Tag Archives: vdi

vSphere5 licensing – the good, the bad, and the ugly

The announcement on 12th July about vSphere5 was largely overshadowed by the furore around licensing changes. My gut reaction was much like many people – angry that VMware seemed to be charging more for the same functionality. If you want a feel for customer feedback, this VMware communities thread is a good place to start or see how many posts on the ESXi v5 forums relate to licensing. I’ve now reached phase 5 of ‘the LonelySysAdmin’s 5 stages of VMware licensing grief‘ – acceptance.

The Good

  • I’ve done the maths for my environment (thanks to Hugo Peters for the PowerCLI script to check) and I’m one of the 90% that VMware claim will see no increase in costs. We’re using about 62% of our vRAM entitlement (using 2.1TB from 3.4TB allowable) so have some growth factored in. So far, so good and not a big surprise as I knew we didn’t push our current infrastructure too hard.
  • At the recent London VM user group there was a similar feeling – many people were OK with the licensing today but had concerns about the future.
  • There are no longer any restrictions on number of cores per socket. My company use Enterprise rather than Enterprise+ so without this change we’d be restricted to six cores per socket, a limit we’ve already reached.
  • Service providers aren’t affected by the recent changes. They’re already on a different licensing model which isn’t based on vRAM (the VMware Service Provider Program)
  • New VDI users can use the vSphere Desktop edition which doesn’t include the vRAM based license model. Our company haven’t gone down the VDI route yet, so we’re not impacted by the upgrade issues (see below).

Continue reading vSphere5 licensing – the good, the bad, and the ugly