Licenseageddon Strikes with VMware Per Socket Per Core Licensing Change

[@squelchedotter]

It's so silly that CPU vendors have to optimize their skus for licensing models...

[@fbifido2]

I like how VMware is pricing themselves out of business :)

[@esra_erimez]

+1

[@boycottvmware5435]

I'm planning transitions off VMware myself. More importantly, when I develop new solutions I'm not going to include a VMware option in a BOM. It will be all products with customer friendly pricing.

[@NightRogue77]

It's kind of awesome watching all these old dinosaurs destroy themselves. Happening all over the place - automakers, tech, etc. VMware will die the same way the others did and will: choking on their greed.

[@justinc8157]

I'm surprised VMware hasn't already died.

[@markarca6360]

@@boycottvmware5435 Switch to XCP-ng (the fate of Citrix XenServer), or Proxmox VE (pay only for support). You can also opt with Nutanix.

[@TiagoJoaoSilva]

This is just Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware and EX-CEO OF INTEL, doing Intel a solid.

[@NightRogue77]

smartest comment +12 Intelligence

[@longnamedude3947]

If you're not part of the club then you don't get access to the buffet. And it seems like VMWare are trying the be a faux door-man.

[@briccimn]

and now, a year later, re-new CEO of Intel and ex of VMWare. They're really annoying, aren't they?

[@0bsmith0]

and yet kill themselves in the process. Great solid there.

[@Psychx_]

VMWare is owned by Dell and Dell recieves heavy discounts from Intel. Go figure...

[@lost4468yt]

I don't think that makes any sense? This would benefit AMD if anything. Who on earth is going to buy any Intel processor that's over 32 cores? No one, because you're going to be paying for 2 sockets to get only 40 cores at most. With this change it has effectively guaranteed that if someone is going to purchase over 32 cores, they're going to go with a 64 core AMD, as it's going to cost them the same as a 36 or 40 core Intel. Well what about for 32 and under? Again AMD still benefits, they've got the fastest 32 cores around. I really don't get people saying this is a positive for Intel?

[@Disobeyedtoast]

This may hurt higher-core adoption for right now, but it also will cause even more ill-will towards VMWare and will hopefully cause more people to migrate to better alternatives.

[@SirHackaL0t.]

You mean worse alternatives? Such as HyperV? Yuck

[@boycottvmware5435]

I think you hit it on the head - VMware is going to lose a great deal of goodwill.

[@DeadlyDragon_]

There arent better alternatives currently for the enterprise. VMWare is the cisco of virtualization.

[@longnamedude3947]

@@DeadlyDragon_ A dinosaur of the industry with vulnerabilities left, right & centre with a over-hyped advantage and a ridiculous pricing model? Is that what you mean by similar?

[@rogerthomas368]

Did VMWARE not learn from their past where they tried to charge for the vRAM entitlement pool size.

[@ligarsystm]

I would be ok if VMware would let me spit a 32 core license on 4 x 8 core boxes.

[@gdrriley420]

It is dell, so there is a reason to be questioning the reasoning behind it. late 2020 will likely have AMDs EPYC 3rd gen

[@tommihommi1]

Epyc Milan isn't increasing cores or threads per socket, only IPC, clockspeed and "soft' IO performance (latency, clock rates).

[@fbifido2]

Dell is Intel bitch. Microsoft say this coming (the cores). So it's best for dell if they can make intel with vmware look cheaper than AMD with vmware, plus also try to stop AMD from creating more cores. (imagine an AMD 2-socket system with 392/512-cores).

[@gdrriley420]

fbifido fbifido 64 cores is reaching the power limit. Maybe a 96 core could be made but you’d then have to lower the clocks even more

[@fbifido2]

@@gdrriley420 that's with current tech.

