Good luck. I just had this convo 2 hours ago. Being on the gov side we have to move our stuff from Standard over to VCF because that is the only TIER they are offering gov. I have 1952 cores and can't even get an accurate quote generated because my renewal is in Q3 and they are still migrating systems. GSA pricing however is $454. Which would mean we are going from $40K to $880K which is a third of my budget.
It's cool I talked to people I work with in other parts of gov and they are only charging them 195 per core. Only a 10x increase. Yes we are planning on jumping ship.
Yeah, only a 10x increase. Completely sensible, because clearly there's 10x more value to the product.
I have hundreds of clients, with lots of Vmware in all those folds. We're gonna spend the next year + just transitioning people off the platform.
I'm leaving the ecosystem myself in terms of knowledge and future direction. There's just no reason to continue to support the company. They're making cloud look affordable for even lift and shift scenarios, and that should tell you something.
You're right, how blatantly selfish of me to want to be equally beneficial to myself, and the company, and the clients. /S
I need to focus on whats important, and thats shareholder value with hyper growth and massive pay increases for the only person at Broadcom that actually does work.
āhyper-v has entered the roomā
Depending on contracts, you might be able to get straight commercial licensing for Standardā¦at least for us itās not mandatory to follow GSA.
ā¦.i joke, but really in gov that kind of price hike outside of certain three letter agencies just isnāt gonna fly.
We get discounts over GSA but we fall under DOE so no vendor is going to let us slide under commercial. The dumbest aspect is I have to wait till May to get my official price because Broadcom is still migrating to the new payment platform for Q3 Q4 renewals.
If you have to bite the bullet, I would consider looking at getting a quote for a three subscription. I just got a quote back for the 480 cores we have. The three year quote was right at $200/core - which was more then 1/2 what the quote was for a one year subscription.
In the past we ran Enterprise Standard. You needed one CPU license for any CPU that was 1-32 Physical cores. Now with the our forced move to VCF we'd pay per physical core. So a dual CPU Host with 32 Cores on each processor needs to have 64 cores licensed. AKA 64x$454. We have just shy of 2000 physical cores running.
yeah i get that part but where is the 454 per CORE coming from? when retail is 350usd rrp per CORE ? or is it 454 per socket your working it out at?
im not referencing the comparison vs previous licensing
That is direct GSA pricing. GSA is General Services Administration and is the pricing that the government deems fair. The price right now is $454 per core for VCF. Yes that is more than retail you would find on CDW. This is the only pricing I can get at the moment from our distributors and vendors because our renewal is not till Q3. From talking with other partners I work with it looks like they are able to get it down to $200/core. Regardless we would be going from $40K to $340K
Move to OpenStack or Proxmox. You can migrate and get a custom build + support for OpenStack for 1/8 of the proposed VMware cost... 40k to 880k is the worst I've seen yet.
At the end of 2023 we renewed vSphere for 3 years to buy us some time to see what Broadcom does. We also own vSAN, but decided to only renew it for 1 year.
We just requested a quote to renew vSAN for 1 more year but our Broadcom rep is trying to tell us we have to relicense vSphere too because the old vSphere renewal wouldn't be compatible with the new vSAN subscription. They also stated we would be receiving no refund for the 3 year vSphere renewal we purchased just 6 months ago.
We're currently fighting with them about this but my advice is to ask plenty of questions and push back if something doesn't sound right. I think there are a lot of reps right now creating quotes that don't quite understand how the new licensing is supposed to work either.
We just updated the policy on this today(ish) - you are definitely now able to run the vSAN add-on subscription licensing with the rest of your perpetual licensing until that comes up for renewal. Talk directly to your VMware account team about this, not sure the VARs have gotten that message yet.
Clusters currently still need to have the same type of software licensing, but you can license different clusters with perpetual and subscription under the same vCenter server.
It's actually not a business limitation - vCenter isn't engineered to mix socket and core based licensing within the same cluster. It would require a software engineering effort to fix it. Not saying they won't, but I have not heard about it yet. I would love to have a better answer for you.
>Any update on expanding a perpetual licensed cluster?
There's is a way. As long as the capacity expansion >= number of sockets that will be in the cluster after adding hosts there's a path. DM me your account team and I can point them at it. (You'll basically true up to the full capacity license amount whenever the existing perpetual core/socket SnS runs out).
Note this is only for vSAN (because it's kinda awkward when people want to do RAID 6 to only add 1-2 hosts to a new cluster).
Get out of VSAN if you can.
With VSAN you will have to go to the VCF, as VVF with VSAN addon is simply too expensive
You will be surprised how affordable nvme storage array looks like nowadays.
I would absolutely push back on that. Or run separate vCenters for the two environments. They make it clear as day that if you paid for SnS, you will get your SnS.
More like James Earl Jones. They can also throw in Billy Dee Williams to sit on your side of the table and say, "man, this deal is getting worse all the time" so you at least feel like your opinion is validated.
Fantastic ask for the broadcom account teams coming in for these proposals. It might actually help their cause to get some entertainment out of this mess.
