As many of you did I watched todays Cloud Infra­struc­ture Forum and the release of vSphere 5 today.  I was very excited with many of the fea­tures such as Stor­age Pro­fil­ing, Stor­age DRS, VMFS 5 release, and they have blown the top off of the resource lim­its on VMs to cre­ate Mon­ster VMs — just to men­tion a few.  How­ever, one topic I notice caus­ing quite a stir is the new licens­ing that seemed to be very briefly men­tioned at the end of the webi­nar. To quote VMware in page 3 the vSphere 5 licens­ing guide:

 

vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM enti­tle­ment. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will enti­tle the pur­chaser to a spe­cific amount of vRAM, or mem­ory con­fig­ured to vir­tual machines. The vRAM enti­tle­ment can be pooled across a vSphere envi­ron­ment to enable a true cloud or util­ity based IT con­sump­tion model. Just like VMware tech­nol­ogy offers cus­tomers an evo­lu­tion­ary path from the tra­di­tional dat­a­cen­ter to cloud infra­struc­ture, the vSphere 5.0 licens­ing model allows cus­tomers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for con­sump­tion” model with­out dis­rupt­ing estab­lished pur­chas­ing, deploy­ment and license– man­age­ment prac­tices and processes.

 

This caused quite an uproar on twit­ter of peo­ple com­plain­ing that it would raise their licens­ing costs. My per­sonal opin­ion on the new licens­ing is both neg­a­tive and pos­i­tive.  For every neg­a­tive side I see in some­thing I always try to put a pos­i­tive spin on it.  Firstly it is true that this may cause some highly con­sol­i­dated shops to have to reasses their infra­struc­ture before they upgrade to vSphere 5.  It may require pur­chase of more licenses to obtain more pooled vRAM to be on the legal side of the licens­ing.  It may also slow adop­tion as peo­ple have to per­form audits on their infra­struc­ture to deter­mine what will be needed for the new licens­ing model.  Also for some of the big mem­ory packed beast servers this may prove to be a dis­ad­van­tage. As I have heard thru the vSphere 5 licens­ing guide there is no hard limit and vSphere will not stop you from deploy­ing VMs for every licens­ing model but Essen­tials which there is actu­ally a hard limit.

On a pos­i­tive note; as a vSphere Admin this licens­ing may make my life eas­ier.  When appli­ca­tion own­ers real­ize that there is a charge based on mem­ory use and they may need to sign a pur­chase order to get their over­sized machine approved instead of mak­ing their appli­ca­tion more effi­cient they may change their tune a bit.  This means less vm sprawl and more focus on what exactly is run­ning in the envi­ron­ment and is it run­ning at its absolute best and most effi­cient. Also  If there is a zom­bie VM com­sum­ing some valu­able vRAM I am sure it will also be found and dis­patched more quickly than with the cur­rent licens­ing model.

 

 

Written by Ed is a Systems Engineer specializing in Virtualization and Storage for a large Medical Devices company based near Zurich, Switzerland. He is originally from Chicago and relocated to Europe to aid with a project moving a large SAP environment from US to CH. Over the past 10 years he has gained experience working in Support, Systems Administration, to finally infrastructure design/engineering. He currently holds VCP 4, CCA, and MCP Certifications. He can be reached at @eczerwin on twitter.