[@gdrriley420]

@@fbifido2 7nm+ and 5nm aren't going to change it. give it 3-4 years and maybe we will see a double

[@davidedwards7172]

I was wondering about the intel phi processors, where they had 4 threads per core. Could AMD release a bios trick to call all cores above 32 cores a thread? So the 64 core part would become a 32 core with 128 threads? I do not know how the software detects the difference between a thread and a core, so I might be way off.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

That probably would not be the best as it has some architectural implications as well. The SMT=4 discussion we centered around the ThunderX2 which had 4 threads per core. x86 designers could go this way in the future as well.

[@tjb_altf4]

Enterprise will be consolidating hardware (and saving cash doing so) that was previously served by multiple licences. This is not so much of a cash grab as it is an attempt to retain existing cashflow.

[@Noodles.FreeUkraine]

TL;DR: Why do they do it? Because the boss needs a new yacht. Talking about 'incentivizing' is also quite hilarious corporate speak for ripping off customers in this case. To sum it up, thank god for XCP-ng et al., may VMware succeed at pricing themselves out of the market.

[@johnmadsen37]

CEOs get their bonus anyway. They temporarily boost profits so they can jump to another job. Name a CEO that was actually penalized for poor performance..

[@darklocksly3615]

A long video just to said VMWare is ing their customers. I am also a Proxmox advocate as i did use it in a professional environment next to VMWare and showed me Proxmox was more stable.

[@attilavidacs24]

More stable? I've been running x2 VMWare hosts for 800+ days without needing a restart in a production environment. Not sure how much more stable you need.

[@-Xaverius]

@@markj2093 @Attila Vidacs is probably using HA.

[@truckerallikatuk]

What if you got the 48core, and only wanted to use 32 of those cores for VMware? Would you still need 2 licenses even if you only want to run 1 licence worth?

[@TheNasaDude]

How would you do that? Vmware is an hypervisor, you can't restrict it to a certain amount of cores unless you disable the excess in bios At that point, you just buy a cpu with less cores

[@DannyTangtam]

we are switching away from vmware to a hyperconverged product. The cost increase for us is just making things move along faster.

[@esra_erimez]

Thank God for Linux containers

[@regctx9138]

Go proxmox and quit paying these arbitrary fees to use their software...

[@juri14111996]

xcp-ng

[@OSUOSU-vt2bk]

Proxmox really have you every worked in a data center enviroment

[@johnborders8952]

This video could have been a lot shorter. "VMware wants to make more money. The end." VMware didn't have to come up with a different licensing model. They did it because they are the industry leader and they have no real competition.

[@tad2021]

This is pretty much similar to MS's per socket-core licencing, but isn't starting at 16 cores.

[@boycottvmware5435]

The pricing is much worse than MS's though.

[@someother7568]

The issue is VMware is getting ready to loose 50% of their revenues. With the EPYC series, a single socket with high memory density will replace 2x 2 Socket Servers. From 4 licenses to 1. They tried the core count licensing before and there was a revolt. This is an attempt to find a middle ground. And, when you add in other licensing (Oracle, Microsoft, etc.), it seems the sweet spot is around 2x 16 Core.

[@WooShell]

I wouldn't be surprised if VMware pulled a stunt like "32 core per socket if not running on Dell hardware", since Dell now also started shipping Epyc servers beyond 32 cores..

[@BandanazX]

I migrated to Hyper-V and haven't looked back.

[@ИванБрагин]

no good idea ;))

[@thatLion01]

Hyperv is still not for real Enterprise production env.

[@xboxlive6]

@@thatLion01 You have VMM via SCCM. Full migration and clustering.

[@thatLion01]

@@xboxlive6 in this case i see your point

[@affieuk]

@@thatLion01 I've never understood this argument, Hyper-V runs Azure IaaS and the some.

[@vudu5vudu]

Proxmox (KVM/LXD) + ZFS + Ansible (Chef, Puppet) for the win. Yep cutting edge, open source, scalable. Even immutable. You'll need competent engineers who can manage the support themselves. Money flows from corporate code thieves (personal opinion) to engineers and techs. Whats not to like?

[@boommonkey111]

i dont like smelly farts..

[@madant7777]

All this means my smaller customers (the majority) will never go past 32 cores for VMWare now. So no advantage to offer AMD, especially UP 64 cores.