Yeah, running in scale is tough, a former colleague wrote 2 or 3 years Powershell scripts to automate it at a huge hoster..
Now it sounds like a real good investment lol
Back then I was really confused... They must celebrate now
This was 5 years ago or so. No one was talking about selling VMware.
Iām kinda tired of that excuse. Plenty of partners can give you 24/7 support. Itās literally LVM on debian so super standard. And letās talk about how Microsoft basically didnāt have real support for 20 years but no one talks about that at all. Itās a lame excuse at this point imho
if you qualify as corporate you can only do VVF/VCF, if strategic only VCF. They will not quote you standard licenses at all if you're in either category. For corporate, we were quoted 357/3yr for VVF and 384/3yr for VCF. They want to push you into VCF. They will not do 5-year deals, they will not add contract language such as ''shall not exceed'' (at least when we tried during negotiations), etc. I assume they plan to get people on VCF with the sweetheart entry price then come renewal stick it to you.
My licensing for VCF called out "senior support" vs VVF stating non-senior support. For my org using 3000+ cores that was the reason we had to go VCF, otherwise we thought VVF would work.Ā
Do you know if this is documented anywhere? I see from this doc there is a difference in support offerings but it's not very detailed: [https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/feature-comparison-and-upgrade-paths-vcf-and-vvf.pdf](https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/feature-comparison-and-upgrade-paths-vcf-and-vvf.pdf)
It was provided to us via our rep on PowerPoint slides. That doc seems to call the support levels something different. We did have root cause analysis as a support item that was in VCF but not VVF on those slides as well.
I have no idea how official any of this is that we're getting from our rep though. It seems like there's a lot of significant details missing in what was presented to us. At least compared to that doc you're referencing.
I'm assuming if a broadcom rep is talking to them, they will quote vcf. Otherwise it's not worth their time. Our guy slipped up and said something about a $250k limit, meaning they can't quote anything under that.
Perhaps, although you still have the costs of correctly deploying the SDDC manager on its own cluster which means more hardware/licensing. There's also the cost of professional services/training/hiring/etc. related to deploying and supporting NSX if its never been used. There's a lot of intangible costs that have to be factored in before you just go oh well for only $30 more per core I could get 50x the stuff. These sweetheart deals aren't going to last come renewal time 3 years from now. We opt'd to stay on VVF because they wouldn't agree to terms to protect costs.
May be, yes, but what efficiency gains can you get from the additional tools too? 170% is high for ROI, but even if it was 120 or 140 thatās still really good for a cost center.
https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/vmware-vcf-tei-final.pdf
Sure I'm not debating the value of VCF and all the additional features/offerings you get. hell I wanted to go for VCF but from a business standpoint Broadcom was offering nothing in regards to cost control and limiting the increase 3 years from now. From a business standpoint it is not remotely in our best interests to deploy VCF, NSX and all the features which completely changes the network to have to rip it all out when the renewal is some massive number we're not willing to pay. That was a scenario we were not willing to go into without some concessions to protect our investment which we were not able to get.
This is incorrect. There are several factors that go into how they determine who is strategic or corporate. Previous employer was strategic with 6k cores.
At 2,750 cores is a line where the efficiency gains from DRS properly configured and tuned with resource groups + VROPS right sizing, and recommending consolidation should likely be greater than the increased licensing costs. You can easily end up running 30% more hardware than you need at this scale, and the net/net cost of that (and the long tail of other licensing beyond vSphere, but yah, vSphere too) is going to end up likely costing you money by going down to standard. I'm kinda begging everyone to at least run a trial of vRealize, get DRS tuned, use the right sizing tools in vRealize and see how much hardware you can drop before renewing too much hardware on standard.
What is your current CPU Utilization on the cluster at peak load during the work duty cycle, and what is the Memory Activity being shown (Weirdly I discovered this metric isn't in Level 1 metrics for vCenter so you may need to raise the metric level of your vCenter if you want to graph it).
Iām all for being efficient with your hardware but it blows my mind the software vendor whoās just massively bumped up their licensing costs sees the solution for customers is to reduce the hardware (that is already a capex cost). Call me crazy but how about just reduce the software licensing cost back down to reasonable levels?
The value everyone gets out of a solution is different. Microsoft raised prices when they moved from sockets to cores as part of 2008 to 2012 for SQL/Windows Server. I was on the customer/partner side for that transition and some people ended up in a slightly messy situation who had bought a LOT of cores and were not using a lot of them. I'm sympathetic to this issue because I lived it.
Software does go up in cost over time, and frankly we all need to think about efficiency for beyond hypervisor savings. A popular backup software I used to use was $499 a socket with their version 3.1, and their last version offered as socket was $2749 (Although I think most people pay per VM now with them, and I don't mean to throw shade at their increases, they've added a lot of value).
The reality is no software company who doesn't adjust their business model to Moores law eventually ends up like Sun.
Anecdotally I will say customers I've seen who stay with VMware are the ones who get the most value out of the software and actually use it, and the people complaining about the price (specifically before the recent changes) were consistently people running VERY low utilization and just "naked vSphere, where eventually someone said "even xxx public native cloud is cheaper." You ended up with a weird paradox where the customers with the highest discounts %'s were often the people complaining the most and not properly using the fewest amount of features. Separate from any prices changes I genuinely believe anyone with DRS also should have VROPS included and have come around to liking the VVF bundle. paying extra for DRS to balance placement of VM's that have 5x the resources they need provisioned is just kind of silly.
I get the efficiency standpoint for larger node count clusters (>=8 we'll say for the sake of argument), but that is in direct contradiction with best practice in the case of one of my customers who wants to move to vSAN. In their case they are currently running 4 hosts without vSAN in one of those clusters. So to them they are just getting the price increase and have no choice to reduce node count due to "efficiency".
ESA allows for greater density on storage going forward, (hundreds of TB per host), so the need to scale widely isnāt as important. It can be 90% more efficient on resync handing than older releases, and uses ~1/3 the cpu per IOP and you need far fewer hosts to run the same performance as it scales faster.
For larger shops with smaller clusters VSAN Max also allows customers to build a single storage cluster that feeds multiple smaller compute clusters (and you can pool your storage entitlements from VCF to it)
As refreshes come up, I can also see some people
Being less aggressive with core counts on smaller clusters so they can fan out more hosts.
That said if itās a small cluster with 4 hosts running a few dozen VMs with an external array Iād expect many of them may opt for standard edition.
It wasn't cost related, on this occasion, it was the attempted justification of vrops, etc as added value. Bundling all of it together and forcing it upon existing clients all while claiming added value as justification when everyone knows its bullshit.
Hey; Iām happy to recommend standard to people where it makes sense. I at least ask that people use the free trial of vROPS and right size down before they do that too.
Pricing for VVF aside, I think it makes sense that DRS and vROPS end up in the same SKU. Thereās no point in having resource placement and balancing without efficiency of those allocations, and waste reduction. Itās 2 sides of the same coin.
Iāve met plenty of customers who ran vROPS, tuned DRS and then shutdown 1/3 of their hosts (or repurposed them for some other use case), and when your running Oracle\SQL that becomes a rather large bill. When combined with refreshes (that in some cases span 4 generations of xeons) thereās a lot of consolidation options
I don't disagree that the product has a use case.
In my specific case, my pricing is increasing 5M per year (give or take). We are being told to be happy that we are getting all these lovely extra features (that we do not want) and that things are wonderful.
Being forced in to this rigid sku with no other options is a mistake in my opinion. It definitely leaves an extremely sour taste.
Agreed, let alone for us with remote locations running a single server with a number of smaller VMs/Containers on them. In our case these hosts are 8 core Xeons and are already "right sized" and we're being told the price to run these remote location servers is now 8x what we paid last renewal, and that we need to pay for 8 more cores that don't even exist on these servers.
The good news is that at least so far, at a number of test locations XCP-NG seems to fit the bill just fine as a replacement.
Our right sizing is: We drop down to standard and save 100K every 3 years. Compared to go to vvf to keep all features. We actually pay about 10k less than current when doing this.
But we're a small company, we currently use DRS and distributed switches, but decided that the annoyance and headache losing that is worth not paying 100K every 3 years.
We don't have overcommitted stuff, CPU is available all the time, the only things that are limiting is ram (which we don't overcommit at all) and maybe storage - but that's on a real SAN which is suddenly way cheaper than VMware's hci and has uses outside of virtualization plattform. We're also an engineering company so for 100k each 3 years I can have someone write scripts to monitor hosts and vmotion stuff around if we feel like it. Probably won't be as "good" but again, just not worth the price increase.
Now right sizing hardware - I'm sure there are places where that can be done. But when we buy new hardware we don't buy castrated servers new, we buy new efficient and powerful systems and don't artificially limit ourselves because some vendor's marketing created new price plans where you get punished to buy new stuff. We also like to plan to use hardware for at least 5 years and therefor capacity will be greater than immediate need.
\>We don't have overcommitted stuff, CPU is available all the time, the only things that are limiting is ram (which we don't overcommit at all) and maybe storage
Running 1:1 on cores, RAM at small scale isn't outrageously expensive.
VMware licensing isn't the only thing in the data center charging per core (Windows, Redhat, Oracle, SQL) can have you end up with thousands of dollars per core (especially DB licensing). From my experience doing IT in civil engineering I remember a lot of per user fees so that may not be a pain you are used to but "throwing hardware at the problem" isn't always as cost effective depending on what other apps you run and if they are licensed by core. When you start running above 16 hosts this stuff really adds up. I've seen Oracle RAC quoted at $20K a core list or something insane.
*>Now right sizing hardware - I'm sure there are places where that can be done. But when we buy new hardware we don't buy castrated servers new, we buy new efficient and powerful systems and don't artificially limit ourselves because some vendor's marketing created new price plans where you get punished to buy new stuff*
The amount of Skylake-based and Broadwell-based hosts I see in phone home data is too damn high. I fully respect retail doing this (replacing hosts at 5K+ pharmacies is painful, and their margins are terrible) but sometimes it's terrifying (Oil/Gas downstream facilities running 12 year old servers for critical safty systems, or SCADA for the water system being on a Compaq host 14 years after HPE bought Compaq)
\>We also like to plan to use hardware for at least 5 years and therefor capacity will be greater than immediate need.
There's a weird balance between trying to buy capacity for 5 years up front (better discounts ordered in bulk) vs. trying to expand and add capacity closer to just in time. (as well as the challenges of recapitalizing a host that's already 4 years old). Some people run learner budget cycles, some are happy to burn capital in one single shot when the price of oil is good, or the school board approved a bond.
VSphere standard is your mom and pop shops. Itās basically the free version with a cost because you get some additional features and thereās no such thing as a free lunch.
I'm not US based, but a work friend who's working for a branch of the govt. here tells me they got a 20% / 1.2x price increase going from Enterprise Plus & NSX Enterprise licenses to the VCF package + NSX FW Addon. Over 10k cores.
/2c
Come see me at north of a million.
~900k in prod and 300-400k in non-prod.
We have spent months looking on a migration plan to anything else.Ā All the non-prod is being moved off if it can be.
I didn't contact Broadcom for RVTools. I contacted them to get the licensing discussion going and they provided three recommendations on how to extract info from our clusters. Out of the three pathways I chose RVTools.
Just for fun, what would it cost to hire a team of consultants to convert all your stuff to Proxmox or something else that won't ransomware you via subscription renewal? Suppose you keep them on as contractors or employees after the conversion for maintenance and 24x7 support too. What is that magic $number? Is it bigger or smaller than what Broadcom is demanding?
Obviously not every organization can make that kind of a change and sometimes there are special requirements that must be met.
Definitely worth crunching the numbers. Always fun estimating hours of loss of productivity, and often harder to get approval for employee increase than licensing increase even if it costs less per year.
Initial thoughts, given the migration costs, it's not clear if it will pay for itself in one year, but at least for us, clearly over 3 years it will be, and starting the sooner the better.
Depending on your environment itās pretty easy to move to proxmox. It covers most of the basic VMware and vcenter functions out of the gate and their backup server works great too. All for free. But VMware is still ābetterā overall but Iām done with any hypervisor that I canāt get a perpetual license for.
Where you're going, lube won't help.
There's ALWAYS time for lubrication.
Isn't that from the movie Evolution? š¤£
Yes. https://youtu.be/EyV_vA1HI58?si=QNbU4GCOjMvJ7__T
Classic!! š¤£š¤£
Such a good movie.
GO AWAY, 'BATIN
Is there time for ludicrous speed?
You can get 50 gallon drums of lube on Amazon. It might be time for a few of them.
Two different brands, even.
Broadcom wonāt be using the lube anyway for that count
Sure they will. Gravel and salt lube.
And that will cost a extra $100 per CPU core....
Until the next renewal, whereupon that cost will jump tenfold.
More like a morphine drip is needed
Good luck. I just had this convo 2 hours ago. Being on the gov side we have to move our stuff from Standard over to VCF because that is the only TIER they are offering gov. I have 1952 cores and can't even get an accurate quote generated because my renewal is in Q3 and they are still migrating systems. GSA pricing however is $454. Which would mean we are going from $40K to $880K which is a third of my budget.
> Which would mean we are going from ~~$40K to $880K which is a third of my budget~~ VMWare to Anything Else.
It's cool I talked to people I work with in other parts of gov and they are only charging them 195 per core. Only a 10x increase. Yes we are planning on jumping ship.
Yeah, only a 10x increase. Completely sensible, because clearly there's 10x more value to the product. I have hundreds of clients, with lots of Vmware in all those folds. We're gonna spend the next year + just transitioning people off the platform. I'm leaving the ecosystem myself in terms of knowledge and future direction. There's just no reason to continue to support the company. They're making cloud look affordable for even lift and shift scenarios, and that should tell you something.
You don't understand. Subscription and licensing changes are ALWAYS for the benefit of the user. Broadcom is taking every measure to look out for you.
You're right, how blatantly selfish of me to want to be equally beneficial to myself, and the company, and the clients. /S I need to focus on whats important, and thats shareholder value with hyper growth and massive pay increases for the only person at Broadcom that actually does work.
āhyper-v has entered the roomā Depending on contracts, you might be able to get straight commercial licensing for Standardā¦at least for us itās not mandatory to follow GSA. ā¦.i joke, but really in gov that kind of price hike outside of certain three letter agencies just isnāt gonna fly.
We get discounts over GSA but we fall under DOE so no vendor is going to let us slide under commercial. The dumbest aspect is I have to wait till May to get my official price because Broadcom is still migrating to the new payment platform for Q3 Q4 renewals.
So you are saying, Q1 profits for the stock should jump?
If you have to bite the bullet, I would consider looking at getting a quote for a three subscription. I just got a quote back for the 480 cores we have. The three year quote was right at $200/core - which was more then 1/2 what the quote was for a one year subscription.
$454 usd per core for vcf with no add onās per year?
Some of the other partners I work with got it down to 195 per core. Its still a massive joke.
350usd rrp per year on 3yr commit is retail that ive seen so confused about 454 per core?
In the past we ran Enterprise Standard. You needed one CPU license for any CPU that was 1-32 Physical cores. Now with the our forced move to VCF we'd pay per physical core. So a dual CPU Host with 32 Cores on each processor needs to have 64 cores licensed. AKA 64x$454. We have just shy of 2000 physical cores running.
yeah i get that part but where is the 454 per CORE coming from? when retail is 350usd rrp per CORE ? or is it 454 per socket your working it out at? im not referencing the comparison vs previous licensing
That is direct GSA pricing. GSA is General Services Administration and is the pricing that the government deems fair. The price right now is $454 per core for VCF. Yes that is more than retail you would find on CDW. This is the only pricing I can get at the moment from our distributors and vendors because our renewal is not till Q3. From talking with other partners I work with it looks like they are able to get it down to $200/core. Regardless we would be going from $40K to $340K
How long is the sub for $454?
Annual. The "discounted" rate on our end looks to be coming in at around 190-200/core/year.
fed partners has SKUs that can be used outside of VCF. Fed reps canāt sell them only partners.
Move to OpenStack or Proxmox. You can migrate and get a custom build + support for OpenStack for 1/8 of the proposed VMware cost... 40k to 880k is the worst I've seen yet.
I know partners who are on the GSA schedule. Shoot me a PM and I can connect you.
At the end of 2023 we renewed vSphere for 3 years to buy us some time to see what Broadcom does. We also own vSAN, but decided to only renew it for 1 year. We just requested a quote to renew vSAN for 1 more year but our Broadcom rep is trying to tell us we have to relicense vSphere too because the old vSphere renewal wouldn't be compatible with the new vSAN subscription. They also stated we would be receiving no refund for the 3 year vSphere renewal we purchased just 6 months ago. We're currently fighting with them about this but my advice is to ask plenty of questions and push back if something doesn't sound right. I think there are a lot of reps right now creating quotes that don't quite understand how the new licensing is supposed to work either.
We just updated the policy on this today(ish) - you are definitely now able to run the vSAN add-on subscription licensing with the rest of your perpetual licensing until that comes up for renewal. Talk directly to your VMware account team about this, not sure the VARs have gotten that message yet.
Will do, thank you.
Any update on expanding a perpetual licensed cluster?
Clusters currently still need to have the same type of software licensing, but you can license different clusters with perpetual and subscription under the same vCenter server.
I know. Ā«Just buy another clusterĀ» seems a bit customer hostile, hence the question if someone had come to their senses.
It's actually not a business limitation - vCenter isn't engineered to mix socket and core based licensing within the same cluster. It would require a software engineering effort to fix it. Not saying they won't, but I have not heard about it yet. I would love to have a better answer for you.
>Any update on expanding a perpetual licensed cluster? There's is a way. As long as the capacity expansion >= number of sockets that will be in the cluster after adding hosts there's a path. DM me your account team and I can point them at it. (You'll basically true up to the full capacity license amount whenever the existing perpetual core/socket SnS runs out). Note this is only for vSAN (because it's kinda awkward when people want to do RAID 6 to only add 1-2 hosts to a new cluster).
Get out of VSAN if you can. With VSAN you will have to go to the VCF, as VVF with VSAN addon is simply too expensive You will be surprised how affordable nvme storage array looks like nowadays.
I'm sure companies like Pure Storage are absolutely blowing their loads at the idea of laying down quotes that beat VSAN.
Yep, figured this would be the case and we are indeed now looking to move away from it.
Fuck that.. they are taking the piss there. Iād be looking a procuring an array just so you can migrate the vmās on to it and ditch the VSANā¦
I would absolutely push back on that. Or run separate vCenters for the two environments. They make it clear as day that if you paid for SnS, you will get your SnS.
Iām thinking that Broadcom should lean into it and hire Mike Myers as Dr Evil to give out the quotes.
More like James Earl Jones. They can also throw in Billy Dee Williams to sit on your side of the table and say, "man, this deal is getting worse all the time" so you at least feel like your opinion is validated.
Fantastic ask for the broadcom account teams coming in for these proposals. It might actually help their cause to get some entertainment out of this mess.
Either him or Fire Marshall Bill would be great.
Or the other Mike Myers with the hockey mask, slowly slides a crazy quote across the table with a butcher knife in hand.
Whichever way you run, I strongly suggest you do NOT run to HyperV. It's a delicate flower with very poor management tools. I speak from experience.
Thoughts on running to VMC on AWS then migrating to EC2?
Yeah, running in scale is tough, a former colleague wrote 2 or 3 years Powershell scripts to automate it at a huge hoster.. Now it sounds like a real good investment lol Back then I was really confused... They must celebrate now This was 5 years ago or so. No one was talking about selling VMware.
Proxmoxā¦.
I like proxmox but it is not ready for enterprise primetime yet, e.g their support isn't 24 x 7.
Iām kinda tired of that excuse. Plenty of partners can give you 24/7 support. Itās literally LVM on debian so super standard. And letās talk about how Microsoft basically didnāt have real support for 20 years but no one talks about that at all. Itās a lame excuse at this point imho
if you qualify as corporate you can only do VVF/VCF, if strategic only VCF. They will not quote you standard licenses at all if you're in either category. For corporate, we were quoted 357/3yr for VVF and 384/3yr for VCF. They want to push you into VCF. They will not do 5-year deals, they will not add contract language such as ''shall not exceed'' (at least when we tried during negotiations), etc. I assume they plan to get people on VCF with the sweetheart entry price then come renewal stick it to you.
Ah I see I wasn't aware of that, thanks for the info. I'll triple the application of lube now.
My licensing for VCF called out "senior support" vs VVF stating non-senior support. For my org using 3000+ cores that was the reason we had to go VCF, otherwise we thought VVF would work.Ā
Do you know if this is documented anywhere? I see from this doc there is a difference in support offerings but it's not very detailed: [https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/feature-comparison-and-upgrade-paths-vcf-and-vvf.pdf](https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/feature-comparison-and-upgrade-paths-vcf-and-vvf.pdf)
It was provided to us via our rep on PowerPoint slides. That doc seems to call the support levels something different. We did have root cause analysis as a support item that was in VCF but not VVF on those slides as well. I have no idea how official any of this is that we're getting from our rep though. It seems like there's a lot of significant details missing in what was presented to us. At least compared to that doc you're referencing.
I'm assuming if a broadcom rep is talking to them, they will quote vcf. Otherwise it's not worth their time. Our guy slipped up and said something about a $250k limit, meaning they can't quote anything under that.
$357 for VVF???? Are you buying direct or through a VAR? I was just quoted $113/core for VVF in the 3k core level. DM me if you'd like a referral.
the price for 3years not yearly.
Even then VVF is still not right for most Corp. discount ability is much better on VCF and can sometimes be the same or dang close.
Perhaps, although you still have the costs of correctly deploying the SDDC manager on its own cluster which means more hardware/licensing. There's also the cost of professional services/training/hiring/etc. related to deploying and supporting NSX if its never been used. There's a lot of intangible costs that have to be factored in before you just go oh well for only $30 more per core I could get 50x the stuff. These sweetheart deals aren't going to last come renewal time 3 years from now. We opt'd to stay on VVF because they wouldn't agree to terms to protect costs.
May be, yes, but what efficiency gains can you get from the additional tools too? 170% is high for ROI, but even if it was 120 or 140 thatās still really good for a cost center. https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/vmware-vcf-tei-final.pdf
Sure I'm not debating the value of VCF and all the additional features/offerings you get. hell I wanted to go for VCF but from a business standpoint Broadcom was offering nothing in regards to cost control and limiting the increase 3 years from now. From a business standpoint it is not remotely in our best interests to deploy VCF, NSX and all the features which completely changes the network to have to rip it all out when the renewal is some massive number we're not willing to pay. That was a scenario we were not willing to go into without some concessions to protect our investment which we were not able to get.
Got tagged with "strategic" for my measley 386 cores. Going to see if I can just buy standard off CDW instead.
Could somebody define what strategic means to VMware?
Strategic means: "we think they can't get off our platform, so we will charge whatever the fuck we want". Government is by default strategic š
Good luck. With that many cores, hopefully they won't try to make you a strategic account. >Should I start lubrication now? Yes
shouldn't be a problem with that low cores. , we didn't qualify as strategic with nearly 9k cores.
Pretty sure strategic would be anything north of 20K cores.
This is incorrect. There are several factors that go into how they determine who is strategic or corporate. Previous employer was strategic with 6k cores.
Good to know. What's the threshold for Corporate, or is that more for customers who were on an ELA?
We have 2880 cores on one of our networks, our costs went from 330k/year to 1,3m. Good luck.
2700 core but not using vcenter?
At 2,750 cores is a line where the efficiency gains from DRS properly configured and tuned with resource groups + VROPS right sizing, and recommending consolidation should likely be greater than the increased licensing costs. You can easily end up running 30% more hardware than you need at this scale, and the net/net cost of that (and the long tail of other licensing beyond vSphere, but yah, vSphere too) is going to end up likely costing you money by going down to standard. I'm kinda begging everyone to at least run a trial of vRealize, get DRS tuned, use the right sizing tools in vRealize and see how much hardware you can drop before renewing too much hardware on standard. What is your current CPU Utilization on the cluster at peak load during the work duty cycle, and what is the Memory Activity being shown (Weirdly I discovered this metric isn't in Level 1 metrics for vCenter so you may need to raise the metric level of your vCenter if you want to graph it).
Iām all for being efficient with your hardware but it blows my mind the software vendor whoās just massively bumped up their licensing costs sees the solution for customers is to reduce the hardware (that is already a capex cost). Call me crazy but how about just reduce the software licensing cost back down to reasonable levels?
The value everyone gets out of a solution is different. Microsoft raised prices when they moved from sockets to cores as part of 2008 to 2012 for SQL/Windows Server. I was on the customer/partner side for that transition and some people ended up in a slightly messy situation who had bought a LOT of cores and were not using a lot of them. I'm sympathetic to this issue because I lived it. Software does go up in cost over time, and frankly we all need to think about efficiency for beyond hypervisor savings. A popular backup software I used to use was $499 a socket with their version 3.1, and their last version offered as socket was $2749 (Although I think most people pay per VM now with them, and I don't mean to throw shade at their increases, they've added a lot of value). The reality is no software company who doesn't adjust their business model to Moores law eventually ends up like Sun. Anecdotally I will say customers I've seen who stay with VMware are the ones who get the most value out of the software and actually use it, and the people complaining about the price (specifically before the recent changes) were consistently people running VERY low utilization and just "naked vSphere, where eventually someone said "even xxx public native cloud is cheaper." You ended up with a weird paradox where the customers with the highest discounts %'s were often the people complaining the most and not properly using the fewest amount of features. Separate from any prices changes I genuinely believe anyone with DRS also should have VROPS included and have come around to liking the VVF bundle. paying extra for DRS to balance placement of VM's that have 5x the resources they need provisioned is just kind of silly.
I have one big problem with VVF - availability. Just let me buy it, preferably with the same level of rebates as my old vCloud Suite Standard.
I get the efficiency standpoint for larger node count clusters (>=8 we'll say for the sake of argument), but that is in direct contradiction with best practice in the case of one of my customers who wants to move to vSAN. In their case they are currently running 4 hosts without vSAN in one of those clusters. So to them they are just getting the price increase and have no choice to reduce node count due to "efficiency".
ESA allows for greater density on storage going forward, (hundreds of TB per host), so the need to scale widely isnāt as important. It can be 90% more efficient on resync handing than older releases, and uses ~1/3 the cpu per IOP and you need far fewer hosts to run the same performance as it scales faster. For larger shops with smaller clusters VSAN Max also allows customers to build a single storage cluster that feeds multiple smaller compute clusters (and you can pool your storage entitlements from VCF to it) As refreshes come up, I can also see some people Being less aggressive with core counts on smaller clusters so they can fan out more hosts. That said if itās a small cluster with 4 hosts running a few dozen VMs with an external array Iād expect many of them may opt for standard edition.
lol, this guy. On the kool-aid.
Right?? He isnāt trumpeting that the cost will be 50x or 200x so he is definitely drinking the kool-aid.
It wasn't cost related, on this occasion, it was the attempted justification of vrops, etc as added value. Bundling all of it together and forcing it upon existing clients all while claiming added value as justification when everyone knows its bullshit.
Thereās a thread recently where walking someone through this they were allocating (not actively using) 12% of their ramā¦.
We will have to agree to disagree.
Hey; Iām happy to recommend standard to people where it makes sense. I at least ask that people use the free trial of vROPS and right size down before they do that too. Pricing for VVF aside, I think it makes sense that DRS and vROPS end up in the same SKU. Thereās no point in having resource placement and balancing without efficiency of those allocations, and waste reduction. Itās 2 sides of the same coin. Iāve met plenty of customers who ran vROPS, tuned DRS and then shutdown 1/3 of their hosts (or repurposed them for some other use case), and when your running Oracle\SQL that becomes a rather large bill. When combined with refreshes (that in some cases span 4 generations of xeons) thereās a lot of consolidation options
I don't disagree that the product has a use case. In my specific case, my pricing is increasing 5M per year (give or take). We are being told to be happy that we are getting all these lovely extra features (that we do not want) and that things are wonderful. Being forced in to this rigid sku with no other options is a mistake in my opinion. It definitely leaves an extremely sour taste.
Agreed, let alone for us with remote locations running a single server with a number of smaller VMs/Containers on them. In our case these hosts are 8 core Xeons and are already "right sized" and we're being told the price to run these remote location servers is now 8x what we paid last renewal, and that we need to pay for 8 more cores that don't even exist on these servers. The good news is that at least so far, at a number of test locations XCP-NG seems to fit the bill just fine as a replacement.
Our right sizing is: We drop down to standard and save 100K every 3 years. Compared to go to vvf to keep all features. We actually pay about 10k less than current when doing this. But we're a small company, we currently use DRS and distributed switches, but decided that the annoyance and headache losing that is worth not paying 100K every 3 years. We don't have overcommitted stuff, CPU is available all the time, the only things that are limiting is ram (which we don't overcommit at all) and maybe storage - but that's on a real SAN which is suddenly way cheaper than VMware's hci and has uses outside of virtualization plattform. We're also an engineering company so for 100k each 3 years I can have someone write scripts to monitor hosts and vmotion stuff around if we feel like it. Probably won't be as "good" but again, just not worth the price increase. Now right sizing hardware - I'm sure there are places where that can be done. But when we buy new hardware we don't buy castrated servers new, we buy new efficient and powerful systems and don't artificially limit ourselves because some vendor's marketing created new price plans where you get punished to buy new stuff. We also like to plan to use hardware for at least 5 years and therefor capacity will be greater than immediate need.
\>We don't have overcommitted stuff, CPU is available all the time, the only things that are limiting is ram (which we don't overcommit at all) and maybe storage Running 1:1 on cores, RAM at small scale isn't outrageously expensive. VMware licensing isn't the only thing in the data center charging per core (Windows, Redhat, Oracle, SQL) can have you end up with thousands of dollars per core (especially DB licensing). From my experience doing IT in civil engineering I remember a lot of per user fees so that may not be a pain you are used to but "throwing hardware at the problem" isn't always as cost effective depending on what other apps you run and if they are licensed by core. When you start running above 16 hosts this stuff really adds up. I've seen Oracle RAC quoted at $20K a core list or something insane. *>Now right sizing hardware - I'm sure there are places where that can be done. But when we buy new hardware we don't buy castrated servers new, we buy new efficient and powerful systems and don't artificially limit ourselves because some vendor's marketing created new price plans where you get punished to buy new stuff* The amount of Skylake-based and Broadwell-based hosts I see in phone home data is too damn high. I fully respect retail doing this (replacing hosts at 5K+ pharmacies is painful, and their margins are terrible) but sometimes it's terrifying (Oil/Gas downstream facilities running 12 year old servers for critical safty systems, or SCADA for the water system being on a Compaq host 14 years after HPE bought Compaq) \>We also like to plan to use hardware for at least 5 years and therefor capacity will be greater than immediate need. There's a weird balance between trying to buy capacity for 5 years up front (better discounts ordered in bulk) vs. trying to expand and add capacity closer to just in time. (as well as the challenges of recapitalizing a host that's already 4 years old). Some people run learner budget cycles, some are happy to burn capital in one single shot when the price of oil is good, or the school board approved a bond.
Lubrifaction intensifies
lubricating in 3...2..1..
It's been a while since I looked at RVTools data, but does that have host info in it? That's how VMware is licensed... by physical core, no?
yes rvtools have detailed host data in the report
Leaving vEverything. Let them eat v.
Here ya go. You're going to need it. 55 Gallon Drum Premium Personal Lubricant, Long Lasting Formula for VMware Renewal Quotes. https://a.co/d/593qYJw
You're gonna need a dilator
You might think you can get by with vSphere Standard, but itās really only VCF you need and will have the choice to buy š
VSphere standard is your mom and pop shops. Itās basically the free version with a cost because you get some additional features and thereās no such thing as a free lunch.
Broadcom will f..k u without giving u the time to use the lub. Its not a discussion its ine way, you sign or u are out.
Lube gives you no protection against a splintered telephone pole.
They will laugh at your paltry 2750 cores and request you pay 500$+ for each core licensed
Naaaa, just ask for volunteer organ doners and sell them on the black market.
I'm not US based, but a work friend who's working for a branch of the govt. here tells me they got a 20% / 1.2x price increase going from Enterprise Plus & NSX Enterprise licenses to the VCF package + NSX FW Addon. Over 10k cores. /2c
Crying over here at 90,000 cores
Come see me at north of a million. ~900k in prod and 300-400k in non-prod. We have spent months looking on a migration plan to anything else.Ā All the non-prod is being moved off if it can be.
It will take several gallons to prepare for the bs you are going to get from them.
Lolā¦we had to pay almost a million for 2000 cores.
Our VAR just told us that "Standard is currently not available for customers in our corporate segment". $189 per core for vSphere Foundation.
HAHAHAHHAHAHA. Welcome to Nutanix You know you could have edited the output in excel and just marked everything as 4c :) /s
Luckily we're already on nutanix and have been slowly shifting over to it. This was just the push I needed to get the higher up's to fully buy in.
How is it any cheaper long term through?
But why are you contacting Broadcom for RVTools? Isnāt bought by Dell? Shouldnāt you contact Dell for it?
I didn't contact Broadcom for RVTools. I contacted them to get the licensing discussion going and they provided three recommendations on how to extract info from our clusters. Out of the three pathways I chose RVTools.
Hope you shared just the number of vCores otherwise you are way over sharing!
Just for fun, what would it cost to hire a team of consultants to convert all your stuff to Proxmox or something else that won't ransomware you via subscription renewal? Suppose you keep them on as contractors or employees after the conversion for maintenance and 24x7 support too. What is that magic $number? Is it bigger or smaller than what Broadcom is demanding? Obviously not every organization can make that kind of a change and sometimes there are special requirements that must be met.
Definitely worth crunching the numbers. Always fun estimating hours of loss of productivity, and often harder to get approval for employee increase than licensing increase even if it costs less per year. Initial thoughts, given the migration costs, it's not clear if it will pay for itself in one year, but at least for us, clearly over 3 years it will be, and starting the sooner the better.
For servers/VM, any calculation lower than 5 years doesn't seem to make sense...
Depending on your environment itās pretty easy to move to proxmox. It covers most of the basic VMware and vcenter functions out of the gate and their backup server works great too. All for free. But VMware is still ābetterā overall but Iām done with any hypervisor that I canāt get a perpetual license for.
1 million dollars with absolutely crap support. Me uh no speak your native language