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YoutubeVMware vSphere 5 Licensing and Pricing Update
As you are probably aware, when VMware announced our new Cloud Infrastructure Suite, we also introduced changes to the vSphere licensing based on a consumption and value-based model rather than on physical components and capacity.
While we believe this model is the right long-term strategy as we move into the cloud-computing era, the announcement generated a great deal of passionate feedback from partners and customers that led us to examine the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario - and equally importantly, taking into consideration our partners’ and customers’ desire to broadly standardize on VMware. We’ve listened to your ideas and advice, and we are taking action with the following three updates to the vSphere 5 licensing model:
- We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Below is a comparison of the previously announced and the new vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements per vSphere edition:
- We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license. This change also aligns with our goal to make vSphere 5 the best platform for running Tier 1 applications.
- We’ve adjusted our model to be much more flexible around transient workloads, and short-term spikes that are typical in test & development environments for example. We will now calculate a 12-month average of consumed vRAM to rather than tracking the high water mark of vRAM.
Finally, we introduced the vSphere Desktop Edition to address vSphere licensing in a desktop environment. vSphere Desktop is licensed on the total number of Powered On Desktop Virtual Machines allowing customers to purchase vSphere for VDI use case on per user basis. Our price books are being updated and will be available on Partner Central shortly.
If you have additional feedback please we welcome your comments here. We also have several resources on Partner Central available to provide clarity for you and your customers, a vmLIVE session available for replay, and an additional vmLIVE scheduled for August 10th
We value our partnership with you and look forward to a successful introduction of vSphere 5 into the marketplace this quarter!
-- Scott Aronson
Senior Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances.
Can you please explain why Enterprise is now more expensive than Enterprise Plus, $44.92/GB vs $36.40/GB?
While Standard is still less expensive than Enterprise Plus, $2985/96GB vs $3495/96GB, The difference in features doesn't seem to fit well with the price difference.
I can't understand how VMware came up with the vRAM entitlements when looking at this from a cost vs features viewpoint.
Posted by: Gary H | 08/03/2011 at 02:27 PM
The licenses are very bad. Already have many customers that stated they will try alternatives. With the changes, they need to again be doubled as it is way too costly to run systems with 256 gb ram.
Posted by: Mchael willams | 08/03/2011 at 02:32 PM
Moving to 32GB of physical RAM for the free hypervisor is certain to be an appreciated improvement.
Posted by: Tinkerer Guy | 08/03/2011 at 02:35 PM
Thanks vmware for listening to your customers. Great work everyone for sounding your comments on this board/phone/email.
Although its not the best case scenario. vmware still has to make $$$$$ and hire best people etc.
vSphere 5 here we come.....
Posted by: Bigi | 08/03/2011 at 02:38 PM
This is a much appreciated change! Thanks for listening VMware!
Posted by: Tim S | 08/03/2011 at 02:42 PM
This was a very good move. We can now look forward to moving forward with vSphere 5.
Thank you VMWare for doing the right thing!
Posted by: rjb2 | 08/03/2011 at 02:44 PM
Somehow I should be happy that they relented and now I will only have to buy 2x as many licenses as I did before rather than 4x under the original proposal?
Posted by: Unhappy Customer | 08/03/2011 at 02:48 PM
Still no upgrade path to the new vSphere Desktop Edition?
Posted by: Chris | 08/03/2011 at 02:56 PM
Brilliant! Now Enterprise Plus accommodates every modern platform fully populated with 8GB sticks without doubling-up on licenses. Even memory oversubscription (i.e. 1TB VM, etc.) is reasonable. It would take more than 7x 16GB DIMMS per socket to exceed Enterprise Plus licensing at 80% memory utilization... Even the top-dog VMmark performers - 8 CPU, 160 thread monsters - cost the same (in licenses) under vSphere 5 as vSphere 4.
Thanks, VMware, for listening and taking action on what you heard! Now we can start talking about the new features instead of licensing questions...
Posted by: Collin C. MacMillan | 08/03/2011 at 02:57 PM
This new vRam stuff is really stupid. If a customer wants to buy more ram, there shouldn't be an artificial constraint which causes them to pay more to use the exact same software. My customers currently exceed the vRam requirements across the board. Every single one of them would have to buy more licenses just to use what they are using today with vsphere 4.x.
Time to pilot hyper-v
Posted by: Alberto de_la_Torre | 08/03/2011 at 02:57 PM
The price model still simply doesn't work for hosting companies. Everyone that I know of in the industry is planning to move away from VMWare including our own company. We might still offer VMWare solutions for the minority of clients that wants to pay double for the few enterprise features that separates VMWare from other hypervisors. :-(
Posted by: Yet another dissapointed customer | 08/03/2011 at 02:58 PM
Tne new vRAM entitlement for Essentials, Essentials+ and Standard is not aligned with Intel's 5500 and 5600 Processor RAM memory balancing best practices (applies to 1U and 2U socket servers mostly). According to Intel, RAM should be installed in sets of three PER processor. 24GB RAM is a valid option (6x 4GB RAM) , 32GB is not. It should have been increased to 36GB RAM (6x 4GB dimms + 6x 2GB dimms). By limiting server configurations to meet VMWare license limitation, many hardware business partners will probably configure servers improperly affecting performance.
This affects IBM, HP, Dell and other vendors, given the fact that most of them are VMWare partners too and sell Intel based servers, How come VMware didn't take this into account?
Posted by: David C | 08/03/2011 at 02:58 PM
Enterprise should also be changed to 72GB at least, not 64GB
Posted by: David C | 08/03/2011 at 03:00 PM
If the maximum is 96 GB how can you have a 1TB vRAM VM on 1 license ?
