Rethink IT

VMware becoming greedy and taking the customers for granted. This will only help other players and I too thinking of alternatives

96GB of RAM for Enterprise+ is not enough. Its a drop in the bucket. In fact in the few months since this announcement, 96 is laughable. I just put 16GB in my home desktop and you're telling me that 96GB is the limit for an ENTERPRISE PLUS license. Totally absurd. In another 6 months this licensing is going to look like the stone age.

I've been installing a lot of vSphere servers the last couple of years. This new license model will lead a lot of customers to other vendors, including me. I am looking at QEMU/KVM and OpenQRM right now, and VMware will soon be forgotten. VMWare guys, be smart: make ESXi open-source and market a commercial version for enterprises.

It's like VMware has no idea how people were using it's product OR they want to send more business to Microsoft?

They way i see this is that VMware will definitly loose lots of clients to Microsoft, I cannot believe this stupid changes on licences. After been with VMware with almost 8 years now, they may also loose sales to Canadian Federal Government because they currently drastic cost review and they may decided to go with Microsoft so much cheaper for the new IT Infrastructure departement that will have 8000 employes from each departtement.
VMware is definitly the greatest product but at what cost....

Investigating Hyper-V with VSS2010 Lab Manager. If it works out even reasonably well VMware will probably go away for us. It hurts me to even think that. I love VMware so much, but this new model is just not going to work for us. This is like the Netflix price change, but for corporate users. Take something that everyone loves and then offend every loyal customer. Sad.

Still think the current entitlements are quite low.

Most virtual servers have 4-8G now. 1 CPU, with 6 cores can pretty much run 8-10 of those servers.

Not to mention it pretty much still bites with memory sharing, if all the servers are running the same OS, you'll be using *much* less physical ram than assigned virtual RAM. But you pay for the assigned virtual RAM, not the in-use physical RAM.

We pretty much don't have issues with the 32GB limit on standard *today*, in 6-12 months, with current RAM increases and prices of RAM dropping, that will be a whole different story.

We are now looking very hard at Xen to replace our entire Vmware environment.

Every one of our hosts has 128G of ram or more.

We would need to buy an additional 10 licences and to be frank that is a very good reason to look elsewhere.

I understand the need to protect revenue. Licensing on CPU only isn't enough to do that. If I were VMware I'd licensing on a combination of CPU and RAM, too.

Unfortunately the new licensing has been implemented in an inconsistent way: pCPU + vRAM

Executives in my organization are perpetually confused about the new licensing. I believe it's the inconsistency.

I'd prefer pCPU + pRAM. I'd accept vCPU + vRAM.

We just Invested over $17K in VMware Licensing for our business (June 2011). Based on our hardware, we calculated, we need upgrade to v5 will cost us an additional $19K. Not possible. We will switch to another v solution. Not happy about it.

There is one major problem with Hyper-V... IT'S A MIRCROSOFT PRODUCT! You should calculate the increased costs for maintaining it, not to mention the increased stress on IT which will affect the moral of the company in general, leading to staff retention problems, etc.. If you have to switch, go open source. Going to Microsoft for the reasons mentioned (vendor lock-in + profiteering, etc.) is a sign of insanity.

This is what happens when you build an enterprise solution on a single source proprietary product. Did anybody NOT see this coming? Go find your open systems hats, people.

Crazy... I have 5 servers with 4cpus and 512 gb ram each...and 12 other 128 gb servers... 40 Enterprise licenses in all. Now I have to spend double just to run the same thing. We are already starting a pilot on Hyper-V with plans to find another solution in the next 18 months.

As with many other posters I can say that our company followed VMWare's earlier direction of building hosts to run as many VMs as possible to cut down on power, heat, floor space costs, etc, and now we're going to be HEAVILY penalized for it with the new licensing model (which, BTW, we will NOT be opting into, VMWare. Hyper-V, here we come.) I spent $4000+ of my own money becoming VMWare certified and now I count that as money lost since very few companies will continue forward with VMWare no matter how superior their products are. I don't fault VMWare for wanting to raise licensing fees by a reasonable amount but this model (even at the new memory block sizes) will quadruple our costs. There are other mature virtualization solutions we can switch to to obtain a reasonable level of data center operation.

I think even if VMWare pulls the memory limits in the 5 model many people will leave since this gesture smacks of profiteering and in this time, the money handlers hate that risk. The IT grunts don't make the final call, VMWare. It's always the money people and this they will not accept.

So many negative waves...

It's obvious that this move was made to stave off the effects of what will be declining revenue. Sorry VMWare, you really need to re-think (again) on the vRAM entitlements, and just simply deal with a short-term loss in projected revenue.

