The wait is over.  vSphere 5.0 was made available for download this evening by VMware.

Here are the highlights and links!

• Download vSphere
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Review Guest OS Support
• VMware Software Compatibility Matrix
• Hardware Compatibility
• vSphere 5.0 Release Notes
• vSphere Installation and Setup Guide
• vSphere Upgrade Guide
• Administrator’s Guide

vSphere 5 License Advisor.

The VMware Licensing Advisor tool is now available for download.  It will all you to connect to a vSphere 4.1, vSphere 4.0, or Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 environment to calculate the vRAM usage and vRAM capacity if the customer were to upgrade to vSphere 5.0.

The tool does require Java JRE 1.6 or Highrer

Hugo Peeters of the Netherlands blog PeetersOnline.nl has written an excellent script to run against your vCenter to calculate your new vSphere 5 vRAM License details. So far, I have not seen a single environment across my customers who don’t already have far more vRAM entitled to them than they are using. This little PowerCLI script will poll your servers, collect the pCPU Count, look at the editions, add up your current vRAM consumption and comapre it to your entitled vRAM. An elegant script that dispells the idea that customers are using 100% of their pRAM for vRAM across the datacenter. I have even seen 256GB+ VM’s easily fall within the vRAM of the vCenter’s pool sizes. Remember,

vRAM is for a POOL of Virtual Consumed RAM of powered on VM’s, not the size of your individual physical servers.

Get the script and run it! Great job Hugo!
URL : http://www.peetersonline.nl/index.php/vmware/calculate-vsphere-5-licenses-with-powershell/

UPDATE: Virtu-AL also has a different script that provide similar information.
http://www.virtu-al.net/2011/07/14/vsphere-5-license-entitlements/

I want to share something on licensing I have been discussing others who hear about vRAM but never took the time to read what the new product licensing entitlement. (You can read the details in the VMware vSphere 5.0 Licensing, Pricing and Packaging White Paper)

I saw this correlation earlier today from someone else….

“Think of it this way. We just invented electricity. Everyone loves it, it makes them more efficient, safer, etc. As the power company, we initially decide to charge for our electricity based on the size of the house. Seems fair at first, but what if one two bedroom home powers 20 lights and another 2 bedroom home powers 200 lights, a pool, 3 freezers, etc. Same physically sized environment, totally different consumption level. Is it fair for the 1st house to pay as much as the 2nd for our electricity? Maybe the most fair way would be to charge per light (per VM), but would customers want to keep track of that and be nickel-and-dimed for every new light they turn on? “ – Jason Dion

I expanded the analogy as follows:

The future is to enable the enterprise to turn virtualization in to a utility service which is better suited for services such as Cloud Computing, capacity on demand, and dynamic growth. Processors are not a stable metric to base this type of model on since the processor your VM runs on may be outside of your own managed datacenter (the Hybrid Model). With vSphere 5, vRAM, memory consumed by a virtual machine, is a less nebulous entity that remains the same regardless of growth or location of compute. What happens when Intel or AMD release a new large-number core Processor greater than 12. What if you’re not using all the pRAM in that 256GB Server and only had 8GB of pRAM consumed? vRAM is a known and predefinable entity that leverages a more fair use model. In addition, you gain the benefit of aggregated vRAM across resources! You are not limited by the same physical boundaries of a single server node.

Here is what I shared with individuals from the local VMUG who had questions on the topic…

vRAM is not so much a restriction as it is a liberator form the traditional Datacenter licensing. No more Cores/VM or max system RAM limits. Also, one clarification… vRAM is consumed RAM across the pool of ESX hosts managed by vCenter, not how much RAM in in the Server. vRAM is aggregated across the vCenter and is the amount of consumed RAM across all ESX hosts in a vCenter (Good news, Linked Mode counts too). You get to pool your RAM across servers to define your available vRAM. It is not a per server number.

The following statement is direct from VMware’s Marketing Team:

VMware is evolving the product’s licensing to lay the foundation for customers to adopt a more “cloud-like” IT cost model based on consumption and value rather than physical components and capacity. VMware vSphere 5 will continue to be licensed per processor (CPU), however, VMware is eliminating the current, restrictive physical entitlements of CPU cores and physical RAM per server and replacing them with a single, virtualization-based entitlement of pooled virtual memory, or vRAM.

Pooled vRAM is the total amount of memory configured to all VMs in a customer’s environment. Each VMware vSphere 5 CPU license will entitle the purchaser to a specific amount of vRAM, which can be pooled across the entire vSphere environment to enable a true cloud or utility based IT consumption model. There are no restrictions on how vRAM capacity can be distributed among VMs: a customer can configure many small VMs or one large VM. VMware vSphere has made it possible for customers to maximize hardware utilization and efficiency by pooling CPU, memory, storage and networking. With these licensing changes, VMware is extending the concept of pooling – one of the foundational elements of cloud computing – beyond technology to the business, allowing the pooling of licenses for maximum utilization and value.

Update:
See my post on Scripts to show you your Consumed vRAM and vSphere vRAM entitlement.

“According to the folks at Gartner and IDC and such, we’re on the verge of reaching the 50 percent mark of the world’s available workloads running on virtual machines-led by VMware,” Maritz said. “That’s great. … We’ve accomplished this in a relatively short time, and we’re proud of our success. But we still have 50 percent to go.”