Jason Nash’s Blog

If you’re around the virtualization industry at all you’re probably aware of VMware’s recently announced licensing changes as discussed here.  The rumor came out last week that VMware was going to make some changes to the proposed licensing levels in response to customer feedback.  I thought the timing of the rumors hitting were pretty funny…when it first hit Twitter I was standing at the back of the room at the Triad VMUG listening to someone from VMware answer questions and complaints about the new licensing scheme.  Let me just say…VMware listens to their customers more than anyone else I’ve ever worked with.  When they said “Give us feedback on this new model!” they really meant it, and they listened.

Today they released the new licensing information.  Basically, they are bumping the vRAM entitlements and moving to an annual average number, not peak usage.  Here are the new vRAM entitlements:

As you can see the high-end license levels were doubled!  That’s a huge change.  I was asking for 50% more entitlement and VMware beat that.  The lower levels are bumped by 33%.  There is also really good news for those that deploy the free hypervisor.  Before it was 8GB of vRAM and now it’s a physical limit of 32GB…there is no vRAM entitlement there, just physical.  Use memory overcommit as much as you can!

The other good news is that the compliance is now based on an average, not peak usage.  So if you wanted to temporarily exceed your vRAM pool entitlement you would be out of compliance, but that is no longer the case.  Now you will “true up” yearly when you renew your SnS.  Supposedly there will be a way to output a report from vCenter for this purpose.  Also on that note, the GA release of vSphere 5 will need a later update to understand these new compliance number.  My understanding is that you won’t be prohibited from powering up systems that exceed your entitlement, you’ll just get a notification in vCenter.

And the third thing…  Now that vSphere 5 can support VMs with 1TB of RAM licensing all that seems a bit crazy, right?  VMware has also made a change so that any single VM will use a maximum of 96GB of vRAM entitlement.  So if you build a VM with 256GB of RAM it will only reduce your vRAM pool by 96GB.  No more jokes about the licensing cost of that mythical 1TB VM!

In my opinion, VMware has exceeded my expectations and these changes should make a lot of people happy.  The larger entitlements should ease a lot of fears and then add on the annual average aspect and you have a great combination.  Some things to keep in mind…when purchasing new licensing look to see what you need.  It may be advantageous, for example, to buy Enterprise Plus with 96GB of entitlement than extra Enterprise.  Word ist hat VMware will be running a promotion for upgrades to Ent. Plus, similar to what they have done before.  That is expected in Q4 of this year.

As I mentioned, when this rumor first hit I was at a VMUG listening to VMware users talk about the new licensing.  In the room there was only one person that had run the license analyzer tools mentioned in my previous blog post and came up short on new licensing.  Everyone else that ran it was fine…at least for now.  While I initially feared far worse for my customers so far those that have run the script have by and large been right where VMware said.  With these new changes that umbrella should extend to more people as well as give a longer planning cycle before new licenses are needed.

So what do you think?  Good?  Bad?  All a big ploy by VMware so they can sell us Coke Classic?