VMware/Linux: Redhat Virtualization Licensing (vmware)
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Update:
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RedHat still has special pricing for vmware. The links below are older, but use the following to see a list of VMware specific licensing on CDW’s website: VMware RH Licensing
Not sure how many people out there know about it yet, but RedHat is on the “band wagon”. Time had come up to renew our licenses, and we found the RH for VMware on CDW website.
Turns out this can definitely save a lot of money! Check out Redhat pricing.
The licensing comes in the following forms:
Now for the fun part:
These are licensed per socket of the ESX host, not per virtual cpu. So for us, each of our ESX hosts has 4 sockets (physical cpu). So this means that the cheaper basic and standard subscriptions are out for us. Now, we will have to buy “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for VMware”. Even though the unlimited sockets is the higher costs of all the “VMware” licensing, we still come out a LOT cheaper!
Note: Be careful if you inquire about this licensing. We almost sent in our order with CDW that was quoted using virtual CPUs instead of physical ESX host CPUs. The bad thing is it was CDW that told us that it was based on VCPU. Also, to make it clear, the number of guests is how many installs of RedHat you can have under that license. So if you get the 10 guests Advanced Platform license, you get to run 10 Redhat virtual machines on your ESX host under that license.
this interesting new licensing policy caused us to switch to SuSE, 1 license gets you unlimited installs on an ESX host…
Anonymous said this on November 26, 2009 at 3:16 am
I appreciate your efforts to share this information. Redhat makes it painful to find and understand this information. And based on what I’m picking up as I wade through undertanding this, Redhat is about to change the licensing model again (effective April 1).
I do have a question though. I found your site and this explanation above via the following post on VMware’s site: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/189522 .
I would like to get a clarification on it though. When asked about the number of licenses you purchased you ultimately said you bought 6 of the RHEL-AP for VMware (inlcudes 10 guests/license) to cover your 60 Redhat VMs. However, you also indicate your have 4 4-core servers in the ESX farm. Aren’t you required to purchase the licenses on ALL the cores? In your case, I would expect that to mean you had to buy 16 licenses. You would then be able to support up to 160 Redhat VMs (because of the pooling).
Or am I missing something?
Joe said this on February 28, 2010 at 3:09 pm
The virtual licensing is different from their physical. The underlining server architecture decides which RedHat level your licensing will be at. Since we are quad, quad core, that meant were were at the higher Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced licensing level instead of basic.
we were hoping that we would be able to run a mix of basic and advanced licenses in the vmware environment, but due to our vmware esx server architecture, we could not. The virtual licenses are setup to be sold in “blocks” of 10 for advanced. So we had 3 vmware esx servers, ~60 RH Virtual Machines, so we wound up by a total of 6 RedHat Advanced Edition blocks. Each of these 6 blocks allows licensing for a total of 10 virtual machines each. That gives us 60 total licensed Redhat VMs.
We are going to dual quad core servers coming soon and that will take us out of the advanced edition licensing, so we should be able to order blocks of the Basic version. Does this help?
Kevin Goodman said this on March 2, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Your blog is very interesting. What do you think about the license conditions in case of use VMotion on a ESX-cluster? Then it can be happens that more than 10 RHEL virtual guests run on one ESX-server…
michael said this on August 12, 2010 at 9:56 am
RedHat requires you to license the whole cluster. So if yo have 3 VMware servers and want 30 RedHat VMs, you would by 3 blocks of 10 licenses. One “block” per ESX host. That would license 30 RH VMs in the whole cluster. That is all redhat is concerned with. The 30 VMs can reside on any of the hosts in the cluster. You just can’t go over 30 RedHat hosts total.
Kevin Goodman said this on August 12, 2010 at 10:48 am
Thank you for this quick answer. You wrote: “You just can’t go over 30 RedHat hosts total.” Do the license conditions permits to run more than 30 RH virtual machines in your example if we buy further 3 blocks of RHEL AP license?
michael said this on August 13, 2010 at 4:08 am