Vmware vSphere 5 vRAM Entitlements Updated – Official

Today I recieved the email from VMware indicating they have refined the vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements. This comes after a lot of negative feedback from the user community on the new licensing model. I had seen a number of posts of users saying they may switch hypervisors as they were concerned about the additional costs. So VMware listened.  I do think it is an impressive move by VMware, listening to their customer base and making adjustments based on their feedback.

Below is directly quoted from the VMware email.

Nonetheless, these changes have generated a great deal of discussion and debate in the blogosphere, across the VMware communities, and in direct conversations with customers and partners. Some of the discussion has reflected confusion about technical terms and the exact nature of the changes. Other comments are more specific to customer and partner use cases and future planning. In all instances, we have been watching the commentaries on the blogs very carefully, and we have been listening to customers very intently. We have collected a huge amount of feedback about the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario.

We are a company built on customer good will, and we take customer feedback to heart. Our primary objective is to do right by our customers. Therefore, we are announcing three changes to the vSphere 5 licensing model that address the three most recurring areas of customer feedback:
We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.
We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
We’ve adjusted our model to be much more flexible around transient workloads and short-term spikes that are typical in environments such as test & dev.

The key changes being doubling the vRAM entitlement for Enterprise and Enterprise Plus to 64GB and 96GB respectively. Essentials and Standard licenses are now at 32GB. Another big change was the entitlement for vSphere Hypervisor as there was a large concern that the previous entitlement of 8GB was not really useable. That is now at 32GB, although for the free hypervisor this is a physical memory limit.

VMware also has introduced a vSphere Desktop Edition which does not have vRAM entitlements. Customers will be able to purchase vSphere for VDI on a per user basis.

Overall a good move by VMware.

vSphere 5 licensing White Paper

VMWare vSphere 5 Overview

VMware On-Demand Virtual Event on vSphere 5 licensing

Pete