So i just followed this guy's advice and tried to make calculations for our production farm.
- 180 Virtual Machines with 427 GB of consumed RAM.
- 10 licensed hosts HP BL460 in 1 cluster 20 CPUs, 720 GB RAM total
- 20 Enterprice Edition licenses
If we want to keep vRAM equal to current physical RAM and stay with Enterprise edition once we upgrade to vSphere 5 we will need 720GB / 32GB = 23. Since we have support contract for another 2 years the upgrade of 20 current licenses will cost us zero. We will need to by 3 more licenses only, the pricing hasn't been changed. It will cost us $2,845x3=$8,535.
There is another, more interesting way to upgrade to vSphere 5. We can move to vSphere 5 for free and upgrade to Enterprise Plus edition for $685 per license. It will cost us $685x20=$13700, and we are fully safe with 48GB vRAM entitlement of Enterprise Plus. We will be able to use up to 48GBx20=960GB.
In a nutshel, we have 2 options:
1. Stay with Enteprise edition and upgrade to vSphere 5 for $8,535
2. Move to Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5 for $13700, but have some spare vRAM entitlement and all fantastic new features of vSphere 5.
It is almost obvious that option number 2 is a winner, $5000 is a not a big deal for such a great package.
The only information I lack is what happens to support contract once we upgrade to vSphere 5. Do we have new support for vSphere 5? Our contract is still valid and it will be waste of money if we upgrade before it close to expiry. This information can definitely influence my primary decision. I will update post once I obtain it.
All these calculations and figures just prove my first thoughts about new vSphere 5 licensing model - it is beneficial and flexible for owners of big farms and Enterprise Plus edition licenses. It is aimed to big players, and I am afraid smaller virutalization customers can swing a bit to free MS Hyper-V solutions. It also seems like VMware decided to give up on SMB market and focus on large cloud providers.
Tthe value of main overcommitment technology TPS is significantly decreased with new licensing. The overall rate of memory overcommitment will also go down, although my assumption was that the resource overcommitment was one of the main drivers towards virtualization.
Another bad impact I can think of is that vsphere admins will try to size their VMs to fit vRAM pools and such approach can badly affect VMs performance, thus, undermining trust and confidentce in virtualization technologies.
Update 1: As I understood if you have Production support contract you are entitled for free upgrade to vSphere 5 and you will still have your support contract which will be transfered to vSphere 5 as well. I guess it is time to revise your current support contracts and their expiry dates.
Update 2: Just read something really interesting for those whose Support&Subscription contracts are expired. Normally it would force you to buy vSphere 5 plus new SnS contract. However, the information below means you can save quite a few thousands of your currency on upgrade to vSphere 5 through renewing your expired SnS contracts.
Reinstatement Options for Customers with Inactive SnS Contracts:
- The applicable SnS fees for the current contract term
- Fees that would have been paid for the period of time that the customer’s SnS contract was not active
- A 20 percent fee on the sum of the fees in the preceding two
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