Dec/1110
VMware increases core counts in 4.1 licensing
TechOps Guy: Nate
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..
Nov/113
Mass defections away from Vmware coming?
TechOps Guy: Nate
I have expected as much since Vmware announced their abrupt licensing changes, in the same survey that I commented on last night for another reason, another site has reported on another aspect of it – nearly 40% of respondents are strongly considering moving away from Vmware in the coming year, 47% of which cite the licensing charges as the cause.
A Gartner analyst questions the numbers saying the move will be more complicated than people think and that will help Vmware retain share. I don’t agree with that myself I suspect for most customers the move will probably not be complex at all.
Myself I was just recently trying to a dig a bit more into KVM trying to figure out what they use for storage, it seems for block based systems they are using GFS2 (can’t find the link off hand)? Though I imagine they can run on top of NFS too. I wonder what the typical deployment is for KVM when it comes to storage – is shared storage widely used or is it instead used mostly with local DAS?
I just read an interesting comment from a Xen user (I’ve never found Xen to be a compelling platform myself from a technology perspective, my own personal use of Xen has been mostly indirect by means of EC2 – which in general is an absolutely terrible experience), from a thread on slashdot about this topic -
Hyper-V is about 5 years behind and XenServer is about 3 years behind in terms of functionality and stability, mainly due to the fact that VMWare has been doing it for so long. VMWare is rock-solid and feature rich, and I’d love to use them. Currently we use XenServer, but with Citrix recently closing down their hardware API’s and not playing nicely with anyone it looks like it is going to be the first casualty. I’ve been very upset by XenServer’s HA so far, plain and simple it has sucked. I’ve had hosts reboot from crashes and the virtual machines go down, but the host thinks it has the machines and all of the other hosts think it has the machines. I’ve done everything XenServer has asked (HA quorum on a separate LUN, patches, etc), but it still just sucks. I’ve yet to see a host fail and the machines to go elsewhere, and the configuration is absolutely right and has been reviewed by Citrix. Maybe 6.0 will be better, but I just heard of major issues today with it. Hyper-V is really where the competition is going to come from, especially with how engrained it is in everything coming up. Want to run Exchange 2010 SP2? Recommendation is Hyper-V virtual machines.
God I miss VMWare.
I hope Vmware comes through for me and produces a price point for the basic vSphere services that is more cost effective(basically I’d like to see vSphere Standard edition with say something crazy like 256GB/socket vRAM with the current pricing). Though I’d settle for with whatever vRAM is available in enterprise plus.
So your actually paying more for the features.
I can certainly find ways to “make do” at a cost of $1,318/socket (w/1 year of enterprise support based on this pricing), for Standard edition (includes Vmotion and HA), vs $4,369/socket for Enterprise plus. Two sockets would be around $2,600 — which is less than where vSphere 3 was, which was in the $3,000-3,500 range per pair of sockets for standard edition in 2007.
I’m not holding my breath though(since being kicked in the teeth with vSphere 5 licensing changes).
Time will tell if there are such defections, unlike Netflix where the commitment is basically zero, we’ll have to wait for the next round of hardware refreshes to kick in to see what sort of impact there is from the licensing change. Speaking of hardware refreshes(that need vSphere 5) what the hell is taking so long with the Opteron 6200s, AMD?! I really thought they’d show up in September, then couldn’t imagine them not showing up in October, and here we are at November, and still no word.
Vmware does need a “Netflix moment”, a term that has been used quite a bit recently.
Nov/111
Virtualization Surveys, and insights from Xen creator
TechOps Guy: Nate
Two different stories caught my eye today, one from our friends at The Register about a survey by Veeam Software which surveyed several hundred companies with more than 1,000 employees which came to the conclusion that the average consolidation ratio was 5.1:1.
Across the four geographic regions and all the companies surveyed, the perceived consolidation ratio was 9.8 virtual machines per physical machine. But if you do the math and calculate the actual penetration ration, companies are actually squeezing only 5.1 virtual machines per host on average.
It could just be that some IT managers garbled their responses and have screwed up the data, but perhaps Veeam is on to something.
