conduct)
So, the *storage migration* feature (where backing store changes with nothing else changing) is not currently implemented as far as I know by anything other than VMware in x86 world (though perhaps the building blocks are there now in one way another). Other than that (live migration, DRS but with more flexible criteria, HA VM restart, and failure avoidance), Adaptive computing has an offering built
Re: (Score:2)
I've seen marketing material for RHEV-M which suggests a vCenter-like set of capabilities, but no hands on to *really* vouch for or against it.
RHEV lost a lot of respect from me, when I learned about certain "limitations" that they weren't very forward with.
Last I checked, You have to shutdown a VM to take a snapshot.
VLAN support in a later release, maybe
If your RHEV-M server goes down, auto-restart-VMS capability also goes down
No graphical management if RHEV-M server goes down; no ability to c
Re: (Score:2)
Last I checked, You have to shutdown a VM to take a snapshot.
Odd, the underlying stuff is agnostic, though a shutdown is a good idea in lieu of something like vmware guest utils to coordinate disk activity with the hypervisor snapshot.
VLAN support in a later release, maybe
That is an odd omission, that's pretty easy to do...
If your RHEV-M server goes down, auto-restart-VMS capability also goes down
A disappointing limitation, but do they at least support some sort of fail-over to have multiple HA RHEV-M instances?
No equivalent to storage vMotion
Not surprised, most people in KVM town misunderstand what storage vMotion specifically does, and the few instancesc when they learn, they tend to respond with a strange
Re: (Score:3)
If you are virtualizing Windows only, Hyper-V is probably the best bet. Completely supported by Microsoft for low low cost of nothing. Supports Live Migration, Dynamic Memory (servers only start with X but can request up to Y if needed) and has very usable GUI and yes, it's true HyperVisor just like ESXi or Xen.
Re: (Score:1)
Xenserver has free edition that has a nice feature set. Does not have LM or auto provisioning. GUI is simple but precise. Ms hyper is great but clumsy to implement in advanced scenarios. But both have been very stable production environments for the most part. They both still lack virtual appliances which suck, maybe one day.
Re: (Score:2)
Does not have LM or auto provisioning.
XenServer free edition has XenMotion.
Oddly, it doesn't have Live snapshotting (which is free in VMware)
It seems like the virtualization vendors are all making the mistake of charging money for new features they had to develop, out of proportion to their place within the software.
More enterprises need snapshotting mechanisms to take backups (IMO) than need live migration. The features everyone needs should have the lowest cost, to encourage users with basic nee
Re: (Score:2)
"So Anyone have a pretty gui built around one of the open source/free hypervisors with all the same basic features as vCenter (live migration, live storage migration, performance reporting)? oh, and the GUI needs to be easy for a windows person to use."
That would be a way to take advantage of the market opportunity presented by the price increase.
Re: (Score:2)
So Anyone have a pretty gui built around one of the open source/free hypervisors with all the same basic features as vCenter (live migration, live strage migration, performance reporting)? oh, and the GUI needs to be easy for a windows person to use.
XenServer + XenCenter.
Add-on features are easy to come by; core product robustness is not.
Good luck trying to run FreeBSD, Solaris, or one of those less-common OS VMs on those 'free' hypervisors with performance comparable to VMware.
Alternatives (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Keep in mind that increasingly, VMware is seeing the individual hypervisors as little more than an means to the end of selling their higher-order management software (vCenter and such). I would not be surprised if one day vCenter ends up managing Xen and/or KVM the same way it will manage ESXi.
Re: (Score:2)
I would not be surprised if one day vCenter ends up managing Xen and/or KVM the same way it will manage ESXi./em>
I would be surprised. If VMware were to add this ability to vCenter, it would increase the value of their competitors' hypervisors... now suddenly you wouldn't even need to change management tools or admin skillsets to migrate to the competitors' platform....
Re: (Score:2)
now suddenly you wouldn't even need to change management tools or admin skillsets to migrate to the competitors' platform....
