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After Complaints, VMware Revises VSphere 5 Licensing

Posted by timothy on from the think-of-them-as-pretend-instances dept.

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)."

14 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Good news, but.. by TigerPlish · · 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?

    --
    The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
    1. Re:Good news, but.. by lucm · · Score: 2

      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 (who also has storage virtualization but is the only vendor that offers a 100% uptime in the SLA); there is also HP 3PAR which is completely awesome. For mid-range again IBM is strong with XIV, but HP, Dell and Pillar are also pretty good. And for entry-level, there are very good iSCSI products (HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic).

      Where does that leave EMC? With existing customers who think that VMAX is still the sh*t... but many of them are switching to HP or IBM who actually have new technology.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
    2. Re:Good news, but.. by lucm · · Score: 2

      > 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 hypervisor hardware is a bit more flexible with Hyper-V, and virtual hardware is equivalent. And lab management from Microsoft is not as popular as Lab Manager but it's still pretty close and personnally I found it significantly more reliable, because with Lab Manager it's not possible to easily pick VMs from VC, one has to import and process them and it takes forever - while on Hyper-V discovery is done instantly.

      In some ways VMWare has better third-party offerings, such as virtual networking with the Nexus 1000v from Cisco or hypervisor-based anti-malware from TrendMicro. Also vCloud is pretty cool, but it's not for a typical company, it's mostly for webhosting and cloud business. And so far it does not support delta disk, which is a complete bummer.

      What I noticed from working closely with both products is that the organizations are quite different. Microsoft are being pretty honest about what the product can or can't do; they will tell you when to use pass-thru disks instead of virtual ones, and they will happily give you what kind of load you can expect from a single host. With VMWare there is a lot of marketing and sometimes it's hard to get an actual answer even when you pay top dollar for a TAM. Sometimes VMWare looks a lot like a mom & pop shop that grew too fast, like Dell or SAP used to be. Some of their flagship products (like VC) have very disturbing bugs, and when you try to get support you end up on the phone with people who don't know the product more than the customer.

      It is my opinion that the best thing that could happen to VMWare would be an acquisition from a company like IBM where it could get the proper support and QA. As for Hyper-V, I think it is following a path similar to SQL Server, becoming an enterprise-ready solution as long as you can accept the limitations and lock-in that comes with Windows.

      --
      lucm, indeed.
  2. Typical EMC Licensing Scheme by Tihstae · · Score: 3, 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.

    1. Re:Typical EMC Licensing Scheme by Anonymous Coward · · 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"...

    2. Re:Typical EMC Licensing Scheme by Tihstae · · Score: 2

      So rather than argue with them, I give their server the XXGB of RAM knowing that I can over subscribe the RAM.

      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 physical host ran out of of RAM.

  3. Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? by Courageous · · Score: 3, 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.

  4. Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? by DuckDodgers · · Score: 4, Informative

    I never used one of the commercial products for virtualization. We were constrained to $0 for the software budget for virtualization, so we toyed with VirtualBox and KVM on Linux. Our development machine was not on a UPS, and over the course of a few weeks we had the occasional 20 second power outage in the building. Some of our VirtualBox images were corrupted by the outage, the KVM images were not, and that was enough to put us onto KVM for production (even though our production servers are of course on UPS with a backup generator). It's possible whatever problem we had with VirtualBox has been fixed in more recent versions or that we misconfigured the storage settings, I don't know. But KVM was more reliable without any tweaking right out of the box, so we went with that.

    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.

  5. Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? by Junta · · Score: 2

    (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 on KVM. http://www.adaptivecomputing.com/products/moab-adaptive-computing-suite.php Their product pages are fairly vague and hard to get a feel for it (mainly because virtualization is a relatively small subset of the product), you kind of need a demo to get a whole picture. This is probably the most polished offering I've seen with my own eyes and touched with my own hands. They actually have quite a few customers using vCenter under the covers because they did some stuff above and beyond VMware with VMware's own products, and have all of it working for VMware and KVM except storage migration which is limited to VMware at the moment.

    IBM also has at least two products with GUI, VMcontrol I've never used and LoadLeveller is starting to accept KVM VMs as workloads IIRC. IBM will also bundle the aforementioned Adaptive product bundled with hardware if you like.

    I've heard some talk about OpenStack, but never seen it in action so I can't speak for or against it other than to say their goal ostensibly lies in this direction.

    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. T

    In general, the biggest thing to prepare yourself at the low level is a drop in I/O performance. virtio-blk and virtio-net mitigate it pretty well, but if you like using e1000 because you don't have to sweat Windows drivers in guests, the performance will be on the floor relative to VMware, for example (and KVM maintainers know and don't care).

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  6. Re:Alternatives by Junta · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  7. Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? by rabbit994 · · Score: 2

    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.

  8. Re:VMware's licensing still sucks by Courageous · · Score: 3, 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//

  9. Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives? by Neil+Watson · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    UNIX/Linux Consulting
  10. Parallels People! by IgnoramusMaximus · · Score: 2

    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" 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.