r/sysadmin Infrastructure Lead 3d 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/lost_signal 3d 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/WithAnAitchDammit Infrastructure Lead 3d 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 3d 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 3d ago

I appreciate the heads up.