DSTAVERT Wrote:
Charles Braun wrote:
If Brocade came to me tomorrow and said "Hey, you are only allowed to push 2Gb through each port in your 32 port 4Gb fibre switch unless you pay for 32 more ports" they would be shown the door rather expediently.
The new license model is no different. "Hey, you are only allowed to use half or a quarter of the RAM in your server unless you buy 2 or 4 times as many licenses as you needed to operate yesterday"
Same same as far as I am concerned. And VMware may well get the same treatment that Brocade would likely get if they tried that approach.
This isn't the same thing at all. You are perfectly free to use your current licenses as you currently do. This is a new licensing model and going forward if you want to use the new product it will be under the new model. When Brocade has a new fibre switch and you want to use it you need to purchase the new version and all the HBA's, cables, management software etc. at the prevailing rate.
A far better analogy would be if you had a Cisco router that came out of the box with certain capabilities, and you'd been paying your SMARTnet coverage over the years to keep the gear updated, and one day Cisco told you that the new IOS release was on the way, and it would add some nice new features, but the licensing model would change and that in order to support above a certain number of VLANs/VPN clients/routing protocols/etc., you'd need to buy an additional software license to add that capability.
This *is* a substantial price increase on the part of VMware for customers with high density. Let's take a look at the capabilities of the platform: as far back as ESX 3.1, you could have 128GB per host and 64GB per VM, and with 4.0, those numbers went to 1TB per host and 255GB per VM.
So now in order to get (and use) 1TB of RAM on a host, you're going to have to buy a minimum of 21 CPU licenses for a host that might have only required 2 or 4 on previous versions.
In addition, one of VMware's advantages has been the ability to oversubscribe the physical RAM on a host. Now that advantage essentially disappears.
VMware has *very badly* miscalculated, and if they don't quickly back down, they'll find a lot of customers migrating to something else.
If VMware had chosen a larger increment per CPU license, this firestorm would have been minor grumbling. If they'd offered 64GB per CPU on Standard, 96GB per CPU on Enterprise, and 128GB per CPU on Enterprise Plus, most people would be far less angry than they are now. A few people would still be irate, but it would be nothing compared to this level of outrage.
BTW: The first I'd heard about the new release and its new licensing model was yesterday--directly from a VMware guy. I didn't know there was already an outcry brewing over this, but my *immediate* reaction was, "This is a huge increase in price", and I told the VMware guy there was no way customers would stand for this. He conceded that VMware has backed down before when met with stiff customer resistance (remember the planned elimination of the Enterprise license) and that if the outcry was big enough, they might again.
I have a network to run. The last thing I need is to have to spend time "getting help" from third parties so I can "understand the impact on my organization" when I changed nothing. VMware changed their licensing model.