I wanted to know when current VMware users are planning to upgrade their existing VMware production environments to vSphere, so I ran a poll on my website. I then ran additional polls to find out the primary reasons that users are holding off on upgrading to vSphere, and to see if they are planning on upgrading their Enterprise licenses to the new Enterprise Plus licenses.

What I discovered is that while people are eager to upgrade to vSphere, there are reasons why others are waiting; and while some will upgrade from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus licensing before the end of the year, a number of respondents indicated that they have no plans to upgrade at all.

When will you upgrade?

The first poll clearly indicated that many existing customers will be quick to upgrade to vSphere to benefit from the new technologies. Out of 140 responses, 32% are planning to upgrade within 3-6 months and another 25% of users are planning on upgrading within 0-3 months.

Only 12% had already upgraded to vSphere, so my second poll was to find out the primary reason that users were holding off on upgrading to vSphere.Why wait?

Out of 101 responses, 31% of users are waiting until they get more knowledge and experience with vSphere. 29% of users indicated that they are waiting for the first maintenance update of vSphere.

This would seem to indicate that many are leery of this release as it is new and has only been tested by VMware and its beta testers, suggesting that memories of the infamous time bomb bug still linger.

Enterprise or Enterprise Plus?

Finally, I wanted to see if customers were planning on upgrading to the new Enterprise Plus edition and taking advantage of the discounted $250/processor special upgrade offer that is valid until the end of the year. I ran a third poll; out of 65 responses only 43% of current Enterprise customers are planning on upgrading to Enterprise Plus this year. 37% are not planning on upgrading at all — my guess is that this is because they can not afford to upgrade their licenses or are not interested in the extra features that are included in Enterprise Plus (Host Profiles and Distributed vSwitches).

To summarize these results, many customers are anxious to upgrade to vSphere for its new features and benefits — but not too anxious, many are holding off until they learn more about it and for the first update to be released. Additionally, many customers are not willing to spend the extra money to upgrade to the new Enterprise Plus license tier and will stick with their existing Enterprise licenses.

What are your plans with regard to vSphere? Commennt and let us know.

• The hardware involved. VMware vSphere has certain hardware requriements, if your target hosts do not support these minimal requirements, then they are not good candidates for running VMware vSphere. The basic requirements are:

- 64 Bit CPU support. This does mean that some EMT64 machines will work. However they may not be on the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guides.

- Intel-VT or AMD-V support. This pretty much goes without saying; it is impossible to use VMware vSphere if these features are not enabled within the BIOS.

- No eXecute (NX) or eXecute Disable (XD) support within the BIOS. In some cases you are required to enable this bit to allow VMware vSphere to run.

• Whether or not the hardware is fully supported by VMware for VMware vSphere 4. This implies that the hardware and IO devices you are planning to use are listed within the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guides. If they are not then there is a chance that when you call for VMware Support that they will deny you this support. It does not happen often but it is possible, so be aware of this. If you are not using VMware vSphere 4 in production, this may not be a huge issue as many a whitebox will work, just be sure your IO devices are listed within the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guides.
• Whether or not current management agents exist for VMware vSphere 4. This implies that your current crop of management agents, such as HP Insight Management Agents, are available for VMware vSphere 4. Monitoring of your physical hardware and alerting on issues is too important to not have available if your use VMware vSphere 4.
• Have you tested vSphere 4 in your environment? Wanting to upgrade implies that you have tested vSphere 4 within your environment and that you are comfortable with the changes in licensing and operation of this .0 release of software. It is unwise to just place VMware vSphere 4 into production without first running some tests. How much of a test plan you use depends on your existing testing processes, but some testing is required. If you are upgrading, at minimum you should test to see which path is a smoother transition for you: upgrading or reinstalling.
• Have you considered licensing level changes? There are many licensing level changes within VMware vSphere 4 with respect to what is available at each license level. If you upgrade will you also need to upgrade your licenses to maintain the appropriate levels of functionality. DRS is a case in point. It is important to know exactly what your licenses imply when you upgrade. With new starts of VMware ESX, it is also important to understand your license levels.
• Do you need to upgrade your hardware to use all vSphere 4.0 functions? In some cases, before you can utilize all features of VMware vSphere 4 such as Fault Tolerance you will need to also upgrade your processors. Not every processor supports VMware vLockstep. If you do require VMware Fault Tolerance, for example, it is important to know its limitations and the required CPUs.

These are not all of the issues involved with upgrading to VMware vSphere 4, but they are helpful considerations for deciding if you should upgrade or even can upgrade as well as start using VMware vSphere 4 for new installations.

As with any virtualization endeavor, it is extremely import to architect, design, and plan your vSphere 4 installations or upgrades. It is very easy to install VMware vSphere 4 without doing any planning, but if you do so, expect frustration, delays, and long days and nights. Ask the tough questions during your planning stages and do not rush to implement vSphere 4 unless there is a major need to do so.