[@LannisterFromDaRock]

Power consumption is also quite an advantage.

[@madant7777]

@@LannisterFromDaRock Not so much for a small amount of servers, like one or two.

[@LannisterFromDaRock]

@@madant7777 Running one server instead of two is in itself a huge difference in power consumption. At least when you run things 24/7.

[@madant7777]

@@LannisterFromDaRock I meant the customers will look at no more than 32 cores, and then buy same amount of Intel servers for continuity sake, especially with NVMe RAID (VROC).

[@LannisterFromDaRock]

@@madant7777 Well, many of them probably will do that. But others will care about price, rack space, power consumption a lot more. Especially the big guys. As soon as AMD will come out with even higher core counts this advantage will only grow.

[@fluffybrook6161]

With that, as i see it, it is wrong. vmware just did shoot its own whole leg, not foot, but whole leg, and vmware didnt expect it.

[@happygimp0]

VMware is closed source. Closed source software has nothing to lose in professional applications.

[@DJEvergreen]

goodbye vmware, hello xcp-ng

[@AmauryJacquot]

or, you can dump vmware and use kvm and virt-manager ;-)

[@Real_Tim_S]

KVM/QEMU on Linux from scratch - I looked at licensing VMWare back in 2005 and said HELL NO!! There isn't enough of a performance hit to justify the license cost of VMware. Looking at OpenBMC with LinuxBoot to pull that even tighter so that the motherboard powers-on into a vetted Linux VM Host state. I think Facebook and Google are already headed in this direction.

[@ИванБрагин]

may Jesus save you

[@TiagoJoaoSilva]

Tim S Oxide Computer

[@matthewhelton1725]

Intel is all about incrementalism... I agree that VMware should go to a straight Core Count Model. VMware is a completely separate entity from Dell... Dell isn't completely happy with that, but that is it.

[@Phynellius]

this seems like a bullshit licensing decision that starts making a dual 32 core EPYC more appealing than a 64 core single socket in terms of lanes of throughput provided per license I actually agree that it would have just been better if they were priced at a lower per core price

[@boycottvmware5435]

You make a great point and I will expand on it. A much better approach would have been for VMware to come up with a regressive Core scheme, that factors in numbers of cores in brackets: First 64 cores at one price, next 32 at 50% discount, next 32 at 75% discount, and so on. Their future pricing actually penalizes multi-CPU, high core system configs that are particularly attractive for high memory density, and data center density.

[@WorBlux]

They could be looking to move more into more ARM, which could have quite a few cores per cpu, even more so than Epyc.

[@PrestonBannister]

Aside from inertia, why run VMware? Used to make sense, but not so much in present. As a developer, used early versions of VMware Workstation, and VMware Server. Switched to VirtualBox when forced as VMware broke Workstation on Linux. More recently did development large scale VMware (backup for VCloud - with ample exposure to VMware bugs). At present, just not seeing a reason to run VMware.

[@jonesconrad1]

It's the windows of virtualisation, heralded by people who favour closed source software over open source because apparently open source is magically insecure because it's source is on GitHub.

[@jonesconrad1]

personally I like a bit of OVirt or raw KVM. VMware fusion is quite nice on Mac though,

[@abinyahwalker7034]

I am sure it is because of ARM that they moved to the per socket/per core license not because of AMD. But VMWare has wanted to make this change since 2016, I’m surprised it took them this long. I am sure the VMWare 7 with ARM support is the perfect time to make the licensing change.

[@iscariotproject]

enter the 80core arm cpu servers....

[@Xxx_EvilSmurf_xxX]

I’m sure there’s a friendly Linux alternative.

[@tunahankaratay1523]

Xen or QEMU are extremely easy to use alternatives on Linux. Proxmox VE is an open source hypervisor OS based on Debian GNU/Linux.

[@n.g.5234]

@@tunahankaratay1523 Proxmox is based on Debian, not FreeBSD. Maybe you're thinking of Free/TrueNAS?

