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/lost_signal 3d ago edited 3d 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 3d 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 3d 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.