News

VMware Raises vSphere 5 vRAM Entitlements

VMware listened to the growing din around its vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements, and announced an increase of vRAM limits in a blog Wednesday.

• By Michael Domingo
• 08/04/2011

As a response to customer feedback,  VMware announced that it has changed the licensing model for vSphere 5. According to a blog posted Wednesday by VMware vice president of product management, Bogomil Balkansy, vRAM entitlements for vSphere 5 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus will be doubled from the original planned licensing model, with Enterprise now at 64GB of vRAM and Enterprise Plus capped at 96GB. vSphere Standard, Essentials/Essentials Plus and the free vSphere Hypervisor are all capped at 32GB.

Balkansky in the blog offered a link to an ROI calculator to assist in planning upgrades from VI 3.5 or vSphere 4 based on vRAM needs.

VMware made the original licensing pricing available on July 12, to coincide with the announcement of vSphere 5. VMware said at the time that licensing would be based on a per-processor-with-core-limitation scheme, and vRAM would be limited to fairly low minimums: Standard at 24GB of vRAM, Enterprise at 32GB and Enterprise Plus at 48GB. The change immediately drew some negative responses from the VMware community and several bloggers.

One of those bloggers, Elias Khnaser, a virtualization expert with The Elias Khnaser Company and a blogger for VirtualizationReview.com, wrote in his Virtual Insider blog that the change would "cost me about three times as much to upgrade to vSphere 5 or to roll out a new environment." He cited an example in which, even with vRAM being pooled, VMs can run out of memory simply because of the core limitation due to the licensing. "A 2-socket, 6-core server with 96GB or RAM, you would need two vSphere 4 Enterprise licenses," wrote Khnaser, adding, "to do the same thing with vSphere 5, you will need three vSphere 5 licenses."

Late last week, there had been hints that a change was coming from VMware on the licensing issue. That hint came from another virtualization blogger, Derek Seaman, who had posted information on the new entitlements.

Even with the higher entitlements, reaction was mixed. "I think the allocated vRAM model makes little sense when VMware changed to a reserved vRAM model for VSPP users," commented Unixman. "It still means that I will NOT be able to upgrade my 4.1 vSphere Essentials environments to 5.0 without having to upgrade to 8 licences of standard edition, and that's before Moore's LAW kicks in over the next 12-18 months," said Steven J.

On the positive side: "I thought the original entitlements were too low but believe the new ones are very reasonable for today," said Seashellkc. "Well done VMWare, you've obviously listened. I still thnk 128GB for E+ would be more realistic," said Joshdel.