That's my point, already VMware is less a virtualization company and more a virtualization *management* company. The free hypervisors before and particularly the mantra that no VMware infrastructure is complete without vCenter make that plain enough. It also *seems* from an outsider's perspective that the people working ESXi half are a very different team than vCenter (they just seem very very differently minded, and I think I like some philosophies in ESXi that clearly aren't central to vCenter developme
Re: (Score:2)
Heh... Yeah. Agreed.
Why don't they just release the complete automation suite that removes 100% human work and then start using a random number generator to come up with prices...you know...for the fun of it.
Re: (Score:2)
This reminds me of a custom computer building company I used to work for that got a military contract and then decided to raise their prices on all non-government builds to a disgusting price and basically shun all previous customers as well as making all potentials laugh.
So uh, what happens on that day you lose the contract, eh?
VirtualBox (Score:1)
Start pushing VirtualBox's features more and more
Make it a true alternative to VMWare.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Right.. Cause Oracle isn't going to try to squeeze juice out of that turnip..
The BSA feeds on might use licensing and not what (Score:2)
The BSA feeds on might use licensing and not what you are really useing.
Licensing needs people need to stop taking in legal and talk in what people can under stand or soon IT will there own legal guy on staff.
KVM (Score:2)
We've started migrating to KVM with vertio because VMWare is just too cost prohibitive when it comes to the expansion we've required recently. I've got to say with with vertio, I'm actually pretty impressed with KVM's performance.
There aren't quite as many features as VMWare offers, but we are lucky enough not to require them.
VMware's licensing still sucks (Score:1)
The VMware "standard" license used to be for 1 physical CPU with 1-6 cores, and up to 256 gig ram.
The new, improved VMware "standard" license is now 1 physical CPU with unlimited cores, and up to 32 gig of ram.
Given that most VMware installations are constrained by memory and not CPU, you're now paying up the wazoo.
The big benefit of virtualization is that most computers are CPU idle much of the time, so it's very easy to run multiple virtual machines on 1 physical server and still have great performance.
Th
Re:VMware's licensing still sucks (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worse than you say.
It's not RAM they are licensing to you, it's vRAM, which means memory that you've allocated to the VM's, but may not be using. vRAM is calculated by summing up the allocated memory of each virtual machine. Which is to say, after spending years saying, "but our product is better than our competitors, because you can oversubscribe your memory," they have now said "gotcha!". This move was A) evil, as they told customers with fully paid up maintenance contracts "no, we won't honor the contract, you'll have to buy more product," and B) stupid, as the licensing model directly undermines one of VMware's principal advantages.
C//
Re: (Score:2)
"no, we won't honor the contract, you'll have to buy more product," and B) stupid, as the licensing model directly undermines one of VMware's principal advantages.
They did this once before, at the last major release when they introduced Enterprise+.
They had been publicizing new advanced features that would be in vSphere for many months.
Then, when the release actually came out, they introduced a new license tier "Enterprise+" which would get all the new features.
So, even though the upgrade to vSpher
Parallels People! (Score:3)
It seems many of you don't know (as did I until not so long ago) that Parallels, the virtualization folks of Mac fame, also do "Parallels Bare Metal" [parallels.com] which is essentially a direct attack on VMWare's lunch money.
The Parallels Bare Metal 4 is near VMWare ESX 2.x functionality or so but the new Parallels Bare Metal 5 (which is now in beta) has pretty much most of the VMWare 3.x-4.x ESX/vSphere series features. Although it is much more command-line centric - which is good for some of us - and the procedures for converting physical and virtual machines from other vendors are quite different - which you simply have to learn and get used to (yes you can convert ESX/vSphere crap on-disk and via Parallels "importer" in-guest agent).
The thing comes with Windows, OSX and Linux management consoles ala the VMWare editions of old.
So for all of you out there who need to appease corporate demons with a commercial product with proper support arrangements etc, take a look.
I was quite pleasantly surprised and I am holding back any moves to vSphere 5 for many of my clients with the aim of deploying Parallels instead.
Oh and pricing: $499 per-host (no idiotic per-core or per-ram or per-disk nonsense here) for "Small Business" (which has everything you need really, even for big shops since you can script everything using their command line tools) or $999 for their "Standard" which comes with a wacky centralized automation/web-interface/event-ticket/delegation/who-knows-what-else management gizmo.
