Licenciamiento vSphere (suma y sigue)

Rescato de la vblogosfera eeste post de Bernd Harzog en The Virtualization Practice donde nos dá otro punto de vista (más) sobre el impacto del nuevo licenciamiento de vSphere. Recomiendo su lectura. Por otro lado, me voy a permitir comentar algunas de sus reflexiones:

"Vertical Equity. Here VMware has always been fair. The Editions of vSphere that are targeted at the SMB and SME markets (while missing many of the nice high end features in the Enterprise Editions) are considerably less expensive than the full enterprise editions that large enterprises use. Therefore small businesses who can arguably afford to pay less for a virtualization platform are afforded this option by VMware. Of course this ignores the question of why SMB’s and SME’s who can get Hyper-V for free should pay anything for vSphere, but that is another article entirely."

Evidentemente, con un modelo que penaliza la densidad, la reflexión es obvia. Evidentemente en los pequeños entornos de virtualización (que no en las pequeñas empresas), la "amenaza" del incremento del coste del licenciamiento abre la caja de pandora de "¿porqué no cambiar el hypervisor")

"Horizontal Equity. Here is where things start to get tricky. VMware makes the point that the vRAM entitlements are large enough to handle the needs of “most” of their customers. However it is already clear that customers who have pushed the envelope on density just a bit, or who have virtualized lots of memory heavy applications will have to pay a lot more for vSphere 5 than they paid for vSphere 4. So this boils down to whether or not a customer with 4,000 VMware hosts who is pushing the envelope on density is the “same” as a customer who is not. It also gets down to who should benefit as the customer drives up density. It would seem that the benefit of driving up density is a benefit of the platform and that the customer having paid once for the platform should not have to pay more to get the maximum benefit from it. The vSphere 5 licensing therefore fails this test."

Sólo imagino un sector de cliente donde el licenciamiento, suba o baje, les dá un poco igual: Los proveedores de servicios Cloud. Básicamente porque repercutirán el coste.... como efecto perverso, puedo imaginar que es una forma sutil de forzar al cliente final a ir hacia modelos Cloud.... con los clientes importantes de VMware.

"Compliance should be easy. When it comes to vSphere 5 licensing that means that it should be easy to figure out how many licenses you need right now and how many you will need into the future. If you have one vSphere environment all pointing to one vCenter then this is not so hard. If, as is the case with many enterprises, there are multiple disparate virtual data centers owned and run by different groups, then consolidated reporting and analysis could be almost impossible. This is also an area where “pooling of vRAM” just does not work. If the test group has purchased N vSphere 5 licenses that have a certain amount of vRAM associated with them, they are not going to let another group use “their” vRAM just because it is technically in the same pool. The new licensing therefore also fails this test."

Evidentemente el modelo Cloud no afecta al licenciamiento... es decir, salvo que os vayáis al futuro SKU para branch offices (que creo limita el número de host y empieza en un paquete de 10 branch offices) el tema de Pools separados (no sólo por vCenters, sino por ediciones) puede llegar a elevar perniciosamente el número de licencias. Las que antes usabas en común.... ahora las adquieres por separado.

"Desirable behavior should not be penalized. In this context desirable could mean many different things. For example, for a performance critical application, ensuring that the application met its response time goals would be highly desirable. In order for this to be achieved, it may make sense to allocate 20% more memory to the application that it uses at its peak in order to ensure that memory bottlenecks never occur. In this case meeting the desired goal of applications performance is in fact inhibited by this new licensing as this new licensing will in the aggregate make being conservative about memory allocations more expensive. This also gets back to the previous point about who should benefit when the customer pushes the density envelope. Clearly it is in VMware’s interest for customers to do this, as it improves the overall value of the vSphere story. For VMware to slap a tax on density therefore seems to make no sense. The new licensing therefore fails this test as well."

Cosas como las reservas preventivas incrementan su coste. Si antes no sobresuscribias memoria, pero dedicabas la definida en la VM por motivos técnicos o de rendimiento (Oracle en Linux, p.e. se llevaba mal con el balloning), ahora tiene otro coste.... el precio por gb de VMware según la edición.

"Promote growth. This is where the new vRAM entitlements may in fact be a fatal mistake for VMware. Because it may turn out that with this new pricing, adding new applications to an existing environment (increasing density) may become much more expensive than it was before. It may also turn out that virtualizing the next 60% of applications that are not virtualized yet may be more expensive than anticipated, since those applications are likely to be more memory intensive than what has been virtualized to date. The new vSphere licensing clearly fails this test."

Básicamente VMware te castiga cada vez que usas sus capacidades de gestión de memoria. Cuanto más ahorres en recursos más pagarás en licencias.

En cuanto a las conclusiones del artículo, totalmente de acuerdo. VMware protege a sus grandes clientes de su intención de facturar más por su infraestructura virtual, penalizando a los más grandes.

Y me uno a la recomendación: Que cada usuario analice cómo le afecta o afectará el nuevo licenciamiento, y tome sus decisiones en base a sus conclusiones.

Un saludo.