Hmmm,did licencing just get complicated?

[dkvello]

the stealth change of the licencing policy to differentiate between 1-6 and 7-12 cores just borked a couple of sales.
suddenly have to tell them that prices doubled.

[Gostev]

the stealth change of the licencing policy to differentiate between 1-6 and 7-12 cores just borked a couple of sales.

This is correct, there are two tiers of licensing now, for 1-6 and 7-12 cores in CPU. Going 8 cores instead of most typical 4 cores enables you to run up to 2x more VMs per host, so effectively it means 2x less backup licenses needed.

suddenly have to tell them that prices doubled.

This is not correct, increase is only 50% between tiers (so 1.5x).

[dkvello]

Customers allways "round up" when the see a price-hike
To them it's double concidering there's also a difference between Standard and Enterprise as well.

Those having bid's from 4.1 (there was only standard edition and pr. socket-license, core-agnostic), but who for some reason delayed for a couple of months now have to pay 2.25 times the price to get Veeam B&R 5 Enterprise Tier B

Easy math. They get a flashback to the vSphere 3.5 Enterprise -> vSphere 4.0 Enterprise Plus thing.

[Gostev]

They get a flashback to the vSphere 3.5 Enterprise -> vSphere 4.0 Enterprise Plus thing.

Huh? What are they talking about? Unlike VMware, we did grandfather all of our existing customers to top product tier of the new major release absolutely free! It really upsets me to see someone saying this and making this comparison

VMware had their existing customers pay to get Enterprise Plus. We did not charge existing customers a single penny - zero, nothing, nada, ingenting... taking VMware example, we essentially upgraded VI3 Standard customers to vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus for free. When VMware had VI3 Enterprise customers to pay for upgrading to vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus.

If they did not act on time, then oh well, this is how life works. If you do not act, you pay the price later. I wish I bought some land in my city's suburbs 5 years ago, because it is 5 times more expensive now. Unfortunately, no one was bombing me with warnings 5 years ago saying this is going to happen for the fact. Unlike Veeam, which did send at least 10 ecards and newsletters to all prospects in Q2 and Q3 saying that offer is time limited, and savings are absolutely great if you act now.

[dkvello]

Just giving feedback here.
They didn't see the consequence of delaying a few months more.
Now, this was only a problem for new customers. Old customers did respond to all the ecards and such and upgraded in time.

It was the prospective customers that reacted negatively.

We did warn them of the std/ent change so that didn't throw them off too much, bit it was the tier A/B that came as a bit of a surprise.

Now, sales did go through in all cases since the extra cost for those 8core and 12core customers didn't change the total cost of projects that much. But in a salesprocess that takes many months in a project its always a bit annoying to call a meeting and telling the customer that one of the components has more than doubled in price.

[Gostev]

I recommend that you talk to your Veeam sales representative and see if something can be done about this given that the sale was in the works for a very long time. I am not involved in sales at all, but I am sure it should be possible to find resolution acceptable to all parties. If you do not know who is your Veeam sales rep, I can find out and have them contact you.

[ctchang]

With the release of vSphere 5.0, VMware removed the CPU cores limit, I am wondering if Veeam will do the same? Of course, not the vRam tax if you removed the cpu cores limit pls.

I got the reply in Jan 2011 from Alex of Veeam.

"With the launch of Veeam Backup and Replication v5, Veeam has also revamp the license structure by segregating the number of cores within a physical cpu into tier A or B depending on their number of cores.

We still license our products by the number of physical cpu just that now depending on the number of cores within the cpu, we will charge you according to the tier they are in.

Tier A = 1-6 core
Tier B = 7-12 core.

This was reflected in our EULA: “CPU Socket(s)" means a single, physical chip that houses not more than six (6) processor cores on a Managed Server”. However, it was changed in Q4 2011: http://www.veeam.com/eula.html ."

See also this thread: Veeam Essentials licensing: CPU sockets or cores?

[Gostev]

Hi, we are not planning on introducing any changes to our current licensing any time soon. Our current licensing is fair yet simple, and our partners are used to it. We'll monitor how vTax works for VMware, and adjust our licensing - if necessary - later. But no immediate plans to change it. Thanks.