I saw that and did a virtual face palm. 5.1:1 ? Even 9.8:1 ? I think I was doing about 7-9:1 back in 2007 with my first ESX 3.0 systems on HP DL380 G5s with 8 cores and 16GB of ram. I came across a screen shot of one of those systems a couple weeks ago, brought back some good memories! (oh how iSCSI sucked on ESX 3! Speaking of which that brought up another memory I was at a dinner thrown by Dell I think a year or two ago, and they were pushing iSCSI for Vmware via some 3rd party storage/vmware consultants or something. The presenter kept trying to emphasize at the time how good iSCSI was and how there’s no reason not to use it in Vmware and I kept reminding him(in front of the group) how much iSCSI sucked in ESX 3, which is why people were still hesitant to use it even shortly after vSphere came out, he didn’t take it well, it was funny to watch)
My last VMware projects, always memory constrained of course were at the low end 14:1, and higher end maybe 24:1(64GB ram on hardware circa ~2006 – HP DL585 G1). This was without any benefits from transparent page sharing since that stuff never worked for me on Linux anyways, no swapping either. Just right sizing the VMs to the workloads, even if it meant as little as 96MB of memory for the VM.
My next project I’ll be surprised if we can’t get at least 30-40:1.
Seeing numbers like 5:1 makes me think back to when Vmware went around to their customers and saw what they were actually using before announcing their new price hikes for memory, and they set the license limits to what their typical customer was using.
5:1 ? Sad. Unless your really running a CPU bound application then that’s fine, not many of those out there though.
Second article was this one, where one of the “Godfathers” of Xen said one of the great things about virtualization is improving security with workload isolation.
Isolation — the ability to restrict what computing goes on in a given context — is a fundamental characteristic of virtualization that can be exploited to improve trustworthiness of processes on a physical system even if other processes have been compromised, says Crosby, a creator of the open source hypervisor and a founder of startup Bromium, which is looking to use Xen features to boost security.
I couldn’t agree more, which is why per-VM licensing strategies really piss me off, because it works direct opposition to that strategy. At the very least have dual licensing so customers can license based on VM or based on hardware.
On a side note, I just saw an interesting interview on CNBC, where someone was talking about the IPO of Groupon which I believe is supposed to go live tomorrow. Groupon is apparently trying to raise about $510M in a very paltry offering of something like less than 5% of their company. The funny part is apparently they owe about $505M in short term liabilities to vendors and stuff. The person being interviewed says if Groupon doesn’t pull this off soon they’ll go broke practically overnight.
They are also reporting there are 11 book runners on the deal, more than any other US IPO in history. I don’t know what a book runner is but it sounds fishy to have so many runners for such a small allocation of stock.
Burn, baby, burn.
Sep/110
Netflix in a pickle
TechOps Guy: Nate
I wrote on why I canceled my Netflix subscription when they jacked up their rates, it all came down to content – or lack thereof. I see people tout Netflix quite frequently, claiming to be willing/able to “cut the cord” to cable or sattelite or whatever and go Netflix/Hulu/etc. I’m in the opposite boat myself, I’m more than happy to pay more to get more content. Netflix is too little content for obviously too little money. They haven’t achieved the balance for me (and it’s not as if they had a more expensive tier that had more content).
They announced today they expect to lose a million subscribers over this, compound that with them losing a content deal with Starz recently things are not looking so hot for Netflix, if I were a betting person I’d wager their best days are behind them (as in now their content costs are skyrocketing and their growth will likely slow significantly vs past years). Their stock is down roughly 41% from the recent high when they announced the change.
I understand Netflix had to raise rates because their costs have gone up and will continue to rise, they just handled the situation very poorly and are paying for it as a result. It is too bad, at one point it seemed Netflix could be ‘the thing’ as in having a model where they could be potentially the world leader in content distribution or something(and they had the market pretty saturated as far as types of devices that can talk to Netflix to stream — except of course for WebOS devices) – but at least with the way their negotiations are going with the content producers that seems unlikely at this point. As a side note, I read this about Netflix as well and that made me kind of chuckle at their operations as well. Though I’m sure in the grand scheme of things pissing a few million down the tubes for “cloud services” is nothing compared to their content costs.
