Trace | 
07 13th, 2011| 
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.
