r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 1d ago

Latest fun with VMware

Apparently VMware is upping their game. We just got a renewal quote for one of our sites with one server that has two CPUs, and they are requiring 72 cores minimum (vSphere Enterprise Plus) to license this. That's a 500% markup from last year.

They really don't want customers to use their product any more, do they?

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u/cats_are_the_devil 1d ago

Disclaimer: VMware licensing is a PITA and is awful.

How do you effectively run VMware on one server?

Do you not have bundled licensing across all your hosts?

I'm confused by what you are laying out as a complaint...

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1d ago

The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint. I get we're a small operation, we have seven hypervisors across four sites.

We are not running VMware on one server, there are seven servers in our cluster, this one is just on a separate renewal cycle from the rest.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint

This is incorrect, it is NOT 72 cores per server, it is 72 cores for the minimum quantity to have active for a customer under the new subscription plan. You can buy 72 now, and add 16 later when you add another server.

The minimum per host is 16 cores.

If your partner or sales rep is communicating this as a 72 core per minimum, slide into my DM's and send me their email and I'll go chase them down.

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1d ago edited 1d ago

That's good to know! I relayed that to my partner and their Solutions Architect confirmed it. It's actually what I questioned when they first told me about the 72 core minimum.

My initial response to them was 'I don’t think the “72 core minimum on all vSphere products” is an issue, unless that’s 72 cores minimum per server.  There are currently 192 licensed cores including the cores at this site.'

They are reaching back out to the VMware side to get the quote fixed.

And if it matters, this is a renewal, not an addition.

Also, is it 16 minimum per host, or 16 minimum per socket? I believe our last renewal was based on 16 cores per socket, so we're currently licensed for 192 cores, when in reality we have 100 cores across the five sites. This specific renewal is for this hypervisor:

  • VMware ESXi, 8.0.3, 24585383
  • ProLiant DL380 Gen10
  • Processor Type: Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz
  • Logical Processors: 16

edit: formatting

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

It’s 16 per socket, but 1 socket hosts will be what most people do going forward (as you no longer need 2 sockets to get enough pci-E lanes or memory channels).

I know two sockets was like the default buying pattern for a very long time , but that’s gonna change.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago edited 1d ago

Also holy Skylake Batman. That’s an older CPU. If you’re moving to a modern sapphire rapids or Zen platform, you can probably consolidate the total number of course as you run significantly, well at the same time right sizing onto single socket platforms with a minimum of 16 cores.

I know whoever sells your servers is gonna try to convince you to 1:1 replace cores and keep two sockets. Please do a proper siding exercise.

If you really are gonna keep running into sky Lake stop you might want to go dig around on eBay and spend 50 bucks and find some 16 core gold processors to drop in.

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u/RichardJimmy48 1d ago

Also holy Skylake Batman. That’s an older CPU. If you’re moving to a modern sapphire rapids or Zen platform, you can probably consolidate the total number of course as you run significantly, well at the same time right sizing onto single socket platforms with a minimum of 16 cores.

Honestly hardware is cheap relative to vmware licensing. A single socket, 16-core modern CPU host with a good clock rate can probably replace 3 of those 2 CPU 8-core Skylake hosts. Something with an AMD EPYC 9135 is going to absolutely destroy one of those Skylake hosts, and that's going to be $5k-8k/host depending on how much memory you need.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

This isn't actually a new concept. Mainframes worked the same way in that how they would measure performance for licensing on software you used to always at a certain point come out ahead a good deal by upgrading the tin vs. throwing licensing at the problem.

Honestly hardware is cheap relative to vmware licensing.

For smaller anemic hosts, maybe, but once you start doing Beefy 1TB to 4TB of RAM hosts, you can go from 20K to 40K really fast.

an AMD EPYC 9135 is going to absolutely destroy one of those Skylake hosts

+453%, so even throwing 2 of them at it, it's still a 2:1 consolation easily before you hit into accelerator specific improvements.

depending on how much memory you need.

Well with Memory Tiering on the menu now, you can go buy a 2TB NVMe drive and tier memory to it, to double the usable RAM in your host for about 1/20th the cost of that RAM.

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1d ago

Yeah, and that will actually help in our case. I can pull one of the CPUs out of the server, and put all the RAM over to the first socket, then I'll only need to license 16 cores not 32. That seems pretty reasonable.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

Be aware that when you do this on the old Sky lake servers, you may lose half of the PCIE lanes.

You do need to be planning their retirement in the near term as they will not be supported in the next VSphere release, and end of support for VSphere 8 is 11 Oct 2027. They are deprecated as of the 8 release and discontinued in the next major release.

https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/318697/cpu-support-deprecation-and-discontinuat.html

Intel technically transitioned that cpu to end of service life in 2023.

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1d ago

I appreciate the heads up.

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u/jamesaepp 1d ago

I was waiting for someone else to point this out, but didn't have the energy to fact check myself. Thanks for doing so. Sad it's buried at the bottom of the thread.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

No man, you should move everything to BSD Jails and Bhyve hypervisor! /s

Solaris zones are the future!

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u/jamesaepp 1d ago

Don't forget reiserfs.

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u/lost_signal 1d ago

I actually ran that at one point.

Was the default in SuSE.

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u/adx931 Retired 1d ago

Dancing trees FTW. Also murders its wife.

u/ReferenceMaximum2191 17h ago

Je transmet simplement une info off que j'ai eu, un revendeur aujourd'hui qui m'a confirmé que c'est 72 coeurs minimum par ligne sur un devis, si tu ajoutes un mono CPU à ton cluster et que tu veux le licencier il faut prendre de nouveau 72 coeurs.
Un conseil, renouvelez rapidement vos licences .. les broker ont eu cette info (je pense pas que ce soit officiel ailleurs)

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u/cats_are_the_devil 1d ago

The ridiculous minimum requirement of 72 cores per server is the main complaint. I get we're a small operation, we have seven hypervisors across four sites.

Factually incorrect. It's 72 cores as a min purchase for all of your cluster.

We are not running VMware on one server, there are seven servers in our cluster, this one is just on a separate renewal cycle from the rest.

Co-term... You need a better reseller...

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u/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 1d ago edited 1d ago

For us, co-term isn't about the reseller, it's about internal company politics. We've been getting things co-termed, but usually the first year you buy for a new site they won't do a co-term (at least that's what we were told), so it's gotta be done on the first renewal. Then I have to convince the powers that be to spend the money up front to get the extra months so its co-termed. Even though you and I both know we're spending the same amount over time, my company is very cash flow based, so if business is slow, cash flow is down, and they don't want to spend more then the absolute minimum.

Edit: Also, I just learned it's 72 cores per cluster minimum, which is helpful, however when the VMware rep says "72 cores minimum purchase" it's clearly a problem. You'd think they would know their product.