VMware Announces vSphere 5 (and a New Licensing Model)

Reacting to the customers’ demands, VMware announces vSphere 5 today and with it comes a new licensing schema.  There were a couple of major reasons for the change.  Looking at the existing vSphere 4.x “per-physical-CPU” licensing model, there are limits on the number of physical cores per CPU and physical memory.  In fact, vSphere Enterprise has a limitation of 6 physical cores per CPU and 256GB of physical RAM.  vSphere Enterprise Plus has a 12 physical core limit.  The roadmap for Intel’s CPUs has 12 cores and more right around the corner, so VMware had to change something – and so they did. The new licensing scheme focuses on “Per-Processor with Pooled vRAM entitlements”.  What does this mean?  vSphere 5 will still be licensed by CPU, however all restrictions on physical cores and physical RAM have been removed.  In addition a new entitlement on vRAM has been added.  vRAM, or virtual memory, refers to the memory assigned to a virtual machine (VM).   Depending on the edition, each vSphere 5 CPU license provides a certain amount of vRAM capacity. When the virtual machine is powered on, the vRAM configured for that virtual machine counts against the total vRAM entitled to the user. Along with the ability to license by virtual memory capacity, VMware is providing pooled vRAM capacity entitlement. The vRAM entitlements of all licenses are aggregated, or pooled, to form a total available vRAM capacity. This allows VMware vCenter to assign unused vRAM entitlements to other VMs across other hosts. With the pooled vRAM capacity entitlement, at any given point in time, the amount of vRAM consumed by VMs on a host could exceed the licensed ability, but as long as the total consumed vRAM across all VMs managed by vCenter is less than or equal to the total entitled vRAM, vSphere would be licensed properly.

“New” License Offerings

VMware is removing the Advanced license edition leaving Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.  While the list prices of the vSphere license editions did not change, VMware did add vRAM entitlements:

• Standard Edition with 24GB vRAM – $995 list
• Enterprise Edition with 32GB vRAM – $2,875 list
• Enterprise Plus Edition with 48GB vRAM – $3,495 list

New Features and Enhancements

With the release of vSphere 5 comes over 150 features and enhancements. I’ve summarized below the major features.

• Storage DRS (VM storage load balancing) – users will have the ability to balance their storage datastores based on different rules like space constraints, or I/O balancing.  This will give customers the ability to avoid issues like I/O bottlenecks or out of space issues.
• Support for larger VMs – virtual machines can now have 32 virtual CPUs  and 1TB of memory (in Enterprise Plus edition).  This opens the door for “any” application to be virtualized.  
• New Architecture for HA – VMware made some backend tweaks to enable users to easily set up HA (from 20 minutes to less than 2 minutes).  This along with more storage interconnects now makes it a more scalable environment supporting HA clusters of up to 32 vSphere hosts.
• vMotion across higher latency links – vMotion is now tested and supported across wide area networks like campus networks.  
• vCenter Appliance for Linux – users will have the option to run the vCenter server on a Linux platform (previously it was only offered on Windows server)
• Web Client for Management – there will be a new web-based client for management of vSphere and vCenter.  While it won’t have all the features of the Windows client, it opens the door for non-Windows management of vSphere and showcases the direction in which VMware is heading with management.

Additional Features
Here’s a list of some additional features that are being released with vSphere 5.  For a complete list of new features, check out the What’s New section of the vSphere 5 release on www.VMware.com:

• VM Hardware Version 8 – EFI virtual BIOS, virtual CPU cores, 3D graphics
• Enhanced Distributed Switch (Netflow, SPAN support, LLDP)Network I/O Controls (per VM)
• ESXi firewall
• VMFS 5 file system
• Profile Driven Storage
• Storage I/O Control (NFS)
• Array Integration for Thin Provisioning
• 2TB+ VMFS datastores
• Storage vMotion Snapshot Support
• VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (check out my blog post on this here: http://corus360.com/company/blog/a-look-at-vmware-vsphere-storage-appliance-vsa/)

For the full details on VMware vSphere pricing, check out:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Link to VMware vSphere 5 Cheat Sheet (PDF): VMware vSphere 5 Cheatsheet