So, perhaps there might be a good compromise solution to this conundrum. Maybe VMWare should eliminate the CPU socket component to their licensing model and go just on vRAM. In addition to this, how about the idea of tripling the vRAM entitlement from what you've just changed it to, VMWare? This may result in a short-term loss in your projected revenue, but you'll end up with happier customers. Additionally, let's offer a different disaster recovery component - how about with the removal of CPU-based licensing, we also remove, or significantly reduce, the licensing cost associated with creating a disaster recovery environment that consists of VMWare hosts? Result: DR environments often times have very few VM's powered on = no vRAM entitlements.

For everyone else, have fun picking my suggestion apart.
Btw, how about making suggestions for improvement rather than just complaining?

We are blown away by this new model and soon will be penalized for being aggressive adopters of VM. Last year, we made huge investment in hardware (VM hosts) and paid premium for servers with very high memory upgrade capabilities. We also paid premium price for 16gb memory modules so we can scale up to more than half TB and get maximum benefit of VM licenses investment and budgeted the projects accordingly.

Now, we will be forced to buy more VM licenses to continue on our aggressive plan. I was told by our rep that, we have a choice not to upgrade but the fact is that we all know that in no time, we will get upgrade prescription for any of the issues on version 4.

We have very strong relationship with MSFT/CTX and have no-choice but get back to the table and explore the options to use VM only in the areas where its absolutely necessary.

Amish

This is still not enough.
We are running 3 servers, with 96GB pRAM each, under vsphere 4.1 essential.
Now imagine how much more would be the cost when as example we have 30 VM with 10GB vRAM.
actual i can run such a setup without paying more under 4.1. The upgrade to 5.0 will require me to buy a lots of licenses.
No way. vsphere has kicked themselve out of the market for SMB.

This is still pretty awful.... I was just talking to my rep how much I love VMware then bam this crap. Even the new limits suck let alone the old ones were nightmare. Yes many of us are using 192-256 GB of RAM on our blades/standalone servers. You are now making us pay a ridiculous amount mount per server than we already pay.

You would think that VMware was just purchased by Microsoft with these antics. In these times of shrinking IT budgets and austerity this is just adding Insult to Injury.

I had counted on VMware for the future deployments of workstation virtualization and continuation of my server virtualization initiatives. I can see that it is time to look to other vendors.

There is a difference to paying more for improvements and additional capabilities. It is something else to pay more to do maintain the status quo. Too little too late.

VMware you have screwed the pooch this time.

Why don't they change the license model so that you can at least address the same amount of memory then on ESX 4.1. for a 2 socket system.

Or create a license model that is based on the number of virtual CPU"s and get some real word number of VM's that can run on a dual socket machine let say between 25-50 / vCPU for a license

I agree with many posters here that the vRAM limit is way too low, considering how cheap RAM is these days. We can easily purchase a server with a high amount of RAM for a reasonable price, but we get hit with a huge license cost from EMC for VMware.

This really shows how EMC appreciates its customer base by raising its prices.

So I am still confused.... We have to now pay for each VM based on the amount of vRAM per VM, rather than the amount of pRAM on the host machine? So for each time I want to spin up another VM, I have to pay again to use that vRAM?

Missed the mark. VMware since its inception has been pushing the value of the raw hypervisor lower and lower by showing how to accomplish the virtualization in hardware. The value of VMware lies with the management of VMs. Most of the newer features (srm...) are licensed by groups of vms which makes more logical sense and scales based on usage. The new licensing model incents people to stay on prior versions and if going to the newest version to utilize less expensive hardware. It makes little sense to tie back to hardware when the product is suppose to enable the use of less hardware.

I agree with posts above, with a 32GB limit on Essentials 4 products why would I would advise my clients to upgrade? It will cost more money. The Essentials market is for SME's who cannot afford the Enterprise licenses to begin with. I feel this is a big rip off and I'm very dissapointed and will be looking to change over if this isnt rectified. All future business will go through alternative Hypervisors...

Some improvement...

License vRAM allocations are still too low. I now either have to purchase 4.5 licenses per server of Ent or upgrade to E+ and purchase 3 copies per server. Nine licenses for 3 servers... troubling

The modern blade server can carry 256GB of RAM. So how about Ent 128GB, E+ 256GB? The disconnect is VMware waited too long to make the shift to this pricing model, it should be introduced in line with modern server capabilities, not the ones I bought almost 3 years ago.

Can you again tell me again how that's a great deal, I missed something?

Long live V4.1 and Citrix - let's start talking.

I was about to jump into a VDI initative with VMware, but am now seriously re-considering my options. I don't want to get raped on a View V5 upgrade when that comes out. Fool me once, shame on you......