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Virtualization Software IT

VMware Back-Pedals On vRAM Scheme, Back To Per-Socket Pricing 70

Posted by timothy from the old-ways-is-best-ways dept.
Last year VMware introduced a complex pricing scheme based on the size of the memory associated with each virtual machine instance. New CEO Pat Gelsinger announced this week that this system (which he described as "a four letter word") has been deprecated, and VMware is back to more straightforwardly charging per physical processor. Adds reader hypnosec: "Pricing hasn't been announced yet but a file [PDF] present on VMware's site does give an indication about the new pricing."
Update: 08/28 17:18 GMT by S : Updated the headline and summary to reflect that the price is per processor, not per core.
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VMware Back-Pedals On vRAM Scheme, Back To Per-Socket Pricing More

VMware Back-Pedals On vRAM Scheme, Back To Per-Socket Pricing

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  • i have lots of bitcoins

    • Well, I hear they take Canadian currency. That's definitely not REAL money.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        It is now as it's worth more than American. With seemingly the inmates running the asylum now down there I expect the gap to get worse for you guys. THE MIGHTY CANUCK BUCK!

  • Isn't that per socket, not per core? (Score:5, Informative)

    by hawguy ( 1600213 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @11:37AM (#41150755)

    The summary says this:

    VMware is back to more straightforwardly charging per physical processor core.

    But I think they mean per socket. (or maybe per physical processor, but not per core)

    • timothy needs to l2RTFA, which states:

      per-CPU licensing, with no restrictions on the available cores per processor or the physical RAM per machine.

    • Yep, reading the linked PDF. "For this example, a user has two 2-CPU (each with 6 cores) hosts with 128GB of physical RAM each that they wish to license with VMware vSphere Enterprise edition. Each physical CPU requires a license, so four VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise licenses are required. No additional licenses will be needed regardless of the number of virtual machines, amount of virtual memory (vRAM) or physical cores or RAM."

    • VMWare's PDF indicates no limit to the number of cores per socket, and no limit to the RAM per host.

      Hooray! Ive been using the 4.1 free hypervisor for some clients because of RAM limits, but with this, vSphere 5 is now viable!
      This really is great news for anyone trying to figure out if they needed to move to HyperV or Xen (at least, assuming you like working with vSphere).

      • Wait, you're using free vmware and your client's vm's have more than 32 gigs of ram? I'm hoping that's against your best recommendations to the client (and maybe they're cheap bastards). Otherwise that's retarded.

        • Re:Isn't that per socket, not per core? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:09PM (#41151379)

          Not really. Sometimes there just isnt a budget for multiple machines, and it is better to start by consolidating old Windows 2000 systems off of incredibly old hardware onto newer hardware.

          If the budget ever arises, we can quickly set up a full vSphere environment and migrate guests around; but there is a place for virutalization even if you cannot afford a SAN or any of the HA/DRS stuff. By consolidating, we have removed a lot of bad hardware and massively lowered switching and UPS requirements, which is incredibly helpful in this instance. The vSphere client also fits the needs of the customer particularly well, since before he relied on zillions of KVMs.

          I cant go into many particulars, but sometimes youre given a bad network and not a huge budget to work with. Ideally we would have a SAN and at least 3 boxes with Enterprise licensing. We dont have that, but its not the end of the world and I still have a job to do.

          • I cant go into many particulars, but sometimes youre given a bad network and not a huge budget to work with. Ideally we would have a SAN and at least 3 boxes with Enterprise licensing. We dont have that, but its not the end of the world and I still have a job to do.

            No shit. I am looking at a Network with 2 old SCO unix 5 boxes with one just acting as a slaved backup in case of Master failure. A 7 year old windows server 2003 box that is a domain controller. Two 7 year old XP pro boxes with specialized hardware a 2 year old windows server taking care of a PCI compliant CC database, and a brand new server that is fairly powerful just to run as a server for our mobile app. If I were to add a bunch of RAM and a second CPU to the new box add a SAN and a second box just lik

    • http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/pricing.html [vmware.com]

      If you don't want to follow the link.. it clearly states "per processor", which indicates no core limit.

  • And now, we might actually upgrade to v5. Probably.

  • Too late, EMC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by charnov ( 183495 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:05PM (#41151259) Homepage Journal

    Too late, EMC, we have already discovered KVM and are happily running on it.

    • Competition isnt a bad thing, and I rather like that vSphere 5 is now viable (assuming pricing is similar to v4).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      KVM is great technology but what makes VMWare great is the management and tools. It's fairly straightforward and seamless. That's what sells it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        KVM management isn't quite there yet, but libvirt is functional and quite useful even if it isn't as feature-full. It is quite adequate for many tasks and is improving.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 )

      Too late, EMC, we have already discovered KVM and are happily running on it.

      I struggle to believe anyone has "happily" gone from a full vSphere environment to KVM anything.

      ESXi free, maybe.

  • I used to love VMware (Score:3)

    by AdmV0rl0n ( 98366 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:05PM (#41151271) Homepage Journal

    But I don't anymore. They have morphed into a 'giant' that now has a homepage with a million products. And each one comes with 20 price plans, and innumerable gotcha's in licensing terms and have only one interest - squeezing people for more revenue.
    When as far as I could see, ESXi got worse from 4.1 to 5, this only underwrote the problem.

    When I spent some time trying to talk to VMware people, and this was when I was trying to formulate a Hypervisor move at work, because we were SM/E - I can't tell you how disinterested, and in fact off putting VMware folks were. So the company chose HyperV over their product. I'm not a HyperV fan - and I try out different vendors at different times, but appalling lic terms, screw you attitude from their people, and 5.1 actually looking poor meant I lost interest in being a VMware supporter/invoker.

