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December 15, 2011

VMware increases core counts in 4.1 licensing

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — Nate @ 10:43 am

I just came across this mention on AMD’s blog. They note that vSphere 4.1 Update 2 included a CPU licensing change –

For the AMD Opteron 6200 and 4200 series (Family 15h) processors, ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 treats each core within a compute unit as an independent core, except while applying licenses. For the purpose of licensing, ESX/ESXi treats each compute unit as a core. For example, a processor with 8 compute units can provide the processor equivalent of 16 cores on ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2. However, ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 only requires an 8 core license for each 16-core processor.

I had not heard of that before, so it’s news to me! So not only is the physical cost of the Opteron 6200 cheaper than the 6100, the licensing cost is half as much (per core). AMD’s blog post above shows some pretty impressive results where a pair of quad socket 6200 blades outperforming a pair of quad socket 10-core Intel blades(2 sockets populated per blade) and at the same time the 6200 solution costs half as much (per VM). Though it’s also comparing vSphere 4.1 vs 5.0, since the Opteron 6200 results seem to be the first vSphere 5.0 VMmark results posted. Also the Intel solution has twice the ram as the Opteron but still loses out.

Based on what I see it seems VMmark is more CPU bound than memory(capacity bound), which I suppose I can understand but still in the vast majority of situations the systems are not CPU bound. People tend to load up more on CPUs so they can get more memory capacity. I won’t have real numbers for probably two months but I’m expecting CPU usage on this new cluster I am building to be at least half the amount of memory usage.

The change sounds Oracle-esque in licensing where they have fairly complicated decisions they made to determine how many “Oracle cores” you have on your physical processor.

I am traveling tonight to Atlanta to deploy a new vSphere cluster with Opteron 6100s, I was going to go with vSphere 5 because of the license limits on vSphere 4.1 not supporting 16 core processors. Now I see 4.1 does support it so I have about 48 hours to think about whether or not I want to change my mind. I do like vSphere 5’s inclusion of LLDP support, more vCPUs per VM. Though really even now after I have been looking through what is in vSphere 5 I don’t see anything game changing, nothing remotely, in my opinion like the change to vSphere 4.0 from ESX 3.5.

Weigh the benefits of what’s new in vSphere 5 vs having the ability to have unlimited memory(well, up to 1TB, which for me is unlimited from a practical standpoint) in my hosts for no additional licensing cost…

I’m already licensed for vSphere 5 since we bought it after the deadline of the end of September.

Mad props to AMD for getting VMware to tweak their licensing.

Decisions, decisions..

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