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After Complaints, VMware Revises VSphere 5 Licensing
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)."
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.
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.
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.
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//