vSphere 5: What’s in Enterprise Plus?
One of the most popular posts on VirtualFuture.info is about licensing vSphere 4 and the difference vSphere 4 Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Apparently, the information is hard to find or not simply explained somewhere. Now that vSphere 5 is announced, I might as well blog about this version as well.
First of all, the limit on the number of cores are gone. With vSphere 4 Enterprise you were limited to 6 cores per CPU socket. With Enterprise Plus, this limit was 12 cores per CPU socket. The new vSphere licensing model eliminates the restrictive physical entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM per server, replacing them with a single virtualization-based entitlement of pooled virtual memory (vRAM). This will simplify the process of purchasing deploying and managing vSphere while facilitating the move to shared infrastructure as a service. The vSphere 5.0 licensing model is per processor (CPU) with pooled vRAM entitlements.
The vRAM licenses come in a number of flavors:
VMware vSphere 4: What’s in Enterprise Plus?
When you look at all marketing material of VMware vSphere, you can get confused about what feature is in what version. For example: I was under the impression that 8-way Virtual SMP was a new feature of vSphere regardless of what version you have (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus). Take a look at this press-release for example:
VMware vSphere 4 also introduces new scalability capabilities. By expanding server resource support to 1 TB of RAM and 64 logical processing cores, some of the very largest and most powerful servers can be leveraged for virtual workloads. With support for up to 256 GB of RAM and eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine, nearly 100 percent of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualization.
When you look at the pricing sheet, there is no reason to believe that 8-way Virtual SMP is not in all versions of vSphere 4. … Continue Reading
XenServer 5.0 Enterprise Ready?
Since 2 months I’ve been playing around with the new enterpise version of XenServer 5.0. As you can read in my first post my expectations of the new version were high. I’ve created a summary of pro’s and con’s. As far is I’m concerned VMware ESX server 3.5 Enterprise and Citrix XenServer 5.0 platinum are in the same league although some key features from ESX 3.5 are missing within XenServer and the other way around. Below you’ll find the way I created my test environment and all challenges I ran in to. See for your self if you consider XenServer enterprise ready.
