It is a common misunderstanding that, if you buy software licenses you can do anything with it. You will not become the owner of it, you only get the use right of the software under STRICT CONDITIONS. What you may or may not do with Microsoft software is recorded to the smallest details by Microsoft in several documents, like the End User License Agreement (e.g. Enterprise Agreement), Product Lists and Product Use Rights.

Only a few people read all those documents, but in general nobody reads them all. They just buy the licenses and think are correct or are offered by their IT supplier. Always check with a license expert that what you want to achieve complies with what is possible with the licenses you want to acquire. This prevents disappointment and high costs later on.

I wrote a post on licensing Windows 7 in a VMware Horizon View environment and most things mentioned in that post are still valid also for Windows 8. Below I will zoom into changes or summarize important facts for a complete understanding.

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It has only been two hours from the end of an action packed General session, opening VMworld 2012, but the pinnacle for me was certainly the announcement leading to the ‘Post vRAM era’.

Almost one year ago VMware introduced their controversial and much hated vRAM licensing model, which after customer complaints changed shortly after introduction to up the vRAM limits. Now one year later, shortly before the first vRAM reports should come rolling out of your vCenter servers, VMware discontinues it and returns to the CPU-based licensing model it used prior to launching vSphere 5.

This will definitely take the wind out of sails for Microsoft and Citrix because they used they vTax, as they called it, to lure VMware customers to the other side.

At first sight this might seem a small meaningless announcement but I think this has great impact on customers, partners, VMware and the competition.

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Since the announcement of VMware vSphere 5, the attention for the great new features has been swapped by the discussion on the new VMware vSphere 5 licensing model.

Because of the processor association it looks complicated and expensive but if you do the math, most of the time pricing remains the same. Gabrie van Zanten wrote an excellent article on that.

In short, with traditional virtual infrastructures used for server virtualization, the host servers seldom exceed the 96GB per host. This matches with a dual socket server licensed with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus. In that scenario the number of vSphere 5 ‘processor’ licenses will equal the number of physical sockets, so the total cost for this environment will be equal with the new vSphere 5 licensing model.

But how about the new licensing model with memory dense servers/blades like we use in VDI solutions. When housing 100-200 VDI desktops on a single server you need immense amounts of memory and with the new vSphere 5 licensing model this would cost much much more that with the old licensing model.

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With the introduction of VMware vSphere 5, VMware introduces a new licensing model. VMware will retain a per processor model but they  removed some restrictions which were in the vSphere 4 licensing model. This is mainly regarding the number of cores per processor and the amount of physical memory in a host on which vSphere 4 could be deployed. With vSphere 5 it does no longer matter how many cores or amount of memory a ESXi hosts has.

Instead of the physical restrictions, VMware introduces a single virtualization based entitlement of pooled virtual memory (vRAM). According to VMware, this will simplify the process of purchasing deploying and managing vSphere while facilitating the move to shared infrastructure as a service.

vSphere 5.0 will be licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each vSphere 5.0 CPU license will entitle the customer to a specific amount of vRAM, or memory configured to virtual machines. The vRAM entitlement can be pooled across a vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model.

The vSphere 5.0 licensing model is per processor with pooled vRAM entitlements. According to VMware, this should offer customers the following benefits relative to the previous vSphere 4 model:

Simplicity – Removes two physical constraints (core and physical RAM), replacing them with a single virtual entitlement (vRAM). Customers now have a clear path to license vSphere on next-generation hardware configurations.

Flexibility – Extends the concept of resource pooling from technology to the business of IT by allowing aggregation and sharing of vRAM entitlement across a large pool of servers.

Fairness – Better aligns cost with actual use and value derived,rather than with hardware configurations and capacity.

Evolution – Allows customers to evolve to a cloud-like “pay for consumption” model without disrupting established purchasing, deployment and license-management practices and processes.

In all fairness, with this VMware introduced the much criticized virtual machine based licensing ‘with a twist’. Because they now license based on the amount of allocated vRAM, you’re much more limited in the total number of deployed virtual machines than you where when you were limited by physical memory and processor cores.

I’m afraid this may backfire on VMware, especially when in competition with Microsoft or Citrix.

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With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has released a new licensing model.

The management products below change from a CPU-based pricing model to one that is VM-based.

• VMware vCenter CapacityIQ;
• VMware vCenter AppSpeed;
• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager;
• VMware vCenter Chargeback.

Until December 15th these product can be offered both ways, CPU-, or VM-based.

As of today VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager is end-of-sale.

This new licensing model has no impact on VMware vSphere licensing!

A couple of weeks ago I talked to a co-worker who is responsible for selling VMware licenses and other VMware related stuff. As a VMware partner it isn’t always easy to manage the licenses for customers nor selling or upgrading their licenses if they bought them from another partner in the past.

A lot of the times multiple people register VMware licenses. For example, if I am the person that has to request or register licenses I probably will do it with my own VMware account. If I leave the company the licenses still are connected to me as a person. I know you can use a general account and register your licenses with that, but that goes against anything I ever learnt about security and identity management.

If you already have licenses there is also no easy way to ‘push’ them to another account, for example a general account. You can do this through the support desk, but takes all kinds of effort.

From a viewpoint of the license admininstrator it’s hard to keep track of all licenses that a company has for VMware products.

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After some hard pushing and nudging with Oracle sales the last couple of months I almost became a Oracle licensing guru. Not what I had in mind and was aiming for to be honest. While completing some business cases about virtualization for several customers, Oracle products became a hot issue again.

The Oracle Soap

I advised the customer to be careful about mentioning that they were striving for virtualizing the Oracle servers on VMware. The Oracle account manager could smell blood and would jump on the band wagon to let them pay for their attempt to make the infrastructure flexible and ready and supportive for a fast changing business. So the first thing what happened when the Oracle account manager heard the word virtualization was that he mentioned to the customer that it would cost at least 200K Oracle licensing costs even without knowing what the customer was pursuing.

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The world of licenses and subscription models is a complex whole, by adding a virtual component it even got more complex. Virtual machines aren’t bound to one physical server and can move freely across several physical servers or even in and out of a cloud. Fortunately more and more software vendors are changing their license and/or subscription models in favour of virtualization. Giving companies back their freedom of choice how they would like to arrange their infrastructure to support their business.

Also Red Hat changed their subscription plans in favour of virtualization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux often abbreviated to RHEL doesn’t have a license model because it’s based on open source Linux and has a GPL license. What you will not get if you do not pay a subscription fee to Red Hat is any updates and support. As a professional business you would like some insurance so I would advise to get a valid subscription on Red Hat products.

To save money on RHEL subscriptions on a VMware infrastructure there are three options to subscribe a virtual machine running RHEL. You can:

1. Subscribe 1 virtual machine running RHEL, also called 1 on 1 subscription;
2. Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server with 2 Socket – 4 Guest for VMware subscription to subscribe 4 virtual machines with 1 special subscription.
3. Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform with Unlimited Socket – 10 Guest for VMware subscription to subscribe 10 virtual machines running RHEL.

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