News VMware Caps Per-CPU Fees at 32 Cores, AMD's EPYC Rome Impacted

zinabas

Distinguished
Apr 17, 2009
58
3
18,635
This smells alot like Intel throwing around dark money behind the scenes to prevent people from buying AMD. Since they don't have a real competitor to 64 core EPYC it costs them nothing to have the fees increased for people who want to use them. They're going to do everything legal or otherwise to keep a hold of the enterprise market.
 

Giroro

Splendid
The software licensing business is amazing to me.
Why stop at 2 licenses per CPU? Why not 4, or 100? What real choice do VMware's locked-in enterprise customers have, except to pay whatever made-up number they charge for it?
I mean, aren't there entire companies, if not entire industries that VMware could hold for ransom, if they wanted?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
The software licensing business is amazing to me.
Why stop at 2 licenses per CPU? Why not 4, or 100? What real choice do VMware's locked-in enterprise customers have, except to pay whatever made-up number they charge for it?
I mean, aren't there entire companies, if not entire industries that VMware could hold for ransom, if they wanted?
What the market will bear.

You want weird licensing, delve into Oracle databases. Ask 3 different reps, get 5 different answers, depending on the day the phase of the moon.
 

bwana

Distinguished
Apr 5, 2006
27
2
18,530
Oohhh. So now it makes sense why intel had 19% earnings pop from data center operations. Enterprise is sticking with xeon because it is still cheaper Considering vm costs. (Clearly intel marketing knew about this ahead of time..or maybe as was suggested above, intel was ‘subsidizing’ vmware in some way) Add to this the fact that AMD doesn’t have mature software tooling for managing their chips and I see why Rome has an uphill struggle. But isn’t virtualBox free? I guess it’s not as good as VMware. Or how about Microsoft’s hypervisor?
 

cfbcfb

Reputable
Jan 17, 2020
96
58
4,610
This smells alot like Intel throwing around dark money behind the scenes to prevent people from buying AMD. Since they don't have a real competitor to 64 core EPYC it costs them nothing to have the fees increased for people who want to use them. They're going to do everything legal or otherwise to keep a hold of the enterprise market.

Look out! Chemtrails!!!1!

Someone hasn't seen newer intel products with many, many cores.
 
This smells alot like Intel throwing around dark money behind the scenes to prevent people from buying AMD. Since they don't have a real competitor to 64 core EPYC it costs them nothing to have the fees increased for people who want to use them. They're going to do everything legal or otherwise to keep a hold of the enterprise market.
Or, you know, VMWare might just not want to lose profits from companies switching to servers with fewer physical processors running the same workloads. The alternate option would be to raise prices across the board, effectively punishing companies not upgrading their processors to higher core-count models. Actually, if you think about it, having server software licensed on a per-socket basis is kind of silly. If there are two companies with data centers each housing a million processor cores, each with relatively similar total performance, but one does so using half the sockets, why should the other arbitrarily get charged twice as much for the same software running on the same number of cores and performing the same amount of work?

Ideally, VMWare should be charging on a per-core basis rather than arbitrarily picking 32 cores though. That kind of makes 48-core server processors kind of undesirable, as any processors not running a multiple of 32 cores will be getting charged more per-core. They undoubtedly didn't want to give a price break to the majority of servers running fewer than 32 cores though.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Olle P

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
Ideally, VMWare should be charging on a per-core basis rather than arbitrarily picking 32 cores though.
Per-core pricing would still be a bit wonky since a core at 2GHz does not perform the same as an otherwise identical core running at 4GHz or an SMT4 core with a handful of extra execution units to give all of its four threads much higher thread-level parallelism.

If they really wanted to scale licensing with performance and not have to come up with convoluted multi-tier overlapping licenses, they'd have to go with some form of giga-ops per second licensing to account for most foreseeable ways that performance can scale.
 
  • Like
Reactions: digitalgriffin
What a load of horse manure. Should have read "VMWare never anticipated more than 32 cores per socket. Unfortunately our business model cannot be sustained by ever increasing core counts per socket. As a result to ensure a healthy business and long term support of vmware we have changed the terms of our licensing."

Try honesty for once you idiots. You'll get more respect and understanding for it.

Today we announced an important update to our per-CPU pricing model, reflecting our commitment to continue meeting our customers’ needs in an evolving industry landscape. This new pricing model will give our customers greater choice and allow us to better serve them. While we will still be using a per-CPU approach, now, for any software offering that we license on a per-CPU basis, we will require one license for up to 32 physical cores. If a CPU has more than 32 cores, additional CPU licenses will be required. " - VMware statement.
 

