Tuesday, February 4th 2020
VMWare Updates Licensing Model, Setting 32-Core Limit per License
VMWare, one of the most popular virtualization solutions commercially available for businesses and the industry in general, has announced changes to its licensing model. From now on, licensees will have to acquire a license per 32 CPU cores, instead of the former "per socket" model. This effectively means that users who had made a migration to AMD's 64-core EPYC CPUs, for instance, and who saved on both price-per core and VMWare licensing fees compared to Intel customers (who would need two sockets to achieve the same core-count, and thus, two licenses) are now being charged for two licenses for a 64-core, AMD-populated socket. This was a selling point for AMD - the company stated that their high-end EPYC processors could act as a dual-socket setup with a single processor, thanks to EPYC's I/O capabilities and core counts. VMWare claims this change is in line with industry standard pricing models.
Of course this decision from VMWare hits AMD the hardest, and it comes at a time where there are already 48 and 64 core CPUs available in the market. Should this licensing change be done, perhaps it should be in line with the current state of the industry, and not following in a quasi-random core-count (it definitely isn't random, though, and I'll leave it at that). From VMware's perspective, AMD's humongous CPU core counts does affect their bottom line. The official release claiming customers license software based on CPU counts may be valid, and they do allow for free licenses for servers past 32 cores until April 30, 2020. Of course, VMWare is also preparing itself for future industry changes - Intel will obviously increase its core counts in response to AMD's EPYC attack on the expected core counts of professional applications.
Source:
VMware
Of course this decision from VMWare hits AMD the hardest, and it comes at a time where there are already 48 and 64 core CPUs available in the market. Should this licensing change be done, perhaps it should be in line with the current state of the industry, and not following in a quasi-random core-count (it definitely isn't random, though, and I'll leave it at that). From VMware's perspective, AMD's humongous CPU core counts does affect their bottom line. The official release claiming customers license software based on CPU counts may be valid, and they do allow for free licenses for servers past 32 cores until April 30, 2020. Of course, VMWare is also preparing itself for future industry changes - Intel will obviously increase its core counts in response to AMD's EPYC attack on the expected core counts of professional applications.
83 Comments on VMWare Updates Licensing Model, Setting 32-Core Limit per License
There are 4 scenarios with explanation how many licenses are needed.
28 cores -> 1 license "Because up to 32 can be provisioned with 1 CPU license"
28 matches "up to 32". It could have been 4.
It looks as if AMD fans were butthurt because VMware said 28. And we all know Intel makes 28-core CPUs and AMD doesn't.
Hence - obviously - VMware is in bed with Intel, right?
And I honestly think it's more than good enough to illustrate how the licensing scheme will change.
$900k$450k.Software is expensive. Cloud is expensive.
Some people here seem to think companies buy servers and gather around them to admire the summer breeze.They did write an "up to 32" in another part of this graph.
It was a serious question if English is not your native language. Because right now, the only mess is your understanding.
www.networkworld.com/article/3435727/two-amd-epyc-processors-crush-four-intel-xeons-in-tests.html
www.vmware.com/reusable_content/vsphere_pricing.html
:rolleyes:
Edit: And I thought Windows Server licensing scheme was nuts.
Why nuts? Not for what you're getting. Some databases are even more expensive.
It's a fundamental tool for most companies - an investment. It either makes sense or not. Nothing "nuts" about it.
Construction companies pay similar sums for excavators or other essential machines. Would you call them nuts? :P
You have to think about how this stacks up.
Lets say you want to start a new on-remise system in a company (some ERP or analytics). You need hardware, database, backup, the actual software you want (e.g. ERP), some consulting help and training. And that's just for production. You also need a DEV/ACC environment which will be much cheaper but still...
So you may end up with something like:
server: $200k
virtualization software: $10k
database: $500k
target software (e.g. ERP): $500k
consulting: $100k
training: $100k
DEV/ACC: $100k (cheap server, cheap/free non-prod licensing)
This sums up to $1.5M for a project (and that's without workforce cost). That's the figure you're going to show to your management board.
It's important to understand this - especially when you read a discussion on a gaming forum and people tell you that everyone will suddenly jump to AMD because EPYC is $3000 cheaper than a Xeon.
All things considered, its not a major change. VMware is used by companies running software worth millions and used to make millions, not by home users. In this space they effectively sell performance, and limiting the performance achievable within a single license is actually quite common in HPC world. Otherwise the software creator would earn exactly as much on a client running the software on a supercomputer (potentially generating massive income) as on a small-time one, which would not be very productive.
Anyway, how is that important? License cost scales with cores/processors. So it doesn't really matter how many servers you want to set up. Virtualization cost is multiplicative (just like energy etc).