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vSphere License Changes Bring Out Pitchforks
The twitterati have taken up torches and pitchforks against VMware and Netflix for changing their pricing models. With vSphere 5, VMware’s changed from licensing based on processor cores and physical memory to charging for vRAM, the amount of memory actually allocated to VMs across your server cluster.
Howard Marks
July 15, 2011
4 Min Read
During the past few days, Twitter and the blogosphere looked like the town square of Darmstadt, as torches and pitchforks were taken up not against Dr. Frankenstein's monster butagainst VMware and Netflix for changing their pricing models.
With vSphere 5, VMware has changed from licensing based on processor cores and physical memory to charging for vRAM, the amount of memory actually allocated to virtual machines across your server cluster. Netflix, meanwhile, is changing its primary business model from DVDs sent through the mail to streaming content. To expand its streaming inventory--and therefore quiet the complaints from folks who say that not everything on DVD is available online--Netflix is going to have to negotiate new contracts with the likes of Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone to get the rights to movies such as "Transformers: Dark of the Moon." Clearly, Netflix is going to have to cough up some big bucks for this.
While I’m disappointed I’ll be paying another $6 per month for NetFlix, I get where the company is coming from and will suck it up. VMware’s license changes, on the other hand, have some users, especially those who have builtservers with lots of memory, lighting the torches and planning to march on the castle.
The new VMware licensing model does have some pluses for users. The company has reduced the number of editions by killing off the Advanced Edition. That leaves the Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, with vMotion moving down to the Standard Edition. What everyone was complaining about was the vRAM "entitlements" of 24GB, 32GB and 48GB per processor for Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, respectively. Even more galling was the 8GB entitlement for the free ESXi, which severely limits its usefulness. After all, my desktop has 8GB of memory and is using 6.5GB right now.
If your systems are using more vRAM than their entitlements, you have to buy additional CPU licenses.
As the announcement webcast was still going on, tweets like, "This will triple my license costs," and, "That’s it, I’m switching to Hyper-V," started whizzing by. Luckily, after a few hours, some calmer heads prevailed, posting some salient points:
vRAM is the memory allocated to running VMs, not the RAM in your servers.
vRAM entitlements are pooled, so 10 dual-processor servers running enterprise plus can have 960GB of vRAM to allocate across all their VMs.
The limits on the number of cores for server processors are gone, but there are still limits on the number of vCPU cores a VM can use.
Fellow Tech Field Day delegate Bob Plankers posted an analysis at Lone Sysadmin of how his infrastructure would be affected, showing he had plenty of headroom without additional CPU licenses. Blogger Rynardt Spies at VirtualVCP.com posted a nice Excel calculator that computes your vSphere 4 and 5 license costs that you can download here.Clearly, the new licensing costs are going to cause some organizations to rethink their standard operating procedures. I know one outfit that built its server templates with WindowsData Center edition and 16GB of RAM assuming that VMware’s memory over-commit would let them run VMs even if they over-allocated memory. Now that they’re paying for allocated memory, that doesn’t look like such a good idea anymore. Curious how VMware’s licensing cuts into the value of memory over commitment now that Microsoft’s added dynamic memory toHyper-V and it’s no longer a major vSphere differentiator.
Virtualization management vendor vKernel is giving away CapacityView, an application that will show the average and peak memory utilization for VMs so you can trim over-allocated memory now that it costs money.
In addition to boosting some users' costs, the new model will reduce the cost savings from virtualizing the larger servers now running on dedicated hardware. If you have to pay $20,000 in VMware licensing to virtualize a 150GB SQL Server, you might be tempted to just buy a new server and leave it physical.
Were I running VMware, I would have set the vRAM allotment for Enterprise Plus at 128GB. And, rather than making users that need more vRAM allotment buy additional processor licenses and the associated service and support contracts, I’d have a 64GB vRAM add-on for Enterprise Plus, only at a lower price. After all, I want to incentivize Enterprise Plus because it has all the features the competitors don’t. It will be hard to switch to Hyper-V after you’ve seen Paree.
I think ESG’s Exhalted Grand High Poobah Steve Duplessie said it best: "All software companies are hated for the way they license. Really, which companies are loved for their licensing except those who give their stuff away free?" After all, the whole idea of any licensing/pricing structure is to maximize revenues over the long run.
As Oracle has shown, having your customers think of you as a minor extortionist might be the most profitable strategy. Of course, when your customers think you’re really blackmailing them, they may start looking for alternatives. And while I think vSphere is clearly superior to Hyper-V and Xen today, the gap is closing. After all, Microsoft is very good at the incremental improvement thing.
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