Something I learned in the midst of these price changes and the uproar about them that I really didn’t know before is that streaming titles come and go on Netflix, what is available today may not be available tomorrow (for no obvious reason – unlike losing a content deal with Starz for example). Could it be that they have rights to put up only x% of someone’s content at any given time ? I don’t know. But I was kind of surprised when I read(from multiple sources) claims that the same titles can be available, then not available then available again. There apparently is some means to get a gauge as to how long something might be available(don’t remember what it was), just goes to show how far we have to go until we ever get to this.
Next up – the impact of the vSphere 5 licensing fiasco. This will take longer to unfold, probably a year or more but I have no doubt it will have a measurable impact (dare I say significant impact) on Vmware’s market share in the coming years. I was talking to a local Vmware rep not too long ago about this and it was like talking to a brick wall – sad really.
I’ve spent more $ buying old movies and tv shows that I want to have copies of in the past week than a year’s netflix subscription would of cost me(I went on somewhat of a spree I don’t do it all that often). But at least I know I have these copies they aren’t going anywhere, I just have to rip them and upload them to my colo’d server for safe off site backup.
Aug/110
VMware revamps vSphere 5 licensing again
TechOps Guy: Nate
I guess someone over there high up was listening, nice to see the community had some kind of impact, VMware has adjusted their policies to some degree, far from perfect, but more bearable than the original plan.
The conspiracy theorist makes me think VMware put bogus numbers out there to begin with, never having any intension of following through with them to gauge the reaction, and then adjusted them to what they probably originally would of offered and try to make people think like they “won” by getting VMware to reduce the impact to some degree.
vSphere Enterprise List Pricing comparison (w/o support)
| # of Sockets | RAM | vSphere 4 Enterprise | vSphere 5 Enterprise (old) | vSphere 5 Enterprise (new) | Cost increase over vSphere 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 256GB | 2 Licenses - $5,750 | 8 Licenses - $23,000 | 4 Licenses - $11,500 | 100% |
| 4 | 512GB | N/A | 16 Licenses - $46,000 | 8 Licenses - $23,000 | N/A |
| 8 | 1024GB | N/A | 32 Licenses - $92,000 | 16 Licenses - $46,000 | N/A |
vSphere Enterprise+ List Pricing comparison (w/o support)
| # of Sockets | RAM | vSphere 4 Enterprise+ | vSphere 5 Enterprise+ (old) | vSphere 5 Enterprise+ (new) | Cost increase over vSphere 4 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 256GB | 2 Licenses - $6,990 | 5 Licenses (240GB) - $17,475 | 3 Licenses (288GB) - $10,485 | 50% higher |
| 4 | 512GB | 4 Licenses - $13,980 | 11 Licenses (528GB) - $38,445 | 5 Licenses (480GB) - $17,475 | 25% higher |
| 8 | 1024GB | 8 Licenses - $27,960 | 21 Licenses(1008GB) - $73,995 | 11 Licenses (1056GB) - $38,445 | 37% higher |
There were other changes too, see the official VMware blog post above for the details. They quadrupled the amount of vRAM available for the free ESXi to 32GB which I still think is not enough, should be, say at least 128GB.
Also of course they are pooling their licenses so the numbers fudge out a bit more depending on the # of hosts and stuff.
One of the bigger changes is VMs larger than 96GB will not need more than 1 license. Though I can’t imagine there are many 96GB VMs out there… even with 1 license if I wanted several hundred gigs of ram for a system I would put in on real hardware, get more cpu cores to boot (not unlikely you have 48-64+ cores of cpu for such a system, which is far beyond where vSphere 5 can scale to for a single VM).
I did some rounding in the price estimates, because the numbers are not divisible cleanly by the amount of ram specified.
It seems VMware has effectively priced their “Enterprise” product out of the market if you have any more than a trivial amount of memory. vSphere 4 Enterprise was, of course limited to 256GB of ram, but look at the cost of that compared to the new stuff, pretty staggering.
Quad socket 512GB looks like the best bet on these configurations anyways.
I still would like to see pricing based more on features than on hardware. E.g. give me vSphere standard edition with 96GB per CPU of vRAM licensing, because a lot of those things in Enteprise+ I don’t need (some are nice to have but very few are critical for most people I believe). As-is users are forced into the higher tiers due to the arbitrary limits set on the licensing, not as bad as the original vSphere 5 pricing but still pretty bad for some users when compared to vSphere 4.
