When the time comes to renew your software licenses, it can feel like a major financial reckoning: How do you continue to pay for essential software when costs always seem to be climbing?
There are different paths forward, but they're not always easy to navigate. You could opt to let your licenses expire and switch to a more cost-effective competitor, but that kind of move can be complex and time-consuming. You could take a more budget-conscious approach to license renewals, but that could mean sacrificing access to the latest and greatest offerings.
With AMD, there's another option: While you are renewing your software licenses, take the opportunity to refresh your infrastructure as well. It may certainly seem counter-intuitive to invest more in infrastructure at a time when you're looking for ways to keep your budget intact. But here's the bottom line: With efficient time slicing on AMD EPYC CPUs, you can allocate more vCPUs per physical core. Hence, you can provision more VMs per server.
This is a huge benefit for AMD customers that want to get more out of software that's licensed on a per-core basis. It's even more significant when the licenses up for renewal are from VMware. AMD closely partners with VMware, so all of their solutions are certified to run on AMD. You can find AMD-based solutions with VMware from Dell, HP and all other major OEMs. On top of that, engineering teams from AMD and VMware have worked together to create VAMT, the VMware Architecture Migration Tool, to simplify your move to AMD infrastructure.
How and when to migrate to AMD
You may hesitate to jump to AMD if you're perfectly happy with your Intel-based solutions. Migration, however, is inevitable -- at some point, you will have to refresh your infrastructure.
When you're ready to migrate your virtual machines from Intel clusters to AMD clusters, VAMT is available on GitHub. The open-source tool provides an easy and automated process to cold migrate machines between clusters of different architecture types within the same vCenter or across vCenter Server instances.
VAMT offers Change Window Support, to help you schedule migrations within specific time frames. There's also Process Throttling, which can help you control how many parallel migration tasks that vSphere will be asked to execute. Meanwhile, Extensibility Stubs allow you to add customization before and after your VMs are migrated. You can also rollback a migration after initial migration execution.
VAMT also allows you to maintain the VM's UUID, so that external tools still recognize the VM after migration. The tool offers Syslog Support, as well as Email Notifications Support. Additionally, with Best Effort Migrated VM Success Validation, the tool will wait for VMware Tools to load successfully after the VM has been migrated.
What's next? Fewer licenses
After a successful migration to a platform like AMD EPYC Genoa, provisioning VMs requires fewer physical cores. This means you can reduce your overall software license expenses significantly.
For customers that are concerned about licensing costs -- and subsequently, their processors' per-core performance -- AMD developed a range of chips with fewer cores and higher clock speeds. You can identify these CPUs by the "F" at the end of the part number (for high-frequency). These processors use the same die but with fewer active cores per die, allowing for higher clock frequency.
For example, the 16-core AMD EPYC 9174F uses eight dies with only two active cores per die, enabling a base frequency of 4.10 GHz. By comparison, the standard 16-core AMD EPYC 9124 has a base frequency of 3.00 GHz. These high-frequency processors are available with 16, 24, 32 and 48 cores.
The AMD EPYC 9474F, which offers 48 cores, gives you a VMmark 3.x score of 26.95 with 26 tiles. By comparison, Intel's legacy Cascade Lake (8280) infrastructure, which offers 28 cores, has a VMmark 3.x score of 9.02 with 9 tiles. Between these two processors, the EPYC 9474F offers 36% lower TCO.
Intel's Emerald Rapids (8592+), which offers 64 cores, gives you a VMmark 3.x score of 27.52 with 28 tiles. However, the EPYC 9474F comes in with a TCO 24% lower.
When you are ready to migrate your VMs, subject matter experts from AMD and VMware can provide you that white glove service to make it a seamless process. Once you make the move, you'll see the benefits -- not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of your TCO, security and overall value.