[J1mbo]

Hi, we are not planning on introducing any changes to our current licensing any time soon. Our current licensing is fair yet simple, and our partners are used to it. We'll monitor how vTax works for VMware, and adjust our licensing - if necessary - later. But no immediate plans to change it. Thanks.

Please don't be tempted to follow the vTax route!! All the time there are downgrade terms available I can't see any reason to move to vSphere 5 for that reason alone. For Veeam, the current product, pricing and support are all a very compelling mix

[Gostev]

OK, thanks for your feedback.

[ckluka]

I personally feel like i got screwed with your 8-core servers being classified as Tier-B.

I have:
3x servers; each with:
2xOpteron 6128 (2.0ghz, 8 core)
64GB ram

for a total of 192GB Ram, 48 cores.

This is all covered under VMWare vSphere 5 Essentials for ~$540.

Now, for my backup product, i'm going to have to shell out almost $3500 just because I'm running AMD, not Intel.

No one in their right mind is going to believe that my 8 core AMD will run more VM's than a 6 core Intel, but my pricing model is rediculous.

PLEASE FIX THIS - The processor division should be on raw GHZ of the machine, not core or processor counts.

8x2Ghz (16Ghz) AMD cores should NOT cost more than 6x 2.8Ghz (17Ghz) Intel cores to license, especially since Intel cores get more work done per clock cycle than AMD cores...

[Gostev]

Hi Chris, thank you for your feedback. At this time, we are not considering any changes with the licensing. Earlier this year, we did consider including vRAM entitlements (to make our licensing similar with vSphere 5), but our customers and partners were pretty clear that we should not do this.

I would disagree that raw GHz should be the main licensing factor. Core count is far more important for any hypervisor host, due to the nature of workload it runs. Note how when it comes to CPU, consolidation density is planned and measured using the "vCPU per core" metric, and never using raw GHz.

I appreciate that there are border cases (such as above) when the current licensing may not make sense from certain perspective. For example, in rare cases when you have only a few but high CPU usage VMs per host, raw GHz can indeed be a better metric. But in more typical virtualization scenarios, the current licensing worked well for us and our channel in the past years, so there is simply no reason to change what is working.

[rfn]

Does this apply to Veeam Essentials? We have a Veeam Essentials Plus license and are considering to buy two new servers to replace our older three ESXi hosts. In consideration has been Dell servers with two 16-core AMD processors which are pretty cheap but does the Veeam Essentials license allow these processors?

[NightBird]

I think Veeam Essentials are tier A licences, so maximum 6 cores per processor.

[rfn]

After some searching I have found that Essentials exists in both Tier A and B versions. I guess ours is Tier A since we bought in when VB&R was at version 4.x. Can anyone tell me how to find out what kind of license we have?

[Vitaliy S.]

Rene, to find it out your best bet would be to contact our sales rep responsible for your region.

[Gostev]

This is part of your sales contact, they will be able to look it up.

[rfn]

I'll do that, thanks...

I'm glad that I didn't just buy two new Dell servers with these 16 core processors when we got a good offer! Btw, does Tier B allow these processors since Tier B is 7-12 cores?

[Gostev]

Oh, come on, Veeam licenses are not THAT expensive to be a factor here we are talking about may be 5-10% of the cost of those 2 servers comparing to your existing Tier A licenses? You really should have bought those servers, if it was a good deal - you could spend some of those money saved to upgrade your Veeam licenses to a higher tier

[Gostev]

Funny you should say that! Very interesting coincidence indeed, but I have just got the brand new Gartner report titled:
"How to Optimize the Cost of Software Licenses for Multicore x86 Systems and Virtual Servers During Server Selection"

I am trying to find out if I can publish the whole report here (probably not - as far as I know, most Gartner reports have to be licensed for distribution), but the first sentence of the synopsis goes:

The number of processor cores in an x86 server configuration can multiply the cost of software licensing, maintenance and support charged for by core. Optimize costs by rightsizing server configurations. Careless server selection can multiply the much higher cost of software licensing, ...

This is as much as Gartner is willing to share with us for free