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VMware Listened: vSphere 5 Licensing Changes

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So VMware announced a change in licensing with vSphere 5…the customers reacted…and VMware listened and adjusted the licensing in about 3 weeks.  Quite a rarity in the enterprise software industry…

When I talked to my clients about the licensing changes that were coming with vSphere 5, the reaction wasn’t really one of shock to a change (they had realized that VMware would eventually need to change licensing somehow as the server industry moved to larger sized servers) but  rather a raising of concerns over Enterprise Plus only having a 48GB vRAM entitlement and concern that the new vRAM entitlement in general would limit the desire to virtualize more Tier 1 applications. Non-production groups also had concerns over the transient nature of their dev/test environments which could have short spikes in vRAM usage when lots of VMs get deployed.  Apparently, my clients were not unique in their concerns…

Today VMware announced a change to the new vSphere 5 licensing:

  • Raising the vRAM entitlements per vSphere editions
    • Essentials / Essentials Plus / Standard are now 32GB  of vRAM per license
    • Enterprise is now 64 GB of vRAM per license
    • Enterprise Plus is now 96 GB of vRAM per license
  • vRAM consumption per running VM is now capped at 96GB
    • a VM configured with 96GB up to 1 TB of vRAM will only reduce the vRAM entitlement pool by 96GB.
  • vCenter will calculate & report on a 12 month trailing average of vRAM usage rather than a high watermark
    • This will reduce the risk of transient VM environments requiring additional vRAM licenses.
    • Note: This change will not be reflecterd in the vSphere 5 reporting capabilities at GA time; it will appear in an vSphere 5 future update release but be trackable via a free utility from VMware until then.
Remember that vRAM is a pooled entitlement across an entire vSphere cluster (all hosts managed by one vCenter Server).  And if you have multiple vCenter Servers linked together, their vRAM entitlements are pooled together as well.   This pooling is often overlooked or mis-understood by users.  The Pooling helps to even out your vRAM consumption across your enterprise.

Make sure you take the time to run the calcualations for your environment.  I did that this afternoon with one client group and their vRAM entitlement was more than 3x their current environment and still more than 50% more than their planned upgrade environment.

The following chart is a good summary of the vSphere 5 licensing and features per edition:
VMware vSphere 5 by Editions

VMware also announced a new vSphere Desktop license package for those environments that use vSphere to host Virtual Desktops.  This new license only counts the total number of powered on virtual desktops and is available in packs of 100 desktop licenses.  Most View users usually purchase a View bundle which includes the vSphere licenses.  For those users who run non-View manage desktops on vSphere, they would purchase those licenses via this new vSphere 5.0 Desktop license pack.

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