We are in the process of moving from a physical Solaris server environment to a Virtual Windows environment. BusinessObjects has told us that a significant cost increase will be incurred for the Virtual Server licensing. Has anyone else encountered this and can you please contact me to let me know how it went? We are just a bit confused by the cost of something that should actually be cheaper to run. Any help or insight is appreciated. Thanks
mathurn (BOB member since 2007-02-15)
As always, you need to work this out with your SAP rep. I am just relaying what I have experienced.
I have heard that there may be an ‘uplift’ charge depending on when you bought your licenses. I don’t remember the exact date, but was something like any licenses bought more than 2-3 years ago do not include virtual rights and BO charges you to get those virtual rights.
When you go virtual there is no concept of a CPU equivalent like there is in a physical server. In a physical server you might have a 4 core CPU, that isn’t 4 CPU equivalents. Depending on your licensing agreement it may only be 2.5 or 3 CPU equivalents.
Now, when you go virtual there is no concept of a core, you allocate X number of CPU’s to that VM and you need to license each one of those as a full CPU. Thus, a 4 CPU VM can cost more than a 4 core physical server.
The savings can come from the fact that it is difficult to get physical boxes with less than 2 - 4 core CPU’s, that means you have to license that many CPU’s whether you need that much power or not. In a VM world you can allocate only the CPU’s needed.
jwhite9 
(BOB member since 2006-07-28)
One thing to make sure you work out, is whether you will end up licensing the number of CPUs you allocate to BOBJ, vs the number of CPUS Available to the VM Environment.
I don’t know exactly what my previous company worked out but we had something like 16-20 available CPUs on our main VM system and SAP originally wanted to charge us for all of them, even though only 2 were going to be allocated to the BOBJ server.
That might be where the ‘substantial’ increase could also be coming from.
JPetlev (BOB member since 2006-11-01)
This is what happened at my company. I needed some extra disk space to install a service pack and the physical boxes made that impossible so virtualizing seemed like an obvious choice. However, we would have to pay somewhere around 4x our annual dues to cover all CPUs on the VM frame. It’s really hard to justify a 400% cost increase to continue doing what you’ve always been doing. In this case, it was much cheaper to just get new physical boxes.
BoB LoblaW 
(BOB member since 2007-10-23)
These threads will provide some more background…
MJRBIM 
(BOB member since 2007-03-23)
Everyone’s right. Cost of virtual servers definitely increase. Per core per cpu, and it doesn’t matter if your only using a partial slice of the VM frame. SAP/BO’s current licensing will charge you the entire server cost, despite the amount of resources you use.
We ended up going to a user license to save on expenses, and move away from server limitations.
dsoriano (BOB member since 2008-01-29)