[@tunahankaratay1523]

@@n.g.5234 Yes, my bad there.

[@n.g.5234]

@@tunahankaratay1523 It's alright! It happens to everybody, so many names, acronyms and little things to know and it's easy to think of something but say something else.

[@mikemiller2131]

Proxmox

[@dupajasio4801]

Worked on VCenter problems today. Can't login with AD credentials because namespace is disjoint. Also log reader is gone from 6.7. I'm not using damn CLI to read logs !!! All of these problems for thousands of $ in maintenance. Something sucks here ....

[@MrConor159]

Could you just disable one of the cores?

[@krusic22]

You can, but you still bought the full CPU.

[@ИванБрагин]

VMvare compression service on the hosts can not do :) and the car did license

[@paulsim7589]

Umm but AMD has anounced 32core 256mb cache performance optimised Epics.

[@chai_reddy]

Seriously, who even needs VMware when Proxmox and XCP-ng exist.

[@TheNasaDude]

They know they are best in class and industry standard. With the move to complete html5 management, they pulled an excellent move in the manageability compartment. If they can drop the vcenter and do management from any node like Proxmox does, they will still be my choice for production environments. Most customers want their business to be stable, flexible, and zero downtime. They will keep paying, as long as it's a one time purchase

[@berndeckenfels]

If you scale licenses up for larger servers and reduce them for smaller, that’s fine. As long as you don’t make it more expensive for everybody. The per socket increments counts for additional bandwith so that’s fine. But a 32 core increment is indeed a bit biased. A per socket+8 core would be more flexible (2 x 48 would be 12 license)

[@florin604]

Other software will take over...

[@thatLion01]

Esxi is very stable. Most stable. They are making big mistake for doing this. Perhaps intel is providing some sponsorship to this idea. Just go opensource promox or others. Basically they asking max 32 core per socket. Or if you got 64 cores. Then buy 2 socket licenses up to 64cores. Or like core pack per 32 core per socket max.

[@boycottvmware5435]

@Dr. Edward Morbius 64 or 128 would have given us a great deal more time to handle the changes. As is, this seems like a pure money grab since it is happening to near to the actual pricing change.

[@testthisfordecficiencies]

Get this man some sound treatment!

[@crashk6]

Proxmox, Hyper-V, Virtual Box....

[@juri14111996]

xcp-ng!

[@Unfamiliar_Fruit]

crashk6 Lol VirtualBox... is that a joke? It’s not even type 1

[@jfbeam]

Vbox?!? Sure, let's go deal with the biggest a**holes around... Oracle.

[@crashk6]

@@jfbeam Yes Oracle is a bunch of corporate douche canoes, but Virtual Box predates their acquisition of Sun Microsystems intellectual property, as such most of it GPL licence except of the extensions. So if they decide to go be all Oracle about it I have no doubt the project would fork and a re-implementation of the extensions would happen. Likewise I won't give up on ZFS for NAS just because Oracle touched the Sun IP. Say what you will, but Vbox is a useful tool, among many others.

[@kwinzman]

How to adopt: Use Proxmox instead.

[@mrrolandlawrence]

VMware taking a lead out of adobe's book. Skin the customer. Would love to know if intel "subbed" VMware for this dick move. You know, because they have done stuff like that in the past...

[@FinlayDaG33k]

only watched till 5:14 (so idk yet if he's gonna talk about it... yes, I'm that kind of guy)... but this would mean that for a quad-socket Epyc 7742 machine (do they even exist yet tho?) you'd need 8 licenses... What's next? additional licenses per 128GB of RAM in your machine?

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

EPYC 7002 is only dual-socket capable.

