From what I have heard the originally targeted release date for VMware's vSphere 5 was August 5th. Now this has passed and it did not happen. There are now rumors ongoing that it will be released on August 22nd (see source)...
I don't know why it is being delayed. One possible reason is the change in licensing that was announced on August 3rd (see VMware's Power of Partnership Blog). With the revelation of vSphere 5 on July 12th VMware introduced a new licensing method based on vRAM (the amount of RAM allocated to running VMs) which lead to a storm of protest among customers and partners, especially because of the low amount of vRAM per physical CPU that was originally communicated. With the announcement above VMware has doubled this entitlement for most vSphere editions and they also capped the accountable vRAM for a single VM to 96GB (even if it has more RAM than that).
This will definitely help to speed up the adoption of vSphere 5 ... once it is released.
Update (2011-08-23): Okay, nothing again ... So it will probably happen on Friday (August 26th), just before VMworld 2011 (starting on Monday 29th).
Update (2011-08-25): It is out now, the official release date was August 24th. Customers with subscription go here to download. The free ESXi version is available here.
Showing posts with label licensing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label licensing. Show all posts
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Thursday, July 14, 2011
vSphere 5 licensing - check your environment now to see how it affects you
There has been a lot of rant about the new licensing model of vSphere 5 (see my previous post), because for certain customers (specifically those with a very high RAM per CPU ratio which is more and more common with recent server hardware) will need to buy more vSphere 5 licenses to cover the vRAM usage as they had vSphere 4 licenses before.
Before you start complaining yourself check your environment now to find out how it will affect you. There are a number of PowerCLI scripts available now for doing this. I personally like LucD's the most, get it here: http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/.
For my production environment it outputs the following:
vCenter : [MyVC-FQDN]
vRAMConfigured : 2732.2
vRAMUsed : 2624.8
vRAMEntitled : 6000
LicenseType : vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus
Note that the used vRAM is lower than the configured vRAM, because it only takes into account the total RAM of all running VMs (and I also have some that are powered off).
The current version of the script also counts the assigned licenses only. However, if you have spare licenses that are currently unassigned, they will also add up to vRAM entitlements once they are upgraded to vSphere 5 (I ask Luc to fix that, maybe there is a new version of his script soon).
Anyway, as you can see, I am lucky with the new licensing model and would (yet) have plenty of unused vRAM in my pool if I upgraded today.
Update: There is now an even better script available by Virtu-Al: It can also handle ESX versions earlier than 4.1, looks for unassigned licenses and has a nice HTML output:
http://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/
It is referenced in an official VMware Blog post that tries to better explain the new licensing model and the motivation behind it.
Before you start complaining yourself check your environment now to find out how it will affect you. There are a number of PowerCLI scripts available now for doing this. I personally like LucD's the most, get it here: http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/.
For my production environment it outputs the following:
vCenter : [MyVC-FQDN]
vRAMConfigured : 2732.2
vRAMUsed : 2624.8
vRAMEntitled : 6000
LicenseType : vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus
Note that the used vRAM is lower than the configured vRAM, because it only takes into account the total RAM of all running VMs (and I also have some that are powered off).
The current version of the script also counts the assigned licenses only. However, if you have spare licenses that are currently unassigned, they will also add up to vRAM entitlements once they are upgraded to vSphere 5 (I ask Luc to fix that, maybe there is a new version of his script soon).
Anyway, as you can see, I am lucky with the new licensing model and would (yet) have plenty of unused vRAM in my pool if I upgraded today.
Update: There is now an even better script available by Virtu-Al: It can also handle ESX versions earlier than 4.1, looks for unassigned licenses and has a nice HTML output:
http://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/
It is referenced in an official VMware Blog post that tries to better explain the new licensing model and the motivation behind it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)