Following the excitement of the vSphere 5 product launch, the realities of the new vRAM licensing model are still becoming clear. It seems that vmware have simply underestimated the consolidation rates typically in use, as it seems a risky move indeed to effectively double license costs at a stroke – even with an 80% market share.
So queue another big disappointment: the vRAM entitlement for vmware Hypervisor (i.e. the free-licensed ESXi) has been set at an enforced 8GB, total.
This effectively makes the product next to useless, I suppose other than as a container for a single VM. I guess the warning signs have been there for a while – read-only vCLI since v3.5, update manager gone in 4.1, and now functionality severely impaired in 5. I wouldn’t mind betting this will be the last free release.
For the SME, the answer is simple and relatively painless: buy an Essentials pack, which is a give-away at $495 anyway. This provides 144GB vRAM entitlement over 6 sockets, and vCentre Server too.
But where does this leave the home-lab enthusiast (and quite likely, vmware promoter, blogger, and VCP)? I just can’t see that too many will want to stump us this kind of cash to continue research and training on the product.
James I like to very much second your comment on the new license structure. In particular the Hypervisor License is killing the self employed consultant, that wants to evaluate software products on a virtualised environment!
BTW New license structure will also hurt smaller companies too. The original idea of the license was to facilitate hardware by virtualisation software. Now it is paying for the infrastructure you use and (almost) forget about the underlying hardware
> In particular the Hypervisor License is killing the self employed consultant, that wants to evaluate software products on a virtualised environment
Self-employed consultant is having problem earning $495? Oh my..
There is a problem with the pricing but as you stated, essentials is the way to go for the smaller environments.
As for the home users, trial versions of course. 60 days is good enough, then simply rebuild the environment, or am I missing the point here?
Yes that is fine of course, for those with the relative luxury of seperate hardware dedicated to vSphere testing!
Little Boy: Mister Owl, how many versions of VMware will it take for EMC to realize they haven’t ****ed them up and begin gouging their customers?
Mister Owl: One… a-Twooo… Tha-reee.
This proves MBA or any other various type of certifications are just fluff. The management that decided on this do not work out in the field directly with customers such as the consultants and Engineers so they have no concept of reality and effect of this decision. The hypervisor was VMWare’s lead into having evangelists for their product. VMWare just drove most of those to alternatives. In 3-5 years, VMWare will be irrelevant as competitors Hyper-V or XenServer offer parity in features and significant less cost…guaranteed. It only takes time to catch a leader, and stupidity to lose eventually.
Seems like VMware have become a little greedy in a market they already lead. I would imagine their competitors are quite happy with the licensing changes, as it would seem to play right into their hands. Let’s hope VMware reevaluate before release.
I run the free version of ESXi 4 at home—it allows me to maintain a small lab and continue my familiarity with VMware (and recommend it to clients). Guess I will now have an opportunity (be forced) to remove VMware from my home and begin to evaluate Xen for myself and clients…
Yeh, but considering that you paid VMWare $0 for this, and you knew it wasn’t a purely open source offering to begin with, you have to accept that you only have yourself to blame here. I mean if you are bitching about a corporation wanting to make money, that’s like complaining that sharks eat things or that spiders sting things. They do that. That’s what they do. If you want a guarantee of free try KVM or OpenVZ with Proxmox on Linux. Your welcome.
This is true. And it is also true that many of their user base similarly put in hundreds of hours of their own time propping up vmware communities – there’s give and take here.
VMware, except in the early days, was never an open source offering, but they still made a decent free product. As for myself, I am not to blame—I can either pay VMware or delve into one of several other quality free virtualization offerings—VMware is the only one who has a chance to lose out here.
Looks like VMware having been reading our comments, and have change the licensing model for the better. Good on them
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/04/vmware_vsphere_price_change/
I’m not so sure about the Hypervisor revisions, “vSphere Hypervisor license includes a vRAM entitlement of 8GB per processor. vSphere Hypervisor can be used on servers with maximum physical RAM capacity of 32GB”. So for the typical single-socket test box, the 8GB limit remains in place.
That’s for pointing that out Orange! Looks like VMware saw the error in their ways! More details are available at the VMware blog post at http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/08/changes-to-the-vram-licensing-model-introduced-on-july-12-2011.html …