See those numbers and weep, oh vSphere 5 victims!
They also have a "Virtuozo" product that seems aimed at the VPS rental market.
By the way, the next version of windows (Score:2)
Will have a per-CPU "Window size" entitlement.
For every CPU, you can have 2000x2000 pixels worth of open windows.
To determine if you are in compliance, add up the widthXheight pixel sizes of the open windows for all running applications (whether minimized or not), if the number of vPixels used exceeds your entitlement, then you are not in compliance and must buy additional OS licenses.
This applies whether you paid in advance for yearly free upgrades or not.
If this is a problem for you, we rec
Re: (Score:2)
No, no, no... You completely misread that. You're only allowed to move your mouse pointer 2000 pixels per window, per day. Licensure of pixels is then 100 "points" per 1000 above that.
That's why they have Xbox Live getting people used to the term "points" so the transition is smoother. Also makes the "Microsoft Dollar" sit well in society for the day it comes into worldwide use.
[Kidding, as well... Or am I?] :}
Re: (Score:2)
No, no, no... You completely misread that. You're only allowed to move your mouse pointer 2000 pixels per window, per day. Licensure of pixels is then 100 "points" per 1000 above that.
Hm... maybe we should try a car analogy
You buy a truck with a twin engine turbodiesel and two fuel tanks.
Next you buy a 50' trailer with a compartment system that is sold based on how many engine sockets you have, so you pay your two $4500 "Engine licenses" plus a $5,000 door handle license for $14,000 total for the
It Really Isn't Evil (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I've been managing ESX environments for over 6 years now and the change makes complete sense to me. VMware based their initial licensing on the number of processor cores in a box. This made sense when we were putting 16, 32 or 64 GBs of ram into a 2 or 4 core box. At max we were seeing 32 GBs of RAM per core and VMware found a price point that worked under this model. With changes in technology (mainly memory virtualization in the Cisco UCS platform) we are now seeing 100s of GBs per core and less total cores due to the expanding number or processors we can fit on a chip. Simply put, we used to get x number of VMs per core license. Now we are getting 4 to 10 times that many per license. That's a losing equation for any licensing scheme and they needed to make changes. All of that said I was on the initial bandwagon of outrage when the news came out. The starting point for vRam entitlements as well as some of the other changes were concerning. Realizing that now single VMs could cost thousands just in VM licensing was not appealing and had me second guessing whether or not VMware was the platform of the future. After seeing the recent changes they've made to the licensing scheme (upping vRam entitlements, maxing out vRam counts on individual machines, pooling, and soft limits) I feel the changes are completely reasonable/understandable considering how things have changed for virtualizing systems. I'm sure many will disagree but I still don't feel like VMware is gouging anybody...
When it costs MORE to virtualize a server due to licensing then it does to build a physical server then that is gouging. VMWare is just shooting themselves in the foot trying to bleed more money. Though greed seems to be the big equalizer. A company gets big, makes a ton of cash, gets really greedy, and then gets wiped out by company B: coming along with a decent product at 1/2 the cost or less.
Personally I have had great luck with VMWare Server which is free.
At one time I had thier "technet" of vmware an
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
If I were to buy a VMware box now, maxing out the licensing as it stands, I would purchase a server with 2 of Intel's E7 processors
Re: (Score:2)
Check out this nice script for folks to run in their current environment to determine how they will be affected by ESX5 licensing - here. [virtu-al.net]
Oh Dear (Score:1)
I had been pressing that we go the VMWare route for our virtualisation. Looks like I'll have to look at the alternatives as the extra unexpected cost will not go down very well with the management.
Why stick with VMWare for it? (Score:2)
There are plenty of other solutions out there and many have found out that virtualization (or cloudization of your server park) is not the end-all be-all of many problems we encounter (such as performance issues, security problems, conflicts between applications) it still doesn't fix and in many cases (usually due to bad understanding and management of the virtual server park) makes things worse than they should be.
There are certain people (I would say 60% of departments deploying virtual server parks) that
atleast they listen (Score:2)
Some companies do not even listen, let alone ...do something about what their client's think....consider yourselves lucky