This is a slightly controversial post, but I hope people will take it in the spirit of curiosity and openness of information, rather than an attack on the new vSphere licencing model, and also sorry it’s far too long – I really need an editor!
For those who aren’t that involved on Twitter or the VMware blogs and forums, there’s been huge amounts of discussion over the recent licence changes by VMware for vSphere 5, in regards to the vRAM caps on per-processor licences.
On a personal level, as a fan of the vSphere technology, as a VMware certified professional, and as a VMware business partner, it’s fairly disappointing that while much of vSphere 5 was well discussed and trialled in advance, it seems the new licences have been much less “field trialled”, and though the new changes are much more in line with how VMware deals with service providers, the surprise of the move has distracted significantly from the positive improvements in the new vSphere version, and wasted much of the initial launch efforts.
While initially VMware were very quiet when people were first reacting to the vSphere licence changes, which VMware says will mean no cost increases for most customers and only large price inceases for a few customers, they’ve now started to come out with some firmed justifications and explanations, which in general sound reasonable.
One very useful blog post, Understanding the vSphere 5 vRAM licensing model includes a graph which attempts to answer how the exact final figures were arrived at, and I would highly recommend reading it first if you haven’t already.
While the graph is very clear, there’s no raw figures provided, and it seemed like those raw figures would give a much clearer anwser to the question of “How many people will actually be impacted by the vRAM change?”, so I sat down with Excel and paint.net to try and return to an estimate of the raw figures, which I’ve come up with below.
[table “1” not found /]
Now, I’m sure the figures aren’t perfect, but I think they’re pretty close, and return an average number of processors at 5.69, while VMware have got 5.7.
What my raw figures also show though, is a high number of entries are above the “5.7 VMs per Processor” average, 39% of them in total.
This is based on the total percentage below 6 VMs per Processor (for ease of calculation, plus it’s a handy error of margin), which comes to 60.3%, leaving 39.7% with a usage above 6 VMs per Processor.
While those 39.7% won’t automatically be charged more by VMware under the new vRAM rule, it certainly gives an estimate of the number of customers who will be either impacted, or impacted in the future by these rules.
More significantly, 10% of the results are for 12 VMs per Processor or above, these 10% of people are almost certain to be impacted and will be very unhappy right now – these are the people that the VMware account managers are going to have to earn their money placating.
Now I don’t believe huge numbers of people will switch from VMware to Microsoft or Citrix over this, and I’m pretty sure most existing customers will end up striking “No cost upgrade” deals with their sales reps, but it seems clear that these 10% of users should have been given significant warning about the change coming, and an opportunity to formally buy much cheaper upgrade deals, rather than have to go through the cycle of “Surprise, outrage, shout at sales, get the discount they should of been given on day 1”.