Redhat licensing in a VMWare world

[Adam Garsha]

It is shocking how hard this is to find out... as if obfuscation will make it so folks don't run Redhat in VMWare but instead inside Redhat Virtualization platform.

Can anyone tell me or confirm the rumors I hear that you can pool your RHEL AP licenses for use in a VMWare cluster environment and get 10 VM's per AP lic owned (and vmotion to hearts content)? Anyone heard anything like this? Anyone have a document that outlines this?

From a technical perspective, how does one rhn_register a VMWare VM? i.e. if you get 10-to-1 and you try to register all your VM's with Redhat, you will soon use up all your entitlements. I did try to figure out how to go about this would go on RHN site, but I am at a loss and man page for rhn_register doesn't clue me in.

I've got a call later in the week with our redhat sales person, but this seems like a question enterprise linux folks like yourselves would probably know so help me if you can.

[Ivan Ferreira]

Is better if you contact directly with Red Hat, last time they asked me for the number of servers over VMware to get a "special license".

If where up to me, I would run Linux VM on Red Hat Virtualization Platform.

[Court Campbell]

I will try to make this short. You have to license each and every Red hat server that you run. Red Hat has a license for vmware. It allows you to run and register 10 virtuals running red hat. You register the virtual just like any other machine. We currently have one of these licenses and it allows me to register 10 red hat machines. I guess I don't understand what it is that you see as an issue. Have you ever registered a server on the red hat network?

[Adam Garsha]

Yes I have registered, but I only have a single Redhat AP license in my RHN and I was inquiring how it was possible that you can get 10-to-1 with only a single license (since I had heard that AP == 10 VM's). What I am guess I am finding is that I need a special license for vmware. I am also finding on my own research that you need a special SKU of Redhat AP to get the 10 VM type of license. I'll know for sure tomorrow. My frustration was that I can't find that information anywhere on redhats site and when I called them, the person on the other end didn't know so I've had to set up a call and wait a few days to find out--nothing more and nothing less.

[Dr Smith · Accepted solution]

Adam,

We have one of the VMware subscriptions for RedHat. You are correct. It is difficult to find information on RedHat about this other than the typical "contact us" note. The description is something like "RHEL ADV PLATFORM FOR VMWARE PREM UNLTD SOCKETS" or "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for VMware, Premium (Unlimited Sockets)". All we did was request one of these subscriptions and my vendor quoted me a price. There is a slight difference in the way that RHN works for VMware and RH Virtualization. With RH, you can see the host on RHN and list the virtuals under that host. With VMware, there is no separate physical host listed in RHN - only the VMs are listed. RHN keeps track of your subscription usage behind the scene. So, if you ordered one of these subscriptions, you would then see two subscriptions (VMware plus your existing AP), but would have 11 entitlements (10 of which would have to be VMware virtual machines).

[Adam Garsha]

Hi all, back again. I had success with the model as outlayed above. Namely, the special RHEL AP for VMWare SKU. Now, I've learned that beginning this past April, things have changed with Redhat licensing/support in a VMWare environment. Anyone know what the new model/technique is?

[Adam Garsha]

Hmm.. think this is new model... zoinks, liked the old way better:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Guest Pricing

For the pricing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests with either Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for
Servers, VMware vSphere 4 or Hyper-V, there are up to four options, depending on the virtualization platform
being priced:

1. Purchase one standalone license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for each guest. This scenario is
chosen when there is a very low density and number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests in the
environment.

2. Purchase the Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Virtual Guest 4 Pack to enable hosts for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux guests. Customers must purchase one 4 pack for each host, and are limited to an
average density of 4 Enterprise Linux guests or less. This is the usual choice for VMware and
Hyper-V environments with a low density of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests, and is also an option
for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers customers.

3. Purchase the Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a Virtual Guest Unlimited Pack¹ to enable hosts for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests. Customers must purchase at least one Unlimited pack for each
socket on each host. This is the usual choice for VMware and Hyper-V environments with a high
density of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests, and is also an option for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
for Servers customers.

4. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers customers have the option to purchase Red Hat
Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform as a hypervisor and make use of its unlimited number of virtual
guests per node. This is the option chosen for environments with a very high density of Red
Hat Enterprise Linux guests.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Your best bet is to buy an appropriate site or volume license from Red Hat. It will cost you money. It will cost a lot for a large number of servers.

People that say Linux is less expensive than say HP-UX may not be referring to Red Hat Enterprise Linux which can be very expensive. Red Hat requires a license for each installed instance of the OS, production, development, sandbox, guest. Doesn't matter though the pricing may vary.

Or.

You could. Use CentOS.

Same code. No license requirement. You can still buy support.

CentOS is a binary recompile of Red Hat which with the exception of copyrighted images such as the "Red Hat" is not sold, because Red Hat doesn't own anything to sell.

http://www.centos.org

SEP

[Adam Garsha]

Respectfully, I don't agree that CentOS is same-same from a management perspective as redhat. The patching and rpm management is a different process to manage, different enough anyway to be a pain. (vs. having all the same, truly the same, flavor of linux).

We have been on HP-UX for a long time and it is much more expensive when you are an organization that buys support and/or if you use any of the sg, vm, veritas stuff, etc.
Much much more expensive. It is probably true that you get what you pay for and not-apples-apples here, I am not denying that... for us, it just seems like RHEL is good-enough and the hardware gets better and better seemingly daily at the x86-64 arch.

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi Adam,

> Hmm.. think this is new model... zoinks,
> liked the old way better:

That looks like the way, as you appear to have found from here:

http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/rhev/DOC108R6-Competitive-Pricing-Whitepaper.pdf

It will be interesting to see if Red Hat manage to take any sales from VMware with this pricing model, as there look to be some considerable savings to be made if you run Red Hat Virtualisation... Unfortunately however, so many organisations are now so entrenched with VMware that to change things significantly is going to take a lot of effort.

Cheers,

Rob