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By admin, July 13, 2011 1:17 pm

After reviewing all the latest features, I would say it should be called vSphere 4.5 instead of vSphere 5.0 as there isn’t much improvements feature wise over the previous 4.1 version.

To my great surprise, VMware launched it’s latest flagship product vSphere in such a hurry, it was originally planed to be released in Q3, 2011 or later. Why is this?

As people say “the devil always lies in the details”, after half reading the latest pricing guide, I quickly figured out the answer to the above question.

It’s all about $$$, VMware tells you the latest vSphere 5.0 doesn’t have any more restriction in CPU/RAM on an ESX host, that sounds so fabulous isn’t it? Or IS IT?

Let’s make a simple example:

Say you have the simplest cluster with two ESX hosts with 2 CPU and 128GB RAM each, you Enterprise Plus edition for these two is USD13,980.

With the previous vSphere 4.1, you have UNLMITED vRAM entitlement and up to 48 cores.

With the brand new vSphere 5.0 pricing model, for the same amount of license (ie, USD13,980), you can only have 192GB entitled vRAM, so in order to have the original 256GB vRAM entitlement, you need to pay extra 2 more Enterprise Plus license, which is USD6,990.

The more RAM your server has, the more you are going to pay with the new licensing model.

So my conclusion is VMware is discouraging people going into cloud in reality. Think about this, why would you buy a Dell Poweredge R710 (2 sockets) with only 96GB RAM installed? The maximum RAM Powerdge R710 is capable of 288GB RAM but you need to pay EXTRA (288GB-96GB) / 48GB = 4 more Enterprise Plus license.

In reality, CPU is always the last resource to run out, but RAM IS! Future server will have much more powerful CPU for sure, but RAM is still the number 1 factor deciding your cloud capacity, IOPS is the 2nd, Network is the 3rd and just to remind you once more, CPU is the last!

Very clever VMware, but will potential customer buy this concept is another story.

Hum…may be it’s a strong sign that I can finally sell my VMW after all these years.

Finally, interesting enough, Microsoft also responsed to this interesting topic.  “Microsoft: New VMware Pricing Makes VMware Cloud Costs 4x Microsoft’s”

* Please note the above is my own personal interpretation as a user, it doesn’t represent my current employer or related affiliates.

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By admin, July 13, 2011 10:34 am

Today VMware announced the release of VMware vSphere 5.0 by surprise! The following is  some of the key features of this release: 

• Convergence. vSphere 5.0 is the first vSphere release built exclusively on the vSphere ESXi 5.0 hypervisor architecture as the host platform.
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy. VMware vSphere Auto Deploy simplifies the task of managing ESXi installation and upgrade for hundreds of machines.
• New Virtual machine capabilities. 32-way virtual SMP, 1TB virtual machine RAM, Software support for 3D graphics, and more.
• Expanded support for VMware Tools versions. VMware Tools from vSphere 4.x is supported in virtual machines running on vSphere 5.0 hosts.
• Storage DRS. This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage.
• Profile-driven storage. This solution allows you to have greater control and insight into characteristics of your storage resources.
• VMFS5. VMFS5 is a new version of vSphere Virtual Machine File System that offers improved scalability and performance, and provides Internationalization support.
• Storage vMotion snapshot support. Allows Storage vMotion of a virtual machine in snapshot mode with associated snapshots.
• vSphere Web Client. A new browser-based user interface that works across Linux and Windows platforms.
• vCenter Server Appliance. A vCenter Server implementation running on a pre-configured Linux-based virtual appliance.
• vSphere High Availability. VMware High Availability has been transformed into a cloud-optimized availability platform.

Here are some of the reasons why I’m excited about this: 

• App Aware API.  This is the same API that has been used by Neverfail’s vAppHA and Symantec’s ApplicationHA products.  Now with 5.0, this API is publicly available.  This means anyone can craft a solution that allows for the monitoring of a application and interfacing with vSphere HA to restart the VM.  Couple this with the new vSphere Web Client’s ease of extensibility and you have the potential to do some great things.
• Ever had DNS resolution cause you issues when using vSphere HA?  With 5.0, all dependency on DNS for vSphere HA has been removed!
• IPv6 is now supported.
• Logging.  There have been a lot of improvements to the log messages with vSphere HA.  This was done to make the log messages more descriptive than ‘unknown HA error’ and should help with identifying configuration issues.
• Several user interface enhancements.  Now you can see more detailed state information about the hosts in your cluster and what role they play with vSphere HA.

The changes to the vSphere HA infrastructure now eliminates the primary/secondary constructs that existed in previous versions of vSphere.  Replacing that is a master/slave model.  In this model, one of the hosts is designated as a master, while the other hosts are designated as slaves.  The master coordinates most of the activities within the cluster and relays information to and from vCenter.

For now though, the reason why this is so great is that you no longer have to worry about details such as what hosts act as your primary nodes and which ones act as secondary nodes.  If you are installing vSphere HA in a blade chassis or making a stretched cluster, this is excellent news for you!

Heartbeat datastores is a feature that allows vSphere HA to utilize the storage subsystem as an alternate communication path.  Using heartbeat datastores allows vSphere HA to do things like determine the state of the hosts in the event of a network failure of the management network. Which brings up another enhancement to be excited about:  management network partitions are now supported in 5.0!

Finally, vSphere 5 has changed entitlements around CPU cores and memory use. The company has lifted licensing restrictions for cores per processor and RAM per host. It’s also eliminated the “advanced” version of vSphere plus, leaving just Essentials, Essentials Plus, Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. vSphere 5 has also introduced a small change to the entitlement process around what is known as virtual memory or vRAM.

You must obtain new licenses to deploy VMware vSphere 5. Your existing VMware vSphere 4 licenses will not work on vSphere 5.

For more, please refer to What’s New in vSphere 5.0 and vSphere 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging Whitepaper as well as Compare VMware vSphere Editions.