Or give me free ESXi with the ability to individually license software features such as vMotion etc on top of it on a per-socket basis or something.
I think the licensing scheme needs more work. VMware could also do their customers a favor by communicating how this will change in the future, as bigger and bigger machines come out it’s logical to think the memory limits would be increased over time.
The biggest flaw in the licensing scheme remains it measures based on what is provisioned, rather than what is used. There is no excuse for this from VMware since they own the hypervisor and have all the data.
Billing based on provision vs usage is the biggest scam in this whole cloud era.
Jul/110
Netflix acknowledges significant customer backlash
TechOps Guy: Nate
Was watching some CNBC recently and they were talking about the upcoming Netflix results and how much of an impact their recent price hikes may cause.
I wondered over to Yahoo! and came across this:
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Netflix Inc. is bracing for customer backlash that could result in its slowest subscriber growth in more than three years amid changes to its online video and DVD rental service that will raise prices by as much as 60 percent.
[..]
The shortfall stems from an anticipated slowdown in Netflix’s subscriber growth amid the most radical change in the company’s pricing since it began renting DVDs through the mail 12 years ago.
Nice to see. I don’t blame Netflix for the price hikes, I didn’t like them so I quit the service, but it seems clear they are losing money pretty badly (apparently they’ve been using fancy accounting things to try to cover this up), and their licensing costs are about to skyrocket.
Netflix spent nearly $613 million on streaming rights in the second quarter, a more than nine-fold increase from the same time last year. The company so far has signed long-term contracts committing it to pay $2.44 billion for streaming rights.
So they’re doing what they have to do. Though I’m sure most everyone agrees they could of handled the situation far better than they did. They also apparently face some stiff competition in the latin america markets where they are expanding to, places where bandwidth pipes are smaller(making streaming less feasible), and cable bills are much cheaper than they can be here in the states.
While Netflix’s price hikes have gotten quite a bit of press at least in the business news recently I am kind of surprised that the same hasn’t seemed to be true of the VMware price hikes (outside of the tech community at least). The outrage continues to build..
For me it all comes down to selection – increase the streaming catalog to at least match whatever they have on DVD now and I would probably jump back on board.. in the mean time I’ll stick to cable(+Tivo), I’ll pay more but I get a lot more value out of it.
Jul/110
VMware Licensing models
TechOps Guy: Nate
[ was originally combined with another post but I decided to split out ]
VMware has provided it’s own analysis of their customers hardware deployments and telling folks that ~95% of their customers won’t be impacted by the licensing changes. I feel pretty confident that most of those customers are likely massively under utilizing their hardware. I feel confident because I went through that phase as well. Very, very few workloads are truly cpu bound especially with 8-16+ cores per socket.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all that many of those customers when they go to refresh their hardware change their strategy pretty dramatically – provided the licensing permits it. The new licensing makes me think we should bring back 4GB memory sticks and 1 GbE. It is very wasteful to assign 11 CPU licenses to a quad socket system with 512GB of memory, memory only licenses should be available at a significant discount over CPU+memory licenses at the absolute minimum. Not only that but large amounts of memory are actually affordable now. It’s hard for me to imagine at least having a machine with a TB of memory in it for around $100k, it wasn’t TOO long ago that it would of run you 10 times that.
And as to VMware’s own claims that this new scheme will help align ANYTHING better, by using memory pools across the cluster – just keep this in mind. Before this change we didn’t have to care about memory at all, whether we used 1% or 95%, whether some hosts used all of their ram and others used hardly any. It didn’t matter. VMware is not making anything simpler. I read somewhere about them saying some crap about aligning more with IT as a service. Are you kidding me? How may buzz words do we need here?
The least VMware can do is license based on usage. Remember pay for what you use, not what you provision. When I say usage I mean actual usage. Not charging me for the memory my Linux systems are allocating towards (frequently) empty disk buffers (goes to the memory balloon argument). If I allocate 32GB of ram to a VM that is only using 1GB of memory I should be charged for 1GB, not 32GB. Using vSphere’s own active memory monitor would be an OK start.
