Yes, here it is… the moment we’ve all been waiting for… vSphere 5.0. Finally announced today, and on top of that also new releases of vCD (1.5), SRM (5.0), vShield (5.0) and of course a new product called the vSphere Storage Appliance. Over the last months I have been working hard on collateral for this launch and soon it should be available. For me personally vSphere 5.0 is most definitely the launch that had the most impact ever. Not only did I work on some of the material that will be released, I also prepared roughly 20 blog articles which will be released over the upcoming weeks and lets not forget the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Tech Deepdive that we’ve released today. Crazy times indeed, but that’s not the topic of this article. Lets talk about vSphere 5.0 for a bit and why I am so excited about this release in particular. I could do a copy of past of the releasenotes, which I am certain many will do, but where’s the fun in that? Instead I am going to list some of the changes in vSphere 5.0 and mention why I feel these are important. I won’t go into much detail yet as that will more than likely happen in one of the upcoming articles.
I have picked 5 topics which I feel deserved to be called out and which are enormous!
- Storage DRS
- vSphere HA aka FDM
- Profile-Driven Storage
- vSphere Storage APIs
- Stateless
Storage DRS
This is near and dear to my heart. I have been involved with SDRS very closely over the last 8 months and provided a lot of feedback around the UI, some which has made it into this release. So what is Storage DRS and why do you need it? Storage DRS does for storage what DRS does for compute resources. Storage DRS allows you to aggregate storage resources (datastores) into a single object called a Datastore Cluster. This datastore cluster is the object you will need to manage from now on. SDRS will balance resources (aka virtual machines) within a datastore cluster. In other words, SDRS allows you to specify a latency and space utilization threshold and based on that it will make balancing recommendations. It can do this fully automated and that probably sounds very compelling to most of you, and it is. However I feel that the true strength of SDRS is Initial Placement. Some of you might recognize this, and some of you unfortunately won’t, but when I deployed virtual machines I would check all VMFS volumes first and identify those with the most available disk space and than check the average latency to make sure I wasn’t creating hot spots. That was a fairly cumbersome task to be honest and that is exactly what SDRS also solves. On top of that it offers things like “Datastore Maintenance Mode” and (Anti) Affinity Rules. Definitely a feature worth evaluating in my opinion and a feature which would justify an upgrade to Enterprise+ due to the reduction in operational effort and the possible problems/bottlenecks it can detect and help preventing.
vSphere HA aka FDM
This is one of those features that many take for granted. HA just works doesn’t it…. But all of us have seen some of the constraints that came with it like the max of 5 primary nodes. All of that has been solved with vSphere 5.0. vSphere HA has been rewritten from the ground up. Yes I do mean from the ground up, AAM is dead and FDM is introduced. FDM stands for Fault Domain Manager and is the name of the new agent. From a UI perspective not a lot has changed however, except for a couple things that appear to be minor but are major in my opinion like: Datastore Heartbeating and Admission Control Policies. Datastore Heartbeating allows HA to make a distinction between a host that is isolated and between a host that has failed. You might wonder why that is important, well in the past HA would try restarting VMs regardless of the state of the host and this causes some overhead and even problems in the past. That has now been solved. On top of that the Admission Control Policies were improved. The percentage based admission control policy allows you to specify a separate percentage for both CPU and memory. There’s much more under the covers that has changed though, no more primary/secondary node concept as stated but a master/slave concept with an automated election process. Anyway, too much details for now, will come back to that later.
Profile-Driven Storage
Profile-Driven Storage is the future. In an ideal world admins are maintaining massive spreadsheets detailing storage characteristics and VM storage requirements. This spreadsheet should be used during the provisioning and during the migration of VMs, but we all know that in many cases placement is either at random or “best of knowledge”. In both cases, and even when a spreadsheet/database is used, this leads to human error or a serious operational overhead. With vSphere 5.0 that is not necessary anymore as Profile-Driven Storage helps preventing these errors. Profile-Driven Storage, in the UI referred to as VM Storage Profile, allows you to create a profile with specific characteristics. This profile can simply be linked to a VM/VMDK and will allow you to do compliancy checks. Simple solution, but very effective and especially when combined with one of the new vSphere Storage APIs…
vSphere Storage APIs
Most of you have seen VAAI into action by now. We all know how it can help reducing the time to make a clone, deploy a template, create an eager zero thick disk and of course offload the locking mechanism. With 5.0 this has been expanded and enhanced. First and foremost, in my opinion, all primitives (features) are now T10 compliant. This means that every single storage vendor out there that adheres to the T10 standards can benefit from VAAI without the need to write their own plugin. On top of that a Thin Provisioning primitive is introduced which does two things: reclaim dead space and provide out-of-space info. Reclaim dead space useful in environments where thin provisioned LUNs are used and VMs are often deleted. This will allow the array to reclaim the blocks associated with the LUN when they are no longer in use. Out-of-space info, well I guess you know what that does… provide details around utilization on the backend (array) to the frontend (vCenter/ESXi) and allows for alarms etc. On top of that a brand new feature is introduced called vSphere Storage API for Storage Awareness aka VASA. VASA surfaces storage characteristics to vCenter. Basically it enables you to retrieve storage details from the “storage provider” and use this for Profile-Driven Storage, SDRS etc. Think about details like RAID level used, thin / thick, deduped, replication etc.