As outlined above •We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
Posted by: Terry | 08/03/2011 at 03:01 PM
Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.
You guys better eliminate this stupid vRam policy before all your customer go to hyper-v.
It's not up to you to decide how much ram a customer decides he want to buy/use.
However you slice it, you are interfering in the a most negative way with your customers.
Posted by: Alberto de_la_Torre | 08/03/2011 at 03:03 PM
Overall I applaud your changes and thank you for listening to your customers. However, how does VMware plan to keep up with Moore's Law? Will the lifecycle of vSphere 5 outpace Moore's Law, or will it be the other way around? Some might argue that even a 96GB vRAM entitlement per CPU is not nearly enough given what's available from all major server manufacturers today.
Posted by: Eric | 08/03/2011 at 03:06 PM
32GB for hypervisor is a very welcome and sensible u-turn. But more generally, the model remains a gift to the competition.
Posted by: Jimbo | 08/03/2011 at 03:14 PM
Kudos to VMware for listening to the market! There's a reason VMware is the market leader - and it's not only because of superior products. Looking forward to selling vSphere along with the cloud infratructure products on the merits of new features.
Posted by: KC | 08/03/2011 at 03:32 PM
"While we believe this model is the right long-term strategy as we move into the cloud-computing era"
Are you kidding? Hasn't vsphere always been "cloud computing"? The fact still remains that you went from being the most expsensive option to even more expensive.
How do you address the fact that the more tier1 applications you run on vsphere 5, the higher the tco compared to your competitors?
Posted by: Bad Dos | 08/03/2011 at 03:39 PM
Not good enough.
Example: I have vSphere 4.1 Advanced Acceleration Kit which is good for 3 hosts with 2 cpus and 256GB RAM each. I paid 10495 USD for it. I might have paid 3 years upfront of SnS expecting to get upgraded to vSphere 5 at no cost like the vSphere 5 licensing docs actually states as well should be possible for customers with SnS. Can VMware please explain to me how I can upgrade at no cost with the above setup to vSphere 5 assuming I'm already oversubscribing RAM?
Posted by: Vidar | 08/03/2011 at 03:58 PM
I still think the vSphere 5 memory entitlements are far too low and having to purchase more vRAM licenses than physical memory in a server is absurd. I don’t need the features in the Enterprise version and currently have several 2 CPU servers with 96GB of memory running 4.1 Standard. Even with the updated licensing, I would still need to buy one additional CPU/vRAM license for each server just to cover the physical memory, but since we’ve oversubscribed the memory I would have to buy yet another CPU/vRAM license to cover memory that doesn’t even exist. Our current servers with 96GB of memory can hold twice that amount, and in the next few years I see us purchasing machines with more memory than even two enterprise plus licenses would allow.
Unless the 5.0 licensing is adjusted further I don’t think I’ll have much choice but to keep running 4.1 for the time being and look at alternative hypervisors as we bring in new hardware. If you’re going to insist on licensing by vRAM I think you should at least have the option to purchase additional memory allowances over the base (at significantly reduced cost than a full license), instead of requiring me to buy full additional CPU/vRAM licenses plus the yearly support costs that go with it.
Posted by: Steve | 08/03/2011 at 04:08 PM
In response to Michael Williams:
"Moving to 32GB of physical RAM for the free hypervisor is certain to be an appreciated improvement."
According to the last item on the FAQ - http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere-hypervisor/faq.html - it is still 8 MB, or (if I am reading it correctly) one "monster" free VM with 32 MB. It used to be 8 MB of vRAM, so this is an improvement.
I still don't understand why I wouldn't stay with the free 4.1 and get 256 GB of RAM; as discussed here - http://blogs.vmware.com/esxi/2009/06/esxi-vs-esx-a-comparison-of-features.html
Posted by: Richard Buschkoetter | 08/03/2011 at 06:04 PM
This is a step in the right direction but not far enough. We've been exclusively a VMWare shop for ten years now and to have a price hike like this at the same time that almost every company is looking at how to squeeze their budgets to weather the slow economic recovery is just poor judgement. Because of this in the last month we have spun up both HyperV and Xen in our test environments as the cost difference is too great to ignore anymore.
I understand the need to keep pace with the growth in computing power but I don't see why you guys chose to use vRam instead of number of processor cores.
Posted by: Steve | 08/03/2011 at 07:00 PM
In less years than expected we will work with "ramclouds" just to satisfy performance and flexibility needs. So the license strategy to use vRAM makes absolutely sense for me. The market penetration with this new license model depends on the ratio SMB/enterprises in a country and on the maturity of the IT. Here in Switzerland we have a lot of SMB companies - this would make it more difficult - however the higher affinity for IT in common sense plays together with the high maturity of VMware products. Therefore I personally think that we will speak with customers more about transition, based on the VMware cloud suite with vSphere 5 and co, than speaking about licensing costs.
With that said, it's clear there is always room for other products.
Of course every company wants to get more for their money spend in IT, but the main cost driver as customers tell us is not licensing, but the costs to increase the know-how internally and the right-sized transition of the systems. Good, robust, well-spread virtualization and cloud know-how is a main factor if a company grows or not. The more the "war of talents in the IT area" will get worse, the more SMB companies will loose their flexibility and strength.
To come back to the discussion: Most of our customers are companies between 100 - 500 employees. We have talk with them about their business and to align that with internal and public cloud services. The discussion will not be about 20 or 30 Kilo Dollars, Euros or Swiss Francs for the SMB licenses - it's the future of that particular company we must help to form.
Posted by: DCasota | 08/04/2011 at 12:35 AM
"The price model still simply doesn't work for hosting companies"
Check out VSPP for this.
Posted by: Ben | 08/04/2011 at 01:07 AM