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back to article VMware kills vRAM memory tax with vSphere 5.1 server virt

The most important new feature of the new ESXi 5.1 hypervisor and its related vSphere 5.1 tools that made their debut at the VMworld virtualization extravaganza today is not a feed or speed, but the fact that VMware has dropped the much-hated vRAM memory tax that came out last year with vSphere 5.0. With the vRAM memory tax, …

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  1. Smelly Socks

    networking

    you didn't mention anything about the networking upgrades. The virtual distributed switch system has been completely overhauled so that you can now actually do upgrades without having to rebuild from scratch as before. SNMP support now looks vaguely useful, and the link aggregation system finally supports LACP. At last. Who knows, in a couple of years, they'll have networking which will be on a par with the early 2000s.

    -ss

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  2. Nate Amsden

    older HW versions supported already

    "So in plain English, any VM that was generated on VMware ESX Server 3.5 or later can run atop ESXi 5.1 unchanged."

    At least when vSphere 4 came out there was no need to upgrade to the latest VM hardware rev (from 3.5), you could if you wanted to take advantage of the new features. I don't believe that was the case in v5 either, though I never upgraded to v5. (I've never seen a vmware version force you to use a newer hardware revision when upgrading).

    From what I read in the PDF one announcement was that you could upgrade the vmware tools w/o a reboot.

    "Zero-downtime upgrade for VMware Tools – After you upgrade to the VMware Tools available with version 5.1, no reboots will be required for subsequent VMware Tools upgrades."

    http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-what-is-new-vsphere51.pdf

    Though the caveat is you still incur some downtime when upgrading to the 5.1 tools, for me this downtime was never an issue.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shock Horror!

    People are pee'd off at price increase.

    Bean counters don't care, it means more money.

    Marketing bullshitters go into hyperdrive, and tell us how they are listening, so increse the previous limt to a "better" limit. look how kind we are.

    Customers don't buy it and start looking at alternatives.

    Bean counters notice, less money coming in, not more.

    Marketing bullshitters go into hyperdrive, and tell us how they are listening so increse the previous limt to a new unlimited tarrif, look, we are no givining it away for free. look how kind we are....

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  4. Shaun 2
    Thumb Down

    A little too late

    Still running our server virtualization on 4.1, with no plans to upgrade, as have lost all faith in VMWare since the vram business.

    We switched to Citrix for our VDI project this year, and although prefer the networking tools in ESXI, find everything else pretty much the same in XenServer, and at 1/3 the initial cost, and roughly the same in annual maintenance.

    Screw you VMWare - You drove us away, and Citrix were more than happy to take our money.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    About 6 months too late.

    We are a virtualisation consultancy firm with around 150 clients, deploying a mix of hypervisors (VMW,XS,HypV, and a few others). Thousands of individual VMware host installs, and probably hundreds of thousands of VMs deployed. I'm hard pushed to think of a single one of our customers who has expanded his VMware estate since the introduction of the VRAM tax, and I know for sure we havent had any new green-field sites go the VMware route since VMware changed their pricing model to VRAM.

    While VMware dont break-out all the details of their license revenues (upgrades vs new sales etc etc) I'm sure their numbers must reflect this story in some way.

    We've had existing VMware sites keep tier-1 services on VMware while pushing lower value workloads onto XenServer or (more rarely) Hyper-V. Nobody has turned VMware off, but plenty have decided not to upgrade to VRAM taxed versions at least until today.

    So far VMware has proved the best recruiting sergeant for Citrix that they could ever have wished for, in previous years I'd have hesitated to sit a VMware guy infront of the Citrix product, but not today.

    Long-term EMC/VMware will need to keep the shareholders satisfied or the sell-side analysts will need to adjust their projections, so I dont think this will be the end of the story...

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