You will love this! #7: Simulate the VMware licensing changes financial impact with a report!

Impacted by the tough Broadcom licensing changes? How much will it cost you? Be prepared to better negotiate and optimize your estate!

VMware context

If you did not attend the SAM Best Practice monthly Webinar I presented on June 6th, stay tuned to get the pointer to the recording on YouTube!

Here is a summary of the tough licensing changes that Broadcom announced after VMWare acquisition and that are already effective. There is a triple bad news:

• The perpetual licenses + optional maintenance model is over and replaced by a subscription model. This gives flexibility to augment or decrease the scope and ensures customers have the latest and greatest technology available but impacts seriously the yearly costs as maintenance is now mandatory.

• Standalone product licenses no longer exist and you can now choose between the vSphere Foundation (that includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, vCenter, Tanzu Kubernetes grid and vSAN Enterprise) or VMware Cloud Foundation that adds NSX Enterprise Plus and NSX Enterprise and Aria Operations Enterprise to the bundle. If you use all products everywhere, the bundles are attractive, if you use partially the products (and very partially vSAN for instance), you need to pay for features you are (were) not using.

• The metric for calculating consumption has moved to processor to core... more precisely from Processor (with a max of 32 cores per Processor) to Core (with a minimum of 16 cores per processor). This change has a positive or negative impact depending on your ESX Server configuration... let's say it is negative in 99% of the cases and the change impact stated on real life ESX infrastructure is a 30% raise of yearly costs (without the "bundling effect").

A report can make your life easier and you stronger in negotiations

Without a report bringing automated analysis on a complex and changing ESX estate, this is impossible to understand the impact of the combined changes. NR SAM Consulting have developed this report that brings transparency on this tricky topic and helps you negotiate the conditions for subscriptions you will have to order for the next maintenance renewal.

The report for your entire vSphere estate:

• Computes CPU consumption and Core Consumption

• Applies the yearly cost, assuming that you subscribe to the core subscriptions for standalone product available at some VMware partners. The report can use the bundle costing but you will need to factor vCenter and vSAM in the legacy CPU consumption to compare apples to apples.

• Shows cost impact for ESX server, Cluster and application in your full estate.

Yearly cost calculation:

• Perpetual licenses amortized on 6 years

• Maintenance = 33% of License cost

• Prices extracted from a partner Website

  • VMware VS7-STD-C vSphere v. 7.0 Standard - License - 1 Processor, Software Licensing: USD1141

  • VMware vSphere Standard (v. 8) - Commitment Plan (1 year) - 1 core: USD61.99

  • VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus (v. 8) - license - 1 processor: USD3675.99

  • VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus - Commitment Plan (1 year) - 1 core: USD139

Before transition happens you can optimize your VMware virtualization estate.

There are ways to optimize your IT estate by loading your ESX server with an optimal number of VMs. The You will love this! #3: A full solution to manage your VMWare license keys and your vSphere Optimization post was presenting a report that computes optimization potential and also manages licenses keys compliance.

The report has been adapted to the new core licensing rule.

Interested?

If you are on premises, you can enjoy this immediately by contacting me. If you are a Cloud customer, this is a matter of patience and the report may be productized, like the 30 reports I created that now support the 3 published SAM Operations, SAM Optimization and SAM Publisher Hubs that you can explore in the Flexera ITAM Best practice information available in Flexera Community post.

Check back the list of 18 "Dots Connected" or "You will love this!" posts published or to come in this article.