Stateless
Last but not least, support for Stateless. This allows you to run diskless setups and boot ESXi into memory over the network. vSphere 5.0 provides the Auto Deployment tool which allows you to manage stateless ESXi environments. The cool thing in my opinion about stateless ESXi, keep in mind that “state” is stored by Auto Deployment and vCenter, is that is makes the update process extremely easy. Instead of patching dozens of hosts you patch the main image and just reboot your host whenever you please. Is that agile or what?
Wrapping up
There’s much more of course to vSphere 5.0 than I have touched on today. However, I suspect that the whole blogosphere will be swamped with blog articles and as such there is no point in calling out every single cool detail as they will drown in a large amount of info floating around. These 5 are my personal favorites mainly because they reduce the amount of operational effort required to run a virtualized infrastructure. I cannot wait for the product to be available and hear all your responses!
** Disclaimer: This article contains references to the words master and/or slave. I recognize these as exclusionary words. The words are used in this article for consistency because it’s currently the words that appear in the software, in the UI, and in the log files. When the software is updated to remove the words, this article will be updated to be in alignment. **
Vlad Nagornyi says
My vote goes to Storage and Network I/O Controls. Speaking from managed hosting side…
Jason says
Looks like the new features (Storage DRS / Policy drive storage) are Enterprise Plus only…. also Duncan whats your take on the new licensing model specifically around the removal of core limits bu the inclusion of a memory limit (vRAM).
Andrew Fidel says
I know what my reaction is, incredibly lame. When I ran our numbers upgrading without adding anything to our environment would cost $70k, taking advantage of our currently unused capacity would be another $20-30k. My bosses reaction when I presented it to him was “let’s look at XenServer 6 and Hyper-V 3.0”, he had previously been 100% a supporter of my choice to go with VMWare. This will lead to a LOT of lost customers unless things are seriously tweaked.
Duncan Epping says
I feel it is a good thing the physical constraints are removed and that we introduced the concept of vRAM. It is something that will need to be taken in to account from both an architectural and an operational perspective. I might do an article about it if I can find the time before my holiday.
Pierre-Yves says
I must say I am a bit disapointed by the new licensing 🙁
In my environment with Enterprise Plus, RAM is the limiting factor. We are using bi-processor Proliant with 96Gb RAM. That means I cannot upgrade my servers with more RAM to host more VMs, which was on the agenda, because our CPU is low. With Vsphere 5.0 I can no longer do this without purchasing additional expensive E+ licences.
It is a huge step backwards for us.
Chuck says
Our current hosts are the same, dual-proc quad-core w/ 96GB of RAM (recently upgraded from 48). Luckily, it turns out, we just upgraded from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus so I don’t have to face losing 1/3 of my usable capacity while upgrading to vSphere 5. However, I’m currently in the planning process for a replacement cluster and was looking to essentially double the hardware capacity without increasing the number of licensed sockets and possibly dropping a few.
I understand that it’s not attractive to VMware that I can double the size of my environment without purchasing any net-new licenses, only maintaining support; but it’s absolutely attractive as a customer and pretty much ensured that I would stick with VMware for the hypervisor. This change adds a minimum of $50000 in licensing costs to my planned environment and guarantees that any future expansions will require additional licenses in addition to memory or host upgrades.
Askar Kopbyaev says
we have 20 hosts with 2 CPUs and 96 GB of RAM in each with Enterprise Edition. For us the upgrade to vSphere 5 makes sense only if we move to Enterprise plus edition. Otherwise we will loose 640GB of RAM. Unfortunately, there is no information how much is the upgrade from vSphere 5.0 Enterprise to Enterprise Plus.
David says
There was no price increase so the upgrade per proc is $685 list price and maintenance must also be purchased with the upgrade ($874 for 1yr of production). Hope this helps.
Askar Kopbayev says
David, thanks a lot for this info.