Want to align better and be more dynamic? align based on memory usage and CPU usage, let me run unlimited cores on the cluster and you can monitor actual usage on a per-socket basis, so if on average (say you can bill based on 95% similar to bandwidth) your using 40% of your CPU then you only need 40% licensing. I still much prefer the flat licensing model in almost any arrangement rather than usage based but if your going to make it usage based, really make it usage based.
Oh yeah – and forget about anything that charges you per VM too (hello SRM). That’s another bogus licensing scheme. It goes completely against the trend of splitting workloads up into more isolated VMs and instead favors fewer much larger VMs that are doing a lot of things at the same time. Even on my own personal co-located ESXi server, I have 5 VMs on it, I could consolidate it to two and provide the similar end user services, but it’s much cleaner to do it in 5 for my own sanity.
All of this new licensing stuff also makes me think back to a project I was working on about a year ago, trying to find some way of doing DR in the cloud, the ROI for doing it in house vs. any cloud on the market(looked at about 5 different ones at the time) was never more than 3 months. In one case the up front costs for the cloud was 4 times the cost for doing it internally. The hardware needs were modest in my opinion, with the physical hardware not even requiring two full racks of equipment. The #1 cost driver was memory, #2 was CPU, storage was a distant third assuming the storage that the providers spec’d could meet the IOPS and throughput requirements, storage came in at about 10-15% of the total cost of the cloud solution.
Since most of my VMware deployments have been in performance sensitive situations (lots of Java) I run the systems with zero swapping, everything in memory has to stay in physical ram.
Jul/110
Cluster DRS
TechOps Guy: Nate
Given the recent price hikes that VMware is imposing on it’s customers(because they aren’t making enough money obviously) , and looking at the list of new things in vSphere 5 and being, well underwhelmed (compared to vSphere 4), I brain stormed a bit and thought about what kind of things I’d like to see VMware add.
VMware seems to be getting more aggressive in going after service providers (their early attempts haven’t been successful, it seems they have less partners now than a year ago – btw I am a vCloud express end-user at the moment). An area that VMware has always struggled in is scalability in their clusters (granted such figures have not been released for vSphere 5 but I am not holding my breath for a 10-100x+ increase in scale)
Whether it’s the number of virtual machines in a cluster, the number of nodes, the scalability of the VMFS file system itself (assuming that’s what your using) etc.
For the most part of course, a cluster is like a management domain, which means it is, in a way a single point of failure. So it’s pretty common for people to build multiple clusters when they have a decent number of systems, if someone has 32 servers, it is unlikely they are going to build a single 32-node cluster.
A feature I would like to see is Cluster DRS, and Cluster HA. Say for example you have several clusters, some clusters are very memory heavy for loading a couple hundred VMs/host(typically 4-8 socket with several hundred gigs of ram), others are compute heavy with very low cpu consolidation ratios (probably dual socket with 128GB or less of memory). Each cluster by itself is a stand alone cluster, but there is loose logic that binds them together to allow the seamless transport of VMs between clusters either for either load balancing or fault tolerance. Combine and extend regular DRS to span clusters, on top of that you may need to do transparent storage vMotion (if required) as well along with the possibility of mapping storage on the target host (on the fly) in order to move the VM over (the forthcoming storage federation technologies could really help make hypervisor life simpler here I think).
Maybe a lot of this could be done using yet another management cluster of some kind, a sort of independent proxy of things (running on independent hardware and perhaps even dedicated storage). In the unlikely event of a catastrophic cluster failure, the management cluster would pick up on this and move the VMs to other clusters and re start them (provided there is sufficient resources of course!). In very large environments it is not be possible to map everything to everywhere, which would require multiple storage vMotions in order to get the VM from the source to a destination that the target host can access – if this can be done at the storage layer via the block level replication stuff first introduced in VAAI that could of course greatly speed up what otherwise might be a lengthy process.
Since it is unlikely anyone is going to be able to build a single cluster with shared storage that spans a great many systems(100s+) and have it be bulletproof enough to provide 99.999% uptime, this kind of capability would be a stop gap, providing the flexibility and availability of a single massive cluster, while at the same time reducing the complexity in having to try to build software that can actually pull the impossible (or what seems impossible today) off.
On the topic of automated cross cluster migrations, having global spare hardware would be nice too, much like most storage arrays have global hot spares, which can be assigned to any degraded RAID group on the system regardless of what shelf it may reside on. Global spare servers would be shared across clusters, and assigned on demand. A high end VM host is likely to cost upwards of $50,000+ in hardware these days, multiply by X number of clusters and well.. you get the idea.
