VMWare caps per-CPU license fees at 32-cores.
VMware Caps Per-CPU Fees at 32 Cores, AMD's EPYC Rome Impacted : Read more
VMware Caps Per-CPU Fees at 32 Cores, AMD's EPYC Rome Impacted : Read more
What the market will bear.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?
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?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.
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.Ideally, VMWare should be charging on a per-core basis rather than arbitrarily picking 32 cores though.
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.
Yep.Why the step change at 32-cores?
Probably because of this:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/i...yc-rome-with-cascade-lake-xeon-refresh-report
i.e. nothing above 28 cores from team blue for the forseeable future.
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.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.
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.
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.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.....
They said VMware and VMWare in the article.VMWare caps per-CPU license fees at 32-cores.
VMware Caps Per-CPU Fees at 32 Cores, AMD's EPYC Rome Impacted : Read more
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.
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.