vSphere 5 licensing changes

Unless you have been living under a rock, you would have heard VMware announce the release of vSphere 5 today. I have spent a few hours sifting through the information on the new features and changes. There is a lot of great content been released today, from bloggers but more importantly on the Partner Portal. VMware have obviously invested a lot of time and resources in getting the content out so quickly and this is something other vendors should take on board.

Although there are a lot of great new features in vSphere 5, I believe its release will be remembered for the changes to the licensing model. This is shame as there are some great new features being released and these may well not get the focus they deserve. I totally understand why VMware made changes to the licensing model and the market has been expecting VMware to make some sort of change. As Intel continues to produce CPU’s with more cores and Servers are capable of being fitted with more and more RAM the old license model was doomed.

New Licensing Details:http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

I personally believe the new licensing model (vRAM) is the right model but that the amount of vRAM allocated per license is in-adequate. Instead VMware should have used numbers that reflect what customers are using in their environments now (probably nearly twice what VMware decided).

In my experience, customers deploying VMware using new hardware with 4.1, Enterprise plus on dual socket servers would allocate between 96 to 146GB of physical RAM. Factoring in the over subscription of about 30% vRAM to physical RAM with 80% utilization of a host with 146GB of RAM. I would estimate about 152GB of vRAM total, divide that by two for Dual socket makes 76GB of vRAM per socket. Therefore to ensure customers who have existing infrastructure, that are looking to upgrade to vSphere 5 from 4.1 can without purchasing additional licenses, VMware should look to increase the vRAM to about 76GB for Enterprise Plus per processor.

The new licensing model will no doubt be attacked by many people, customers, competitors and partners but ultimately everyone should agree something had to change.