Does it mean that our current maintenance contract for vSphere expires as soon as we upgrade to vSphere 5 and we need to buy new maintenance contract? if it is so, it will make us to wait for another 2 years before our maintenance contract naturally expires so we can move to vSphere 5 with minumum financial loss.
Rob Kobiske says
Is the license upgrade going to be a 1:1 upgrade? Meaning if we have 4.x licenses are we going to get the same number of 5.x licenses? If so, this is going to cost us a ton! We have servers with 192gigs of ram and enterprise licenses.
Brian says
VMW screwed the pooch big time on this.
I’ve a client running 22 VS4 Enterprise licenses, and approximately 1500 GB of running VM memory. They’re going to have to roughly double their license count to upgrade to VS5.
Scenario #2, new VMW user needing 1500GB of running VMs. Cost of this using VS5 Standard would be around $60k, but hopefully they don’t need Enterprise or Enterprise + features, or figure out how much it would have cost them using VS4 licensing.
dilidolo says
5 is the magic number. It will drive customers away due to the new licensing.
I have about 250 ESX servers now and it may double or even triple our license cost upgrading to 5.
I think it just opens the door for customers to look at competitor’s products.
Ed says
Having 96GB of memory doesn’t mean you need 2 Enterprise Plus license. You may need a bunch more. After all, you are probably USING 96GB of memory but ALLOCATING a bunch more. After all, guests never use 100% of their memory 100% of the time.
If you have 128GB of ALLOCATED memory to your guests to run on your 96GB of physical memory, buy another license, shut down some guests, or change the allocations and then join the lengthy line to beat on your salesrep who will likely pass the unhappy messages along.
Chuck says
Just noticed this as well after reading through the packaging whitepaper. Unless it’s explained very poorly, memory overcommitment will require matching licensing.
I believe I would prefer per-VM licensing to this model, or just licensing memory usage and remove sockets from the equation altogether. At least that would give some more freedom in sizing the hardware without feeling like you’re wasting socket licenses to get memory capacity.
Eric Gray says
Nice article, Duncan. I enjoyed reading your personal take on the amazing new vSphere 5 features.
Eric
Duncan Epping says
Thanks Eric, it took time to write this and I appreciate the feedback.
Magnus says
Hi Duncan,
ggeat article. Do you know how the VMware HA/FDM slot sizes re calculated for the different admission control policies in vSphere 5?
Magnus says
i found the slot calculation information in the documentation.
Ingvar says
Hi Duncan
are there any changes in specification for FT VM?
in 4.1 there some limits like just 1 vCPU.
BR
Ingvar
Christiaan says
Hi Duncan
When will vSphere 5 be available for download?
MB-NS says
Thanks for this information !
HA revamp sure is good, especially the datastore heartbeat which can make isolation responses more informed.
As for others features, I believe VMware and most of the blogosphere is seriously blinded here : all of them are Ent+ features.
Integrators struggle to justify the cost of even the Standard sku against hyperv in the SMB market, what with current economics.
So presenting these new features as a given for all customers is misleading at best.
I understand that these new features makes sense only for big clusters. So then, why not included old, but major features like hotadd, svmotion, which DO make sense even in small clusters scenarios ? VS4 essentials and standard customers have very little to gain to upgrade to vSphere.
But the worst of it is still the vTax here, which make it so that most customers have something to LOSE by upgrading.
4.1 was a big step towards SMB with vmotion included in lower SKUs.
5.0 is a major stepback, and it contradicts every message VMware has sent so far.
Sure, VMware will get more cash out of its customers. But it will lose a lot of them, and fail to get new ones it could have because of this new licensing.
I strongly hope VMware will see the light.
MB-NS says
I realize my previous post has several typos, sorry about that.
I correct 2 sentences in order to avoid ambiguity :
“So then, why not include old, but major features like hotadd, svmotion (which DO make sense even in small clusters scenarios) in the lower SKU ?
As it is now, VS4 essentials and standard customers have very little to gain to upgrade to vSphere 5.
Dave says
I’ve been keen to see what new features came out of the v5 release.. but all the good is overshadowed by the vRAM pricing. I don’t see how this can be a good thing for consumers when I have to buy an additional license per blade just to keep the features I currently enjoy.
I understand why VMware is doing it thanks to even more cores per socket allowing higher consolidation. It’s just going to be a heck of a hard sell to convince management that it’s a worthy upgrade when competitor’s products may now be ‘good enough’.
I’d welcome advice on HOW I can sell this additional cost to my manager.
Chargeback is not going to fly in many organisations including ours.
Senth says
Hi Duncan,
Very Nice Article!