Recently I have been involved in discussions internally on what it will take to get Business Objects onto a Virtual Machine. The main talk has been around potentially removing another equivalent product and moving entirely over to Business Objects. Then we got pricing for Business Objects.
The standard piece of hardware today is pretty hefty even a small 1/2U system. They come with multiple cores. You have to do a special order to get anything less than a dual/quad core today. An enterprise doesn’t order single sockets either. Kinda silly to save $500 when you can have 2x the power and be able to reuse this system in the future for other purposes.
They price and only price by physical cores in a system and on all systems their software could potentially run on.
Business Objects is blowing a potential sale since today we only need something like 6-8 cores worth of power today and making these systems into VMs is ideal. It isn’t like Enterprises are out to “screw” vendors. Yes we all want a deal though Enterprises just want to pay for what they use. If they would just license use of ~8 CPUs (virtual or physical or core) and let us make these VMs they win.
Even for us to make these physical is a joke. We have to disable cores and sockets to make us legal.
So.. BO is blowing it. They need to grow up and stop making Mainframe’s look cheap with their licensing policies.
Or BO could tell you what they told us. CPU affinity on the VMs to bork the whole DRS/HA VI cluster. No thank you.
I’m a bit surprised to read this. Due to my understanding contracts signed in 2008 and later do have virtualization rights, means in a virtual environment SAP would count virtual CPUs/cores instead of physical. If you have an older contract, you can convert it to get virtualization rights.
I have an update to this that I will post on. What we have finally gotten to the root here is to upgrade a contract from the CPU/core count to the virtualization rights by either User based or vCPU style based would cost us 2+x the maintenance fees. Needless to say that is way over the cost of figuring out a rather ingenious way to stay within our CPU count AND still make them virtual with all the bonuses that come with that.
I will revise my statement about BO not being entirely virtualization friendly.