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VMware Back-Pedals On vRAM Scheme, Back To Per-Socket Pricing
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.
Update: 08/28 17:18 GMT by S : Updated the headline and summary to reflect that the price is per processor, not per core.
i have lots of bitcoins
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)
And now, we might actually upgrade to v5. Probably.
Too late, EMC, we have already discovered KVM and are happily running on it.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
You want all of your companies to have shitty pricing schemes? Prepare to lose customers.
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.
We`re all equal
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 one physical server at home, and simply spin up a linux distro or windows installation whenver you need one. Heck, even my router runs on my vmware box (pfsense - freebsd distro)
No, you can't be Oracle. Not yours.
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."
Sadly, the 'vSphere Hypervisor' (ESXi Free Edition) is limited to 32GB of RAM on the host. It will disable its 'trial' mode if it finds more than that. You'll need to get the Essentials Kit ($500) for up to 3 2-socket hosts to get more than 32GB per host.
Seriously, I have been trying to decide on VMware or Parallels. I used to run both a few years ago and loved VM, but they recently killed my licence key when I upped my OSx. I dont know if my Parallels licence key still works yet. I havn't tried.
For someone that is not going to simply play games, which virtual machine software would you recommend?
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.
Are we buying AMD Opteron 6200 processors from now? 16 cores (for now) with 256 GB RAM.
http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/vsphere/pricing.html
If you don't want to follow the link.. it clearly states "per processor", which indicates no core limit.
For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
you must be new here...
Like VMware Workstation or Player.
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 set up, with pop up menus, but damn, just the sheer number of Products/Solutions... overwhelming really.
I guess you can't blame them though; they need to diversify as their core products become commoditized and commonplace if they wish to stay relevant. More on that below. They just seem unfocussed, throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, almost. Sort of like playing the lottery.
They need a new killer app, plain and simple. And it needs to have a mid-long term strategy and laser focus. I have no idea what that could be.
One thing that's interested me is the virtual desktop angle. It seems like it's been slow on the uptake for reasons such as the cost of the terminal was no different than a PC, plus you also need the back end servers and storage. So really, your costs would increase; why bother? But with the proliferation of cheap ARM/Android devices, it's only a matter of time before there's a $75 palm sized device, with just the right feature set, to act as the terminal: USB for mouse/kbd; HDMI for display, Ethernet, quad A9 clocked up, running a lightweight Linux or Android hosting a VNC/RDP session. These devices already exist, but they're just too slow at this price point at this time. See the Mk802 for reference. The only problem with that device, is it is pretty anemic. Single core A10@1Ghz/1GB DDR2/3; not quite there yet, but still a fun toy. If it had twice the cores and clocks, we'd be talking an almost disposable desktop replacement; just keep your current KVM setup. So another 18 months we should have that power at that price point; if there's a viable open source virtualization environment sporting live vmotion that's a snap to configure, VMware's ESXi/vSphere/VDI goose is cooked.
One thing they could do to make some sure fire bucks for a couple of years at least, and to get their VDI platform standardized, would be to have the aforementioned devices manufactured in quantity to hit a below $99 price point, bundle that with their VDI crap, and get some interest generated. Once the desktop can be replaced with a throw away device, things get very interesting. And so what, you don't get the early adopter tax anymore and in order to generate interest by keeping the device cost low (subsidizing it almost I guess), you forgo that bit of profit on the hardware. But you license a ton more software for a year or two before this setup, too, becomes commonplace & easy to replace with free software.
The Thrill is Gone
To expand on my earlier rambling, what were their core products? GSX Server, then ESX, then ESXi-vSphere combo. These things once seemed almost magical, but now we completely take them for granted. The engines of these products, their hypervisor, have become commodities. The focus has left the hypervisor, though improvements still abound. But hell, they give it away now. The special sauce is vCenter, and everyone's favorite trick: live migration. That right there is really 90% of the magic,and the reason we gladly hand over 5 figures for licensing; the rest is just gravy. The minute there is a free, reliable, easy to set up environment that supports Xen or KVM and live migration, the jig is up on the vCenter special sauce and that cash cow is dry. I give it a year or two. I get there's a lot more to it than just live migration. For instance: storage vmotion. Great trick, being able to live-migrate the VMs disk store; realy realy cool to migrate from the old array to the new one wit
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.
I have one question. If the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture is not in charge of Gundam, then who is?
$1,268.00 for the lowest tier offering limited to 32GB RAM, or Xen or KVM with no such limitation?
Tough decision there.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50