[@FinlayDaG33k]

@@ServeTheHomeVideo Hm... that does make it less of an issue for now... but considering where AMD is heading, I wouldn't be surprised if they support 256cores in a single machine s00n(tm)

[@shahboy68]

well we have been riding the gravy train for a long time. I had several conversations with VMWARE on how I took my 2x license up to a 6x licenses and I went from 4 core sockets to 22 core sockets in 2017 and was asking when they thought they would change there model. VMWARE is way more generous than MS when they changed their datacenter license from Socket to core. Microsoft changed there licensing module for CPUs years ago. The advantage with AMD is a single socket can support massive amount of PCIe lanes meaning more drives with out any shared lanes like intel. Plus they are cheaper and perform as well or better than intel. Well see if Nutanix calls it a CPU tax or if the Community pushes back like the memory tax licensing. It could push some companies to another Hypervisor but your giving up a lot of Management features that just make things that a lot of admins take for granted. in truth it will have a smaller impact on most organizations right now but could trip up folks on the 2021 refreshes but VMWARE made this announcement well before companies start next years budget cycle. At least they didn’t go to a subscription model.... yet

[@boycottvmware5435]

Making an announcement of a pricing change 3 months ago is not sufficient. More importantly, it wasn't like VMware came out with some great features or capabilities. This is all about a money jerk, when VMware already has the most expensive pricing in the industry. No more!

[@shahboy68]

@boycott vmware. Like everyone has 64 cores now. get real 99 % have less than 32 cores per socket. I only have one farm that has single socket AMDs that I put in place last year. Also VMware said they would grandfather in whats currently out there that exceeds 32 cores.

[@markarca6360]

Solution: Use XCP-ng or Proxmox VE instead. In case of Proxmox VE, you only pay for support.

[@Etheoma]

So the 48 core Epycs are basically dead.

[@MyPlayHouse]

This will be bad for VMware, this will move more over to open hypervisors,,, I have been looking at Proxmox for some times,, and if I have to put two lic. on a >32 core CPU,,, whatever might be better on ESXi, just became twices as expensive. On top of that, they have been moving features, that you use to get with ESXi, over to extra packetes,, so you have to buy add on, on add on, to get the same, as you use to get. This video is to favorable, towards a company, that is just milking their customers. :-/

[@sysghost]

VMware thinks there's no competition. Glad I moved away from VMware.

[@przemysawukawski4741]

You can always take a free Hyper-V Server 2019 and have the full power of 64 core virtualization for free :)

[@ИванБрагин]

good luck ;) may Jesus save you

[@przemysawukawski4741]

@@Traumatree From what I see these limitations were caused by wrong drivers or wrong settings. Here you have guys that are able to saturate 10Gbps or more: community.spiceworks.com/topic/2222459-hyper-v-network-switch-on-10gbe-slow

[@SirHackaL0t.]

My big issue with hyper-v is that you are putting the same OS on the guest as the host. So once a month it's reboot the whole farm time plus the hosts as well. And any issues can affect the host as well as the guests. Imagine all your hyper-v machines either being deleted or encrypted because the host was infected. *shudders*

[@przemysawukawski4741]

@@SirHackaL0t. Hmm, to be honest I do not understood your statement. HYPER-V Server 2019 is a separate and free Windows Server Core operating system with only HYPER-V installed on it. In the guest you can install any operating system you want (Windows/ Linux, Unix, etc.). And you are not forced to reboot the host every month - it is your decision how often and when make a servicing reboot for updates.

[@affieuk]

@@Traumatree Get better hardware, get better drivers, configure drivers properly or all the above. Look at some of Microsoft's S2D demos.

[@FaceBookAutomated]

There is almost no advantage that VMWare provides over Hyper-V these days. It has an extreme overhead and will still glitch, no matter what. I’d go with ProxMox over VMWare, and that is saying something...

[@NilsJakobson]

Whats the panic if youre able to afford the latest chip technologies you should be able to afford the licenses too. Those who run things on low budget will stick to the free ESXi and just be thankful that VMWare has their free licenses at all so you can just take something that is reliable and works right out of the box instead of going through piles of half-ass written software to base your infrastructure on.

