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For over 20 years, the employee-owners of SMS proTECH have been striving for your business through responsiveness, adaptability and relationships.
For over 20 years, the employee-owners of SMS proTECH have been striving for your business through responsiveness, adaptability and relationships.
There's a lot of press right now about vSphere 5, VMware's latest platform for virtual infrastructure. We want to make sure you are aware of the changes in licensing that will occur on or before August 22. If you Twitter, you may have seen some posts about the "vRAM TAX". Moving forward VMware is going to charge for virtual memory because servers now allow for hundreds of GB of RAM per host.
vSphere 5 vRAM licensing model will continue to be licensed per physical processor. vRAM is the amount of memory used across your entire environment. The licensing is based on virtual RAM (vRAM) that is allocated to your virtual machines, not physical RAM. Here's a recent statement explaining vRAM entitlement:
"We have introduced vRAM, a transferable, virtualization-based entitlement to offer customers the greatest flexibility for vSphere configuration and usage. vRAM is defined as the virtual memory configured to virtual machines. When a virtual machine is created, it is configured with a certain amount of virtual memory (vRAM) available to the virtual machine. Depending on the edition, each vSphere 5.0-CPU license provides a certain vRAM capacity entitlement. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM entitled to the user. An important feature of the new licensing model is the concept of pooling the vRAM capacity entitlements for all processor licenses. The vRAM entitlements of vSphere CPU licenses are pooled across all CPU licenses managed by a VMware vCenter instance."
vRam limits:
As you can see the Advanced version is missing. On the release date of vSphere5, Advanced will be discontinued. If you intend to move to Enterprise version any time in the future, it's important that you purchase or upgrade to Advanced Licensing. This date is unknown to the community, but we guess it will be before VMworld conference on August 28th. Only licenses that have active support and subscription contracts will be eligible to upgrade when vSphere 5 becomes generally available. Once vSphere 5 is available, those with advanced licensing will get a free upgrade to Enterprise licensing. If you have advanced licensing before this deadline it will save you over $600 per processor license. This could be a huge savings! You will need to do this very soon in order to take advantage of the savings. Justin has more information on his blog.
Please contact your SMS team or Nick Zircher (nzircher@smsprotech.com or direct line 937-494- 2251) to review your current contracts and map out a plan to move forward.
