IBM Offers Virtualization-Friendly Pricing for RHEL 5 on Power

Published: June 26, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of its announcement that it was beginning to ship the Power variant of Red Hat's new Enterprise Linux 5 server operating system, IBM last week said that it was going to offer customers using Power-based machines a per-server license rather than the per-core pricing that IBM has used in the past to peddle RHEL 4 and earlier Red Hat Linuxes.

The per-server price for RHEL 4 and RHEL 5 is meant to make it easier for IBM's customers to cope with licensing in an increasingly virtualized environment. The licensing that the company announced last week applies to System i and System p servers running Linux in partitions as well as OpenPower boxes running Linux exclusively and PowerPC-based blade servers in the BladeCenter family. The licensing has to be different on Power-based machines because these boxes do not support the open source Xen hypervisor, but rather use IBM's own Virtualization Engine hypervisor and the tools that IBM has created to manage logical partitions (LPARs).

The way IBM has created its RHEL 5 licensing is that it is still counting sockets and LPARs, but it is doing so in a slightly different way from Red Hat's Xen-on-X64 scheme. A standard one-year license to RHEL 4 or RHEL 5 from IBM costs $375 for a machine with one or two processor sockets and supporting up to four LPARs; a one-year license on a machine with an unlimited number of sockets and up to 25 LPARs costs $719. IBM is offering a 7 percent discount to customers who ink a three-year subscription deal for a Red Hat Linux backed by IBM support. Moving to Red Hat support more than doubles the fees. Specifically, to $759 for a one- or two-socket box with four or fewer LPARs and to $1,349 for a box with unlimited sockets and up to 25 LPARs. Premium support licenses with Red Hat's patching and IBM support cost $645 for the smaller machine (one or two sockets, 4 LPARs max), but are only a little more expensive at $899 for the unlimited socket-25 LPAR license. This latter one is clearly the sweet spot that IBM is targeting for many of its midrange System i and System p customers. The irony is that IBM's pricing for RHEL 5 on Power boxes is a bit more generous than Red Hat's own pricing for its RHEL 5 Advanced Platform (which has unlimited sockets and virtualization). It is unclear what happens when customers with big System i or System p boxes want more than 25 virtual instances of RHEL 5 running on their machines.

Red Hat is perfectly happy to sell customers a license at its own pricing for Power-based systems that is identical to that for its X64-based licenses. So you don't have to buy RHEL 5 from IBM. But given the different packaging and pricing, it is probably a good idea to look into it and compare your options. Moreover, IBM's prices for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Power machines, backed by IBM support, are even less expensive than the RHEL 5-IBM support combo, which is also a little less expensive than what Novell is charging. Like RHEL 5, SLES 10 includes an integrated Xen hypervisor that is basically useless on a Power box or an IBM mainframe and only useful on X64 machines.

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