Jim90

Distinguished
Title should read: "Intel throws money at VMWare to hurt AMD"
Since with Intel, and its current model for <32 core scaling, the painfully clear fact this move is designed to hurt one company - and one company only(AMD) - leads us to one undeniable conclusion -->
...so this is what Intel is doing with it's well-publicised "$3 billion set aside for anti-competitive practices".
We can expect the expanding army of shills to start ramping up their work - it's what $ntel is paying them for after all.
 
Last edited:
What the market will bear.

You want weird licensing, delve into Oracle databases. Ask 3 different reps, get 5 different answers, depending on the day the phase of the moon.
Oracle licensing is horrible. The best analogy I ever heard for Orale licensing is this. "Imagine you are parking your car in an empty lot. Each parking space costs the same to park in, however, instead of having to pay for one space in the lot you have to pay for them all since you can park anywhere you want." This is a similar licensing model that Microsoft is using since Server 2016. Even if you were to limit a VM to only 8 virtual cores on Server 2016+, you have to pay for all the possible physical cores it can be run on. If you were to have a dual socket Epyc 7742each instance of Server 2016 Standard costs over $5000 to license and each host costs over $65k to license for Datacenter Edition.
 
This smells alright.
Interesting that Dell, who is one of the largest users of VMWare for their servers (mostly Intel) will benefit from this with their "untouched as yet" Xeon CPUs.
This feels like something from the past with Intel in the background suggesting (or maybe forcing) hardware and software companies to stay with their Xeon CPUs.
Maybe a little government "look-see" into this would shed a little light on the situation.
 
This smells alright.
Interesting that Dell, who is one of the largest users of VMWare for their servers (mostly Intel) will benefit from this with their "untouched as yet" Xeon CPUs.
This feels like something from the past with Intel in the background suggesting (or maybe forcing) hardware and software companies to stay with their Xeon CPUs.
Maybe a little government "look-see" into this would shed a little light on the situation.

Except other companies like Microsoft changed their licensing structure before EPYC and their massive 64 core CPUs came out to similar methods.

Companies that stay with Xeon will probably stay because the cost of upgrading is more than just a single box at a time as VMWare doesn't like to mix and match.

It probably has nothing to do with Intel at all but of course anything that is news that could adversely affect AMD has to be Intel, right?

Or could it just be VMWare finding a way to make more money like every single company ever to exist has done.....
 

Tarc Novar

Distinguished
Jan 12, 2016
7
1
18,515
This smells alright.
Interesting that Dell, who is one of the largest users of VMWare for their servers (mostly Intel) will benefit from this with their "untouched as yet" Xeon CPUs.
This feels like something from the past with Intel in the background suggesting (or maybe forcing) hardware and software companies to stay with their Xeon CPUs.
Maybe a little government "look-see" into this would shed a little light on the situation.

The government does not have our best interests at heart. We do not need them investigating anything.
 
  • Like
Reactions: fball922
Except other companies like Microsoft changed their licensing structure before EPYC and their massive 64 core CPUs came out to similar methods.

Companies that stay with Xeon will probably stay because the cost of upgrading is more than just a single box at a time as VMWare doesn't like to mix and match.

It probably has nothing to do with Intel at all but of course anything that is news that could adversely affect AMD has to be Intel, right?

Or could it just be VMWare finding a way to make more money like every single company ever to exist has done.....
What is Microsoft's licensing structure currently? I would love to blame VMware for these licensing woes, as I don't see why VMware didn't go straight to per core, or even per thread licensing. If you're gonna change models, might as well change all the way. As they always say, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity", although the opposite of that saying is becoming more true by the year.
 

kyzarvs

Distinguished
Interesting. Just completed moving our farm from VMWare to Hyper-V Core. The VM's are easily migrated, Hyper-V Core is free and supports high availability for that low low price. Not often Microsoft is the value proposition!
 

elroy.coltof

Commendable
Jun 29, 2018
13
5
1,515
I was already looking into moving to Xen from my 'ancient' vmware version. Looks like the decission has been made for me.

It's just a hobby project and the server and one vmware license is already more than I should spend on it. Now I get to learn new tech and save some money. I'd hate to be a business though, where such decissions are much harder.
 
This smells alot like Intel throwing around dark money behind the scenes to prevent people from buying AMD. Since they don't have a real competitor to 64 core EPYC it costs them nothing to have the fees increased for people who want to use them. They're going to do everything legal or otherwise to keep a hold of the enterprise market.

I wouldn't doubt it but it wont work that well not in this era. With so much cloud consolidation all the big players will simply get the charges reduced to a point its a meaningless difference. So it's down to power and floor space which is way more valuable.
 
What the market will bear.

You want weird licensing, delve into Oracle databases. Ask 3 different reps, get 5 different answers, depending on the day the phase of the moon.

As someone who has done this with Oracle it really is so complicated customers will almost always overpay. Of course if you are a big customer you get like a 90% discount which sounds great but it still end up being a very high cost.