[@fbifido2]

@5:08 - Why they are doing this? like you said (comparisons - AMD is too great at cores vs Intel), to make it easier for Intel to sell their security problem server CPU, but business can abandon (not likely) VMware and use opensource or just move to the cloud( that does not have VMware). @8:15 - don't forget Intel's customer/advertise hardware discount funds. Intel will not be caught dead doing what they did in the passssssst, there are better ways to do things now. (oh, did you see the INT-$3.0B vs AMD$0.3B picture, nice right) Money/Power/Respect (MPR)

[@yiannism01]

xcp-ngedon or proxmoxgedon!

[@mranthony1886]

Vmware removal of 10gbe Mellanox cards made me move to XCP-ng or proxmox

[@zeroibis]

Except when you get something that is just a few cores more then bam double your license costs.

[@lost4468yt]

Yeah, if anything this is a plus for AMD

[@zekeriya84]

I beleive VmMware hired a very clever managers and analysts; so they paid so well because of their promises of high revenue after their job. And then we are here, these very bad licensing procedure and a great chance for competitors like Oracle VM, Citrix Xypervisor and others. But there is no problem with these clever employees, they will still paid well even VMware loose money and gave a big head for their competitors. I hope other opensource virtualization alternatives will be rock during this period of time.

[@lordbryson]

Seems like the Tech. Companies need to back up OPEN source project "GPLv3" for Virtual Machines instead of sponsoring someone greed.

[@Runehorn]

What a dumb fucking idea to have chip makers now have to fit into 32 core increments because of an arbitrary decision to extort more money out of customers. Hopefully competition of some variety will fix the problem going forward. Rent on processing power....I suppose the only entity to blame for this is consumers for not putting their foot down in disgust and instead just opening their wallets.

[@jaybrooks1098]

Use kvm. Its better and open

[@ivanarturovjr]

Just use free VM

[@happygimp0]

I don't know about large servers and automatically deploy new VMs and so on. But i had to use VMware for one project, on a desktop, it was horrible. VirtualBox is so much better on a desktop and small server.

[@hermanstrom3948]

😎 That's why I use kvm/libvirt. 😎

[@mohdfaizal6773]

Oho😅. 02:40 All nasaly ehh.😢 2 weeks quarentine in da small dark server dungeon for you. 🤣😅

[@davidh.6930]

You dont have redundancy :/ if you go from two servers to one.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

Most installations are not 2 servers these days so one can maintain redundancy even moving 20 to 10 servers

[@Phil-D83]

Wont affect a homelab much as many don't care

[@chazbarclay]

Hello Docker.

[@andljoy]

Yet another reason not to use VMware. I mean , rather than fucking people over to get more money, how about they make people WANT to buy the licences by not being terrible. The per core for server or fixed licence for software is so out of touch. Sell support, sell knowledge. Dont nickle and dime people for stuff like iDRAC etc. If you do , you will be left in the dust by people like proxmox or gigabyte server.

[@webluke]

Haha, I like the conspiracy theories in the comments, "DELL IS WORKING WITH INTEL AND VMWARE TO SCREW AMD MAN". No, the fact is you need to pay more for the software that runs your VM stack because it's doing more when you have more cores now that there is lower Socket to Core counts. Most of the people mad are not using these systems in a corporate environment where the software is just part of the budget, and they pay lots of money for all kinds of things that you don't when you're in your "home lab".

[@ernestoturcios3689]

virtualbox master race

[@juri14111996]

xcp-ng

[@AlpineTheHusky]

"Anti AMD" Love AMD fanboys like there arent any other CPUs with more cores

[@Mil-Keeway]

Is this a joke? No there aren't, at least not in enterprise, and definitely not on a platform that VMWare runs on (Cavium Thunder and IBM Power are not supported, not even implemented by VMWare).

[@falxonPSN]

Not a fanboy thing. Intel simply cannot compete on core count.

[@DergEnterprises]

Sounds like this video was sponsored by VMWare.

[@ServeTheHomeVideo]

It was not sponsored by VMware. All STH content on the main site and on video is editorially independent. All of our revenue comes from third party agencies such as Google, Amazon, and etc. That is one of the reasons STH has grown so much over the years.

[@DergEnterprises]

@@ServeTheHomeVideo I know it wasn't.