While I’m here, I might as well say I’d like the ability to hot remove memory, Hyper-V has dynamic memory which seems to provide this functionality. I’m sure the guest OSs would need to be re-worked a bit too in order to support this, since in the physical world it’s not too common to need to yank live memory from a system. In the virtual world it can be very handy.
Oh and I won’t forget – give us an ability to manually control the memory balloon.
Another area that could use some improvement is the vMotion compatibility, there is EVC, but last I read you still couldn’t cross processor manufacturers when doing vMotion with EVC. KVM can apparently do it today.
Jul/117
VMware jacks up prices too
TechOps Guy: Nate
Not exactly hot on the heels of Red Hat’s 260% price increase, VMware has done something similar with the introduction of vSphere 5 which is due later this year.
The good: They seem to have eliminated the # of core/socket limit for each of the versions, and have raised the limit of vCPUs per guest to 8 from 4 on the low end, and to 32 from 8 on the high end.
The bad: They have tied licensing to the amount of memory on the server. Each CPU license is granted a set amount of memory it can address.
The ugly: The amount of memory addressable per CPU license is really low.
Example 1 – 4x[8-12] core CPUs with 512GB memory
- vSphere 4 cost with Enterprise Plus w/o support (list pricing) = ~$12,800
- vSphere 5 cost with Enterprise Plus w/o support (list pricing) = ~$38,445
- vSphere 5 cost with Enterprise w/o support (list pricing) = ~$46,000
- vSphere 5 cost with Standard w/o support (list pricing) = ~$21,890
So you pay almost double for the low end version of vSphere 5 vs the highest end version of vSphere 4.
Yes you read that right, vSphere 5 Enterprise costs more than Enterprise Plus in this example.
Example 2 – 8×10 core CPUs with 1024GB memory
- vSphere 4 cost with Enterprise Plus w/o support (list pricing) = ~$25,600
- vSphere 5 cost with Enterprise Plus w/o support (list pricing) = ~$76,890
It really is an unfortunate situation, while it is quite common to charge per CPU socket, or in some cases per CPU core, I have not heard of a licensing scheme that charged for the memory.
I have been saying that I would expect to be using VMware vSphere myself until the 2012 time frame at which point I hope KVM is mature enough to be a suitable replacement (I realize there are some folks out there using KVM now it’s just not mature enough for my own personal taste).
The good news, if you can call it that, is as far as I can tell you can still buy vSphere 4 licenses, and you can even convert vSphere 5 licenses to vSphere 4 (or 3). Hopefully VMware will keep the vSphere 4 license costs around for the life of (vSphere 4) product, which would take customers to roughly 2015.
I have not seen much info about what is new in vSphere 5, for the most part all I see are scalability enhancements for the ultra high end (e.g. 36Gbit/s network throughput, 1 million IOPS, supporting more vCPUs per VM – number of customers that need that I can probably count on 1 hand). With vSphere 4 there was many good technological improvements that made it compelling for pretty much any customer to upgrade (unless you were using RDM with SAN snapshots), I don’t see the same in vSphere 5 (at least at the core hypervisor level). My own personal favorites for vSphere 4 enhancements over 3 were – ESXi boot from SAN, Round Robin MPIO, and the significant improvements in the base hypervisor code itself.
I can’t think of a whole lot of things I would want to see in vSphere 5 that aren’t already in vSphere 4, my needs are somewhat limited though. Most of the features in vSphere 4 are nice to have though for my own needs are not requirements. For the most part I’d be happy on vSphere standard edition (with vMotion which was added to the licensed list for Standard edition about a year ago) the only reason I go for higher end versions is because of license limitations on hardware. The base hypervisor has to be solid as a rock though.
In my humble opinion, the memory limits should look more like
- Standard = 48GB (Currently 24GB)
- Enterprise = 96GB (Currently 32GB)
- Enterprise Plus = 128GB (Currently 48GB)
It just seems wrong to have to load 22 CPU licenses of vSphere on a host with 8 CPUs and 1TB of memory.
I remember upgrading from ESX 3.5 to 4.0, it was so nice to see that it was a free upgrade for those with current support contracts.
