Is licensing holding you back from going EPYC?

Grimlakin

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I look at these dual EPYC CPU systems and go... OOooo all of those cores in a single chassis.. but then I start thinking about the cost to license all of those cores and just sigh wistfully.

AMD needs to workout some sweetheart licensing deals with Broadcom and Microsoft around their software to make me really want to take advantage of their top tier CPU's for my high density clusters.
 
Grimlakin said:
I look at these dual EPYC CPU systems and go... OOooo all of those cores in a single chassis.. but then I start thinking about the cost to license all of those cores and just sigh wistfully.

AMD needs to workout some sweetheart licensing deals with Broadcom and Microsoft around their software to make me really want to take advantage of their top tier CPU's for my high density clusters.
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Licensing has been the sole reason why I haven't gone apeshit on building a killer host with dual EPYC's in it. I'm in the process of testbenching XCP-NG though, and very well may make a cluster of dual EPYC's (for HA/Redundancy) for the majority of guests.
 
Since I'm about to have 3 old hosts in my dev space might be time to look into trying out some alternative hypervisors.
 
If you get to tinker with it Space ranger, I'd love to know if VM's are portable between ESXi and XCP-NG. My only worries are if it is secure. And their patch cadency. I love how quickly vmware normally reacts to issues. I'd like to see that kept up. Not sure I'm 100% down for open source in my prod environments due to that.
 
I did schedule a presentation with the XPG-NG sales folks next week. I'll try and remember to update this thread.
 
Observation: Company is based in France. That could be an issue if you need to run a US gov secured SCIF. And might effect review by your security organization.
 
So - is there anything stopping you from having the physical cores but only licensing a lower number?

Seems like if you are running a hypervisor on it anyway that would still be an attractive strategy, as you would have dedicated cores counts for specific processes.
 
Enterprise licensing is crap. 350 a core per year minim 1050 cores. This is based on word of mouth online.
 
Grimlakin said:
If you get to tinker with it Space ranger, I'd love to know if VM's are portable between ESXi and XCP-NG. My only worries are if it is secure. And their patch cadency. I love how quickly vmware normally reacts to issues. I'd like to see that kept up. Not sure I'm 100% down for open source in my prod environments due to that.
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There is a Migration path directly from XO for ESXi VMs to XCP-NG. It's currently bugged if you use the latest "Release" version of 8.2.1 for XCP-NG and it's supposedly fixed in the 8.3-B2 release of XCP-NG. I'm going to be playing with an upgrade of my testbench to 8.3-B2 and try another set of ESXi VMs.

I was able to manually migrate some VMs on 8.2.1, but not via their XO interface.
 
Grimlakin said:
Enterprise licensing is crap. 350 a core per year minim 1050 cores. This is based on word of mouth online.
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This is roughly correct.. I don't believe you can under-license the cores and get things to work (license for 16 cores when you have 32 available on the CPU). Broadcom is hacking the living daylights out of the product to make it completely unusable by small/medium sized business and home labs... You can't even get the "Free" version of ESXi anymore. They removed that completely in February.
 
Space_Ranger said:
There is a Migration path directly from XO for ESXi VMs to XCP-NG. It's currently bugged if you use the latest "Release" version of 8.2.1 for XCP-NG and it's supposedly fixed in the 8.3-B2 release of XCP-NG. I'm going to be playing with an upgrade of my testbench to 8.3-B2 and try another set of ESXi VMs.

I was able to manually migrate some VMs on 8.2.1, but not via their XO interface.
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Thanks, my workplace is checking out other solutions as well. Though to be fair for my farms I'd be licensing some 1472 cores worth. Lets hope there is a break in licensing. Ugh...
 
Grimlakin said:
Thanks, my workplace is checking out other solutions as well. Though to be fair for my farms I'd be licensing some 1472 cores worth. Lets hope there is a break in licensing. Ugh...
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Sadly there isn't a break :( Broadcom when full-on stupid with their plans for VMWare. I don't nearly have the infrastructure you're having to manage (roughly 256 cores for my 6 hosts) and as a Non-profit the pricing just isn't sustainable.
 
Space_Ranger said:
Sadly there isn't a break :( Broadcom when full-on stupid with their plans for VMWare. I don't nearly have the infrastructure you're having to manage (roughly 256 cores for my 6 hosts) and as a Non-profit the pricing just isn't sustainable.
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Yea with their 'minimum' footprint bullshit being over 1 million a year that would hurt a LOT.

Even my farm's footprint is a small part of the larger companies. Normally our licensing needs are covered in their overflow.
 
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