Get your license keys:

1. Log in to your VMware Account by going to http://www.vmware.com, clicking on Account, then clicking on Manage Product Licenses.
2. Select your product, ‘VMware Infrastructure 3′ from the drop down menu for Server & Datacenter Products.
3. Once you go to vSphere licenses, your VI3 licenses no longer exist, so be sure you get the proper number of VI3 licenses that you need for the time being.
4. In the upper right will be a ‘vSphere Licenses’ button to click. Click on that button or clock on Go To: ‘VMware vSphere’. Either will work.
5. Here is where you can divide your licenses so you have the proper number of CPUs per host. If for example you have 12 licenses and 6 2 CPU hosts, you can create 6 2 CPU licenses.

If you make too many vSphere licenses and need more VI3 licenses you can also use the ‘Downgrade Licenses’ link to do so.

That is all there is to it. VMware vSphere uses a license key instead of a license file. Once you have migrated your licenses to vSphere and divided them appropriately you can record the license keys for future use. No need to download a license file or anything like that.

Get the software:

Getting vSphere 4 is much easier than getting the licensing but there is still a gotcha. The steps are follows:

1. Go to the VMware download page.
2. Click ‘Download’ for VMware vSphere 4.
3. Expand the level of your license. I.e. if your level is Standard you will expand the ‘Download VMware vSphere 4 Standard’ link. If your level is Enterprise you will expand the ‘Download VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise’ link.
4. Click on the link for your choice of install, ESX 4 or ESXi 4 (I usually get both).
5. Read the EULA carefully and accept it as you desire.
6. Download pretty much everything from the resultant download page. VMware has added a Download Manager that I found very useful indeed.
7. Go back and click on the link for VMware vCenter Server 4 as well as for VMware Consolidated Backup and repeat the process you used for ESX 4 and/or ESXi 4.

I usually download all four ESX, ESXi, VMware vCenter Server 4, and VMware Consolidated Backup. Once that is done you are now ready to reinstall.

Upgrade vs. Reinstall

I leave that to you. Hopefully these steps will aid you in upgrading your vSphere licenses and getting the software. Many people are doing this at this moment so occassionally the VMware site will either not display everything properly or be temporarily out of service. Be patient as it will come back very soon.

While there were few surprises to the beta vSphere users as to functionality, new information was released about editions, licensing and pricing.

To summarize the licensing changes:

• VMware vSphere will be available in 7 editions: ESXi single server, Essentials, Essentials Plus, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, each with different features as shown in the below image. The new Essentials editions are geared towards smaller environments and are all-inclusive packages which include ESX Server and vCenter Server. ESXi single server remains free and includes support for thin provisioned disks. A new tier above Enterprise is introduced called Enterprise Plus which includes support for Host Profiles and Distributed vSwitches.

• All editions (except for Advanced and Enterprise Plus which support up to 12 CPU cores per physical processor) support up to 6 CPU cores per physical processor.
• Your existing VI3 Foundation and Standard licenses will become vSphere Standard licenses and your existing VI3 Enterprise licenses become vSphere Enterprise licenses as shown in the below image. You must have an active Support and Subscription (SnS) contract, however, to get the new licenses.

• You can upgrade from one addition to another if you want more features, the prices for this are in the below image.

• A special promotion exists until the end of the year that allows existing customers with active SnS to upgrade to a more featured edition at less than 50% of the standard upgrade price. The reduced cost to go from the Standard edition to Advanced is $745 per processor and to go from the Enterprise edition to Enterprise Plus is $295 per processor. See the bottom of this upgrade page for more information on this promotion.
• The per processor cost for new licenses is $795 for Standard, $2,245 for Advanced, $2,875 for Enterprise and $3,495 for Enterprise Plus as shown in the below image.

• The Essentials and Essential Plus editions includes licenses for up to 3 physical servers (up to two 6-core processors) and a vCenter Server. Both editions are self-contained solutions and may not be decoupled or combined with other vSphere editions. The cost for vSphere Essential is $995 which includes a 1 year Subscription; however Support is optional and available on a per-incident basis. The cost for Essentials Plus is $2,995, however SnS is sold separately and a minimum of one year of SnS is required.

VMware has definitely made licensing more complicated and many customers may struggle to figure everything out. Luckily VMware has provided a lot of documentation on its website to help with this. The below links should help you better understand all the new changes.

• vSphere 4 Pricing, Packaging and Licensing Overview
• vSphere Editions Comparison
• vSphere Key Features & Benefits Summary
• vSphere 4 Essentials Editions
• vSphere – What’s New in Licensing
• vSphere Upgrade Entitlement Mapping
• vSphere Upgrade Center – Licensing

Many existing Enterprise edition users were disappointed to find out that they would not be entitled to the new Host Profiles and Distributed vSwitch features without paying to upgrade their licenses to Enterprise Plus ($295 per processor). Previously Enterprise was the top edition with all the features but VMware chose to add a higher edition instead with the two features that will be very useful to manage larger environments. It’s understandable that VMware is trying to re-coup some of their huge investment costs in this new release by charging existing Enterprise customers for these new features. Beginning May 21^st is when you can begin upgrading and purchasing the new vSphere licenses. Existing customers will be notified that they can log into the new Licensing Portal and download the new licenses that they are entitled to use with this new release.