    Since then they did an about turn and decided that in fact, if they lose the tech's and SM/E, they lose the next inbound group of people buying virt - and they started calling and wanting to talk. But damage has been done.

    They still have great tech to be honest, but its being utterly ruined by 'marketing/management' for a lack of better wording, and given so much virtualisation is free these days, I can't see anything but death by a thousand nibbles.

    It used to be that you could onbly really virt stuff their their products, but its simply becoming an untruth. Wether is server, or workstation, other options exist.

    • Re:I used to love VMware (Score:4, Informative)

      by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:16PM (#41151517)

      When as far as I could see, ESXi got worse from 4.1 to 5

      In what way? Better HA, datastore heartbeating, removal of the 2TB-per-datastore limit, DPM, better ways of dealing with RAM contention (page sharing)...
      there are a LOT of ways ESXi got better in version 5. Only regression Im aware of is that the VUM no longer does guest updates, but TBQH who really cares? Just use WSUS or your package manager in Linux.

      • Can't access guest consoles via free browser plugin anymore on Linux.

        • Version 5 introduced a web client accessible from cross-platform (AFAIK) browsers. I dont have too much experience with it as I prefer the Windows client, but from what Ive heard it does most things the full client does, and is being improved greatly in 5.1.

    • True. 5.1 was a definite "disimprovement" - a Microsoft-like "change for change's sake." The company appears to be suffering MBA-itis (i.e. irritation caused by MBAs who think they are intelligent, managing people who actually are).

  • Competition (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    For a while Vmware was the only game in town and it shows. They were running as fast as they could to the "Well, how much you got?" pricing model where they ask for your financial statements and a blank check before they even give you price.

    Now that they're seeing real competition from other Microsoft and other vendors, and cloud services in general, it seems that they're being a bit more reasonable about price.

    At least they have a free product that's great for learning and hobbies. It's great to just have

  • Amazing what competition does (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MoToMo ( 17253 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:15PM (#41151491) Homepage

    To rephrase the headline:

    "VMWare realizes that Hyper-V in Server 2012 is now competitive with vSphere in features; lowers prices in an attempt to lose fewer customers."

  • This is why I use VirtualBox... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RocketRabbit ( 830691 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @12:59PM (#41152571)

    VirtualBox costs a very reasonable $50 if you want to deploy it commercially. It competes well with VMware on features and speed, and is user-friendly enough to recommend to small businesses.

    VMware is expensive, the licenses are confusing, and overall it's just become a gigantic pain in the ass.

    • Re:This is why I use VirtualBox... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bugler412 ( 2610815 ) on Tuesday August 28, 2012 @02:01PM (#41153901)
      EMC purchases a company then that company's licensing becomes confusing, expensive and fragmented?! No way that could happen! /sarcasm
      • Yeah, funny and somewhat true. To be fair though, their licensing has always been a mess, even pre-EMC.

      • EMC's newest strategy appears to be to purchase a company, then retire it and rebrand the products as VMware (with an appropriately confusing massive markup). We just had our helpdesk solution ripped out from under us this way.

    • VirtualBox and VMWare ESXi hosts are 2 different products. If you need a small 1-4 PC environment for testing or coding or whatever, run from a PC or server for free... virtualbox is the way to go.

      For a large enterprise, Virtbox will not cut it. Lack of many of the features that esxi has for centralized data, moving virtual hosts between physical hosts... HA, etc...

      Citrix Xen Server is a nice alternative, but still lacks the maturity of vmware.

      • VirtualBox has long had support for centralized data, moving running virtual machines between physical hosts, HA, etc. In fact, the whole thing can be controlled and scripted from the command line. Last I checked ESXi still had features that can not be accessed thusly.

        Perhaps the 2.x branch of VirtualBox didn't compete with ESXi, but times have changed.

        • Last time I looked at the 'Teleportation' Feature of Virtual Box, it did work, but required quite a bit of work on the admin to prep a new host to receive the Virtual host. IIRC, the new host OS had to have a VM prepared with all settings matching for the Virtual Host to teleport correctly. There were also smaller errors that could be worked around, but still present. It may have matured since then, but I remember it was troublesome.

          I'm a fan of Virtual Box. Don't get me wrong. But when I'm asked

    • Like VMware Workstation or Player.

    • you clearly don't know what you are talking about if you are comparing virtualbox with vmware, especially since we are talking about vmware vsphere and not workstation, virtualbox is fine if you need a vm on your pc but it's absolutely terrible on a server
      vsphere is an OS that acts as an hypervisor not just a software that you can install on an existing os that let's your run a vm

  • These guys are so all over the map, it's amazing. Just like this post. Is anybody actually steering this ship? The only things that outnumber the silly (for the most part) bullet points of new features for each new VMware release, are the times they change the frickin' product names and the details of their licensing. It's like business via improvisation with these guys. Just random shit left and right. And their web site? Holy crap, I think they need more products.... my eyes just glaze over. It is nicely
  • I am on their mailing list as a customer and nearly fell out of my chair laughing today, reading their most recent PHB Ad email.

    It was all about how their latest VCloud offering would OPERATIONALIZE your Cloud, and VDirector would magically train your admins. They even threw in BPM, the only thing the email was missing was any mention of DevOps. They are totally marketing to Management now, and not to the techs.

  • $1,268.00 for the lowest tier offering limited to 32GB RAM, or Xen or KVM with no such limitation?

    Tough decision there.

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