It now has been more then 24hrs since the vSphere5 announcement. Allthough VMware has done tons of work on the arhitectural level wich we all are very pleased with, there is something out there that throws a big shadow: the new licensing model, a.k.a #vTax (lets make the name official shall we?)
I’m not going to repeat what everyone else allready said. The real VMguru’s will defend the strategie as far as they can, the partners (hardware vendors) and the resellors (as I) just don’t get it. Allthough you’ll find some blogs that state “it isn’t bad at all” (sorry @gabvirtualworld) you just can’t defend this strategie all way trough in my opinion.
So why do I feel I have to say something too? Well, this morning I read Calvin Zito’s (@HPStorageGuy) blog on their new support for up to 2TB in 1 server! (blogpost). The last few years all hardware vendors have been working their asses off to save footprint, power, cooling, blablabla,… And once they get there you’ll have to pay +150k per server just for your VMware Licenses? So now the answer of the beleivers could be: who the hell puts 2TB in one server. Isn’t that a little bit to much showing off? Ok, I hear you. Therefore I will give you an opposite example.
Lets say you don’t really need an enterprise environment with tons of hypervisors. Could we still take the benefit of the architectural strengths of VMware? Oh yes you can. VMware launched Essentials+. You get vCenter, HA and VMotion, almost for free. For free you say? Yes, only 3.500. The only limitation was max 6 sockets. How do we size this? Well, you take an HP DL380 (or DELL r710) with 2 quad or 6-core sockets and each socket gets 6 x 8 GB RAM. Not really oversized no? Result? 3 x 96 GB RAM per server = 288 GB RAM. Together this means: 12.5/GB on vSphere licenses. And what does this mean in the new licensing model: Essentials+ has a max of 144GB in the vRAM pool so I will need to go to the Enterprise+ linceses becasue of the 48GB RAM per socket. 6 sockets Enterprise+ * 3.500 per socket = 21.000 (73/GB) for the same amount of RAM I allready put in there. Are you kidding me ???
Now lets hope that I will be proven wrong…
To summarize: I think my boss is really happy these days that we have always supported a multi-vendor vision (ex. HP/DELL) as VMware now gave our Hyper-V Consultants job security for the next months.