vSphere 5 vRAM Licensing Model

While everyone was excited to hear about the next generation of the dominating hypervisor, one particular piece has held a cloud (no pun intended!) over the head of the announcement of vSphere 5.  That cloud is that of the new licensing model VMware has placed in front of us.  VMware has decided to move away from the current entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM to that of a virtualization-based entitlement referred to as vRAM Pooling.

The new licensing model is as follows:

[togglebox state=”closed” head=”Essentials” ]

[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• 24GB vRAM Entitlement

• 8 way vCPU Support

• Centralized Management

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[togglebox state=”closed” head=”Essentials Plus” ][list style=”bullet-tick”]

• 24GB vRAM Entitlement

• 8 way vCPU Support

• Centralized Management

• High Availability

• Data Recovery

• vMotion

[/list]

[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”Standard” ][list style=”bullet-tick”]

• 24GB vRAM Entitlement

• 8 way vCPU Support

• Centralized Management

• High Availability

• Data Recovery

• vMotion

[/list]

[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”Enterprise” ]

[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• 32GB vRAM Entitlement

• 8 way vCPU Support

Everything Standard license offers plus:

• Virtual Serial Port Connector

• Hot Add

• vShield Zones

• Fault Tolerance

• Storage APIs for Array Integration, Multipathing

• Storage vMotion

• Distributed Resource Scheduler & Distributed Power Management

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[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”Enterprise Plus” ]

[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• 48GB vRAM Entitlement

• 32 way vCPU Support

Everything Enterprise license offers plus:

• Distributed Switch

• I/O Controls (Network & Storage)

• Host Profiles

Plus these **new **features:

• Auto Deploy

• Policy-Driven Storage

• Storage DRS

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One of the first questions that comes to mind is, “How does this affect my current virtual infrastructure?”  Here are a couple of example scenarios:

[togglebox state=”closed” head=”2 CPUs/32GB RAM per Host” ][list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Essentials or Essentials Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Essentials line are in the clear.

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• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 64GB (32GB/license)

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Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Enterprise line are in the clear.[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”2 CPUs/64GB RAM per Host” ]

[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Essentials or Essentials Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Essentials line are in the clear as long as their ACTIVE vRAM usage is below 48GB. If the customer wants to utilize all 64GB on a host they will need to purchase another license to add _24GB_of vRAM Entitlement to their vRAM Pool.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Standard per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Again, we are in the same boat as above.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 64GB (32GB/license)

[/list]

Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Enterprise line are in the clear.

My recommendation for this scenario is to upgrade to the Enterprise license for users who need the functionality included with Enterprise.[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”2 CPUs/96GB RAM per Host” ][list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Essentials or Essentials Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Essentials line are in the clear as long as their ACTIVE vRAM usage is below 48GB. If the customer wants to utilize all 96GB on a host they will need to purchase 2 additional licenses to add _48GB_of vRAM Entitlement to their vRAM Pool.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Standard per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Again, we are in the same boat as above.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 64GB (32GB/license)

[/list]

Customer’s using the Enterprise line will need to purchase an additional license to extend their vRAM Pool Entitlements to _96GB_in order to fully utilize all physical RAM.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 96GB (48GB/license)

[/list]

Based on this quick look, customer’s using the Enterprise Plus line are in the clear.

My recommendation for this scenario is to upgrade to the Enterprise Plus license for users who need or could use the functionality included with Enterprise Plus.[/togglebox][togglebox state=”closed” head=”2 CPUs/128GB RAM per Host” ][list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Essentials or Essentials Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

In my opinion, this is a pointless choice for licensing the product in this scenario as it requires too many additional licenses to be able to utilize everything.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Standard per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 48GB (24GB/license)

[/list]

Again, we are in the same boat as above.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 64GB (32GB/license)

[/list]

Customer’s using the Enterprise line will need to purchase an two additional license to extend their vRAM Pool Entitlements to _128GB_in order to fully utilize all physical RAM.[list style=”bullet-tick”]

• Licenses Required: 2 Enterprise Plus per host

• Total vRAM Entitlement: 96GB (48GB/license)

[/list]

Customer’s using the Enterprise Plus line will need to purchase an additional license as well, which brings their total vRAM Entitlement to 144GB.

This particular scenario is highly objective. Are your consolidation ratios worth the extra hit in licensing or is it worth it to scale down and proceed to scale your infrastructure out instead of up?[/togglebox]

As you can see, I looked at specifically 2 CPU configurations. I know that the entire world doesn’t run only dual-proc hardware but I believe that once you see the above examples you will be able to come to your own idea of what it takes to get where you need to be.

When first looking at the above scenarios it seems that the sweet spot configuration would be that of 2 CPUs and 96GB of RAM. Although it is nice, most companies have followed the model of scaling up rather than out. With the ability to consolidate more machines with the newer processors and gobs of memory we can throw into our hardware, does this seem to make sense? Again, this is dependent on the direction your infrastructure is going and the end all dollar spend you can absorb.

In essence, there are a multitude of reasons why VMware feels the change to licensing was necessary.  From the customer perspective, without running numbers, it seems as though they are trying to limit us more than before.  Is this really true?  There are many blog postings out there regarding the cost analysis. This is why I decided to focus more on getting people to better understand the nature of the structure.

How does this affect your infrastructure and your future state plans?