I have been a very happy, loyal and satisfied user & customer of VMware’s products since 1999, put simply they have created some of the most robust software I have ever used (second perhaps to Oracle). Maybe I have just been lucky over the years but the number of real problems (e.g. caused downtime) I have had with their products has been tiny, I don’t think it’s enough to need more than one hand to count. I have never once had a ESX or GSX server crash for example. I see mentions of the PSOD that ESX belches out on occasion but I have yet to see it in person myself.
I’ve really been impressed by the quality and performance (even going back as far as my first e-commerce launch on VMware GSX 3.0 in 2004 we did more transactions the first day than we were expecting for the entire first month), so I’m happy to admit I have become loyal to them over the years(for good reason IMO). Pricing moves like this though are very painful, and it will be difficult to break that addiction.
This also probably means if you want to use the upcoming Opteron 6200 16-core cpus (also due in Q3) on vSphere you probably have to use vSphere 5, since 4 is restricted to 12-cores per socket (though would be interesting to see what would happen if you tried).
If I’m wrong about this math please let me know, I am going by what I read here.
Microsoft’s gonna have a field day with these changes.
And people say there’s no inflation going on out there..
sigh
Nov/100
Extreme VMware
TechOps Guy: Nate
So I was browsing some of the headlines of the companies I follow during lunch and came across this article (seems available on many outlets), which I thought was cool.
I’ve known VMware has been a very big happy user of Extreme Networks gear for a good long time now though I wasn’t aware of anything that was public about it, at least until today. It really makes me feel good that despite VMware’s partnerships with EMC and NetApp that include Cisco networking gear, at the end of the day they chose not to run Cisco for their own business.
But going beyond even that it makes me feel good that politics didn’t win out here, obviously the people running the network have a preference, and they were either able to fight, or didn’t have to fight to get what they wanted. Given VMware is a big company and given their big relationship with Cisco I would kind of think that Cisco would try to muscle their way in. Many times they can succeed depending on the management at the client company, but fortunately for the likes of VMware they did not.
SYDNEY, November 12. Extreme Networks, Inc., (Nasdaq: EXTR) today announced that VMware, the global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure, has deployed its innovative enterprise, data centre and Metro Ethernet networking solutions.
VMware’s network features over 50,000 Ethernet ports that deliver connectivity to its engineering lab and supports the IT infrastructure team for its converged voice implementation.
Extreme Networks met VMware’s demanding requirements for highly resilient and scalable network connectivity. Today, VMware’s thousands of employees across multiple campuses are served by Extreme Networks’ leading Ethernet switching solutions featuring 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet, all powered by the ExtremeXOS® modular operating system.
[..]
“We required a robust, feature rich and energy efficient network to handle our data, virtualised applications and converged voice, and we achieved this through a trusted vendor like Extreme Networks, as they help it to achieve maximum availability so that we can drive continuous development,” said Drew Kramer, senior director of technical operations and R&D for VMware. “Working with Extreme Networks, from its high performance products to its knowledgeable and dedicated staff, has resulted in a world class infrastructure.”
Nice to see technology win out for once instead of back room deals which often end up screwing the customer over in the long run.
Since I’m here I guess I should mention the release of the X460 series of switches which came out a week or two ago, intended to replace the now 4-year old X450 series(both “A” and “E”). Notable differences & improvements include:
- Dual hot swap internal power supplies
- User swappable fan tray
- Long distance stacking over 10GbE – up to 40 kilometers
- Clear-Flow now available when the switches are stacked (prior hardware switches could not be stacked to use Clear-Flow
- Stacking module is now optional (X450 it was built in)
- Standard license is Edge license (X450A was Advanced Edge) – still software upgradable all the way to Core license (BGP etc). My favorite protocol ESRP requires Advanced Edge and not Core licensing.
- Hardware support for IPFIX, which they say is complimentary to sFlow
- Lifetime hardware warranty with advanced hardware replacement (X450E had lifetime, X450A did not)
- Layer 3 Virtual Switching (yay!) – I first used this functionality on the Black Diamond 10808 back in 2005, it’s really neat.
The X460 seems to be aimed at the mid to upper range of GbE switches, with the X480 being the high end offering.
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