Earlier this month VMware announced a new pricing scheme for vSphere that immediately raised the ire of many customers. VMware has now revised its pricing scheme again, this time increasing the per-license entitlement for vRAM, which should help customers affected by the earlier change contain costs.
VMware shifted the basis of pricing from CPU cores to vRAM, which some customers expected would triple costs even though VMware claimed it would simplify and reduce costs. One commenter in the VMware forums wrote “You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor.”
The new vRAM entitlements are as follows:
VMware also made the following changes:
- 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.
Note that the caps are per VM, not per vRAM pool. So those building “monster VMs” out of a large pool of vRAM would only need one license, but someone building a dozen VMs using a pool of 192GB of vRAM would still need two Enterprise Plus licenses (unless those dozen VMs used less than 96GB on average).
For those facing price hikes, this should drastically reduce the amount of those hikes or possibly result in savings. Even for those still facing price hikes, those increases may not be enough to justify moving to another hypervisor system.
Disclosure: VMware is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor
