VirtualPro

This morning I finally got the chance to sit down and review all the various announcements surrounding the new vSphere release.  There was a lot to take in and to be honest I’m still digesting a lot of it and what it means for the company I work for.

First thing I have to comment on was the impressive nature of the launch,  it was obvious that VMware worked hard on this launch to make it as slick as possible.  From the vSphere Simulcast live launch with CEO’s explaining the bigger vision, to the excellent resources such as the vSphere upgrade advisor and the great step by step upgrade videos within the upgrade centre.  This was a key announcement for VMware, they needed to continue to stay way ahead of the competition being that they’ve made up a little ground recently. From what I’ve seen so far VMware appear to have made another gigantic leap ahead of the rest.

New features aside (See here for more information) what were some of the major changes to note, looking through it the following jumped out immediately as they were relevant to my current employer.

• Change of licensing from 2 CPU pricing to single CPU pricing in vSphere
• Editions - Essentials, Essentials +, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise +
• Higher maximums and increased performance for “virtualise everything” strategies

Licensing and New Editions

The change of licensing and the introduction of different versions introduces a complexity for existing VI3 customers.  The afore mentioned vSphere upgrade advisor should help with that but customers are going to have to re-evaluate their current licensing, determine what new edition they’ll get based on their current licensing and decide what features they actually want from vSphere in case they need to upgrade.  The vSphere edition comparison should help you distinguish what you do get with the different versions and Jason Boche’s vSphere licensing article  brilliantly explains some of the more notable licence changes. 

With the introduction of the new editions,  there are obviously changes in the pricing structure which on first glance would appear to make VMware that bit more expensive. You can bet your bottom dollar Microsoft and Citrix will jump all over this and use it to their advantage if they can.  The vSphere pricing guide PDF should help you determine what the differences are in the editions, what the costs are when buying from scratch and upgrading.

It’s worth noting that VMware have a special offer on until the end of the year.  Upgrade vSphere Standard to vSphere Advanced for $745 per CPU and upgrade vSphere Enterprise to Enterprise Plus for $295 per CPU.  There is also a special deal on upgrading to Enterprise Plus and the Cisco Nexus 100V for $795 per CPU. Contact your local VMware sales manager for localised pricing.

Configuration Maximums and Performance

Moving on lets talk about the increase in performance and configuration maximums,  the area that interests me greatly as this really does allow companies to say “lets virtualise everything”.   There have been some pretty major leaps in what is possible allowing even the biggest businesses to look at virtualising their tier 1 applications. Support for 8 VCPUs and 256 GB of memory per VM as well as improved networking and vastly improved I/O should technically cover any software application.  The example below shows the potential size of cluster you could have,  it’s obviously an unlikely scenario but just goes to show the sheer scalability of the vSphere software. 

Step-By-Step Migration Videos

Just to finish off,  I’d like to draw peoples attention to these great videos from the upgrade centre which detail how to go about upgrading from VI3 to the new vSphere software.  Top marks to VMware for this,  this will be a great help to people trying to figure out what they have to do to upgrade successfully.

Part 1 of 4 VMware VirtualCenter Management Components	Part 2 of 4 VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
Part 3 of 4 Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)	Part 4 of 4 Implementing VMware vSphere Licensing

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