The Systems Engineer

In an effort to quickly determine how bad VMWare’s vSphere 5′s new licensing is going to hit the company wallet I wrote a powershell one liner. It needs vsphere powershell to function. Once connected to vCenter the first line will show the sum of configured memory in MegaBytes.

> get-vm | measure-object -property MemoryMB -sum
Count : 518
Average :
Sum : 2171984
Maximum :
Minimum :
Property : MemoryMB

Since VMWare’s new licensing says that an Enterprise Plus Processor license is good for up to 48 GB you can do some quick math with the numbers to see how many licenses you need. 2171984 / 1024 = 2121.078125 GB. 2121.078125 GB of configured memory is just over 2 TB. 2121.078125 / 48 GB = 44.18 licenses. So it appears I need 45 processor licenses to run vSphere 5 with my current memory configurations.

This second line I have added a few more switches. These will show you your largest, smallest, and average memory configuration. The average is useful so that you can figure out on average how much a VM costs you from this new licensing view point.

> get-vm | measure-object -property MemoryMB -sum -average -maximum -minimum
Count : 518
Average : 4193.0193050193
Sum : 2171984
Maximum : 32768
Minimum : 256
Property : MemoryMB

VMWare vSphere Enterprise Plus retails for $3495 and provides you with licensing for 48 GB of memory. The means each GB you configure on a VM roughly costs you $72.81. My average VM using the numbers above costs $298.14 just for the vSphere 5 license.

This new model will prove interesting in the near future as better understanding of it is developed. It seems to me that management will see that a VM has yet another license cost. This one tied directly to how much memory we configure and usually waste on a VM. Memory increases on a VM that doesn’t consume that memory now have a cost associated with them.

This new model seems like it will hurt some of the large memory configuration blade providers that have 2 or 4 procs but support 256 or 512 GB of memory. Their prices just went up from $6,990 and $13,980 to $18,639 and $37279 My Cisco B200-M2 blades will continue to cost me $6,990 since they have 96GB of memory. I am concerned about those new B440 series Cisco blades I was looking at. 4 Procs but 512 GB of memory, $37,279 in vsphere licenses per box? Ouch.

All prices are list. There are other editions of vSphere that are cheaper however I do not use those. vSphere 5 does have a lot of positve new features that I am unsure if I can live with out. Storage DRS for instance is something we have been asking for for years.

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I am creating this post using a Cisco Cius. What better way to put this device to the test than to actually use it? I have went through the basics and advanced self paced labs here in the world of solutions. The basics covered the android os on cius as well as how to create a video call and some of the other cool features. The call quality looked great, though a little laggy here on the demo floor, which was to be expected.

Using pocketcloud to connect to a windows 2008 r2 desktop works fine as well. Also a little laggy but I still think that could be solved with enterprise wireless instead of demo booth wireless. I am using a full size keyboard and mouse connected via usb to the cius phone docking station.

For giggles I’ll undock the cius to prove my connection remains to my RDP desktop and complete this post. Looks like I had to reconnect to my session. The software keyboard is a bit difficult to use. However it looks like i will complete this post just fine.

Very interested to play wih this device in my environment, I see some good potentials.

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Day two here at Networkers, sorry Cisco Live, is well underway. I am in my first session and it is resonating with me! Utilizing ITIL event management, incident management, problem management, and change management to when providing network services has been on the radar for me recently.

I have been thinking about how to fix my “broken” event management. Sure we notify of issues on the network. The issue is more about the noise from excessive notifications. The solution? Proper event management. Things like creative tickets and managing their resolution properly for events on the network. Squelching the noise to allow us to clearly hear the actual issues. Moving away from blowing up the email on your phone and instead aggregating events and correlating them.

A lot of the slides in this presentation have excellent KPI’s provided via charts and graphs. I have been given a lot of ideas of how I want to be able to view my KPI’s with the new CMDB we have been planning to deploy.

If you have too many alerts, less than ideal change management, or a desire to improve your network management systems I would recommend viewing this presentation. If you would like to see how ITIL can quickly apply to the network world you may want to take a peek at this session as well.

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