as time goes on it becomes more important to take a closer look at vsphere 5 and esxi in general. i was just watching a presentation on vram licensing that was laughable. the way they try to marketing-speak explain that this is an improvement on the licensing model and that physical constraints are removed, this is more cloud-like, and so on. now, i’m aware that everyone has hated this concept since it was announced and i’m not just jumping on that played out bandwagon* (more on this later)….but plain and simple this was a horrible decision on vmware’s part. there was so much public outcry because the motivation behind the change was so obvious – greed. sure, vmware as a business needs to find new ways to bring in more profits and please stockholders, etc. but common sense says that in order to grow your profits you first need to maintain your current profit levels. one way not to do this is to lose customers and i firmly believe that if you poke at customers too much they begin looking at alternative products/companies. netflix is a good recent example of this principle. they jerked around customers enough that close to 1 million left. it didn’t destroy netflix or anything but losing anywhere from 8-16million dollars a month in revenue has to hurt somewhat.

and in vmware’s case there are viable alternatives nowadays – hyper-v, linux kvm, citrix xen. and these are alternatives that most vmware customers probably thought they would never take a serious look at…but maybe they are now. anyways, to summarize this long drawn out rant it was a horrible decision and remains to be so. it’s common knowledge with 4-cores, 8-cores, 10-cores, that CPU resources are hardly in short supply. what is scarce is RAM. the majority of people are getting a 1U or 2U server with 2 physical multi-core processors and loading them with vast amounts of RAM. someone at vmware realized this and their eyes cartoonishly became dollar signs.

vram licensing scheme (scheme being a very appropriate word here):
enterprise plus – 96GB
enterprise – 64GB
standard – 32GB

currently, we use up 12 licenses in the vsphere 4.x licensing model. we have a total of approx. 882GB of pooled physical RAM. 882 / 96 = 9.2…so it seems we could get away with 10 licenses…2 less than we’re currently using? however, i don’t know pricing yet…so who’s to say that twelve 4.x licenses are more expensive than ten 5.x licenses.

*on the topic of jumping on hateful bandwagons i have personally never agreed with everyone’s hatred of Windows Me. every time a group of people discuss it in forums or in person everyone’s like “lol that god awful piece of crap sucked so much”. even microsoft representatives join in on the “joke” by saying “yeah, haha, what were we thinking??” i feel like i used Me for at least a year or two and never had any problems with it since upgrading from 98SE. i simply remember it as being Windows 98 plus some features from Windows 2000. i guess i would love to hear valid complaints instead of just badmouthing something because everyone else does.

i also could stick up for Windows Vista just the same. i can at least remember some of the issues with the initial release of Vista – performance and general bugginess. definitely not ready to deploy in an enterprise, but it was acceptable for a personal desktop. with SP1 it became even more useable and with SP2 it basically was Windows 7. so the whole Vista hate and 7 love has never made any sense to me…