After Complaints, VMware Revises VSphere 5 Licensing

msmoriarty writes "Three weeks after IT shops began complaining loudly that the licensing changes with vSphere 5 would cost them significantly more, VMware has revised the requirements (although not as much as some users would like)."

Re:Hi Lazyweb! Alternatives?

[DuckDodgers]

I never used one of the commercial products for virtualization. We were constrained to $0 for the software budget for virtualization, so we toyed with VirtualBox and KVM on Linux. Our development machine was not on a UPS, and over the course of a few weeks we had the occasional 20 second power outage in the building. Some of our VirtualBox images were corrupted by the outage, the KVM images were not, and that was enough to put us onto KVM for production (even though our production servers are of course on UPS with a backup generator). It's possible whatever problem we had with VirtualBox has been fixed in more recent versions or that we misconfigured the storage settings, I don't know. But KVM was more reliable without any tweaking right out of the box, so we went with that.

KVM supports live migration and live storage migration, although we have not used either feature. The virt-manager GUI you can use with KVM is easy enough - create, clone, start, stop, change settings, and view and interact with the virtual machines all with clicks in the GUI. I'm sure VMWare has earned its impressive reputation, but free is always nice. Good luck.

Re:Typical EMC Licensing Scheme

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither are their customers. Many have budgets to stick to, and cant just throw bags of money around becasue "VMware said we had to"...