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SuperSpike
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vSphere 5 Licensing

I took a minute to read the licensing guide for vSphere 5 and I'm still trying to pull my jaw off the floor. VMware has completely screwed their customers this time. Why?

What I used to be able to do with 2 CPU licenses now takes 4. Incredible.

Today

BL460c G7 with 2 sockets and 192G of memory = 2 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses
DL585 G7 with 4 sockets and 256G of memory = 4 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses

Tomorrow

BL460c G7 with 2 sockets and 192G of memory = 4 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses
BL585 G7 with 4 sockets and 256G of memory = 6 vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses


So it's almost as if VMware is putting a penalty on density and encouraging users to buy hardware with more sockets rather than less.

I get that the vRAM entitlements are for what you use, not necessarily what you have, but who buys memory and doesn't use it?

Forget the hoopla about a VM with 1 TB of memory. Who in their right mind would deploy that using the new license model? It would take 22 licenses to accommodate! You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor.

Anyone else completely shocked by this move?

@Virtual_EZ
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hellraiser
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Surely the point of SnS is to be able to upgrade to the next version totally free of charge?  Therefore having to pay any additional cost is effectively paying twice?

It seems some people have been blinded by the strategy VMware has used - they sell a product which already carries a premium pricetag. There is *no* justification for increasing that price by several orders of magnitude. They are posting record profits, they are in no form of financial trouble, yet they want to fleece both new and existing customers purely in the name of greed. This is exactly the kind of thing I would expect from a company run by EMC.

Look at Xen - that is completely free for the standard edition. Even the platinum edition is priced on a per-host basis, so just buy the most powerful host you can and put that on, job done - most of the features of vSphere for a fraction of the cost.

How about Hyper-V?  Most people use datacentre licences for the Windows VMs on their ESX clusters, this way you get the hypervisor for free, with no limitations on future RAM usage. Again, why pay over the odds for a product which is "upgraded" by making you pay more for RAM that you use, even to the point of charging you for RAM that doesn't exist if you overcommit! I'm all for virtualisation, but generating bills for something that doesn't exist is pushing it a little too far. As for the cloud, you can stick that load of pretentious crap where the sun doesn't shine - I don't run a cloud, I run an internal corporate infrastructure and have no need to split costs between departments; if I did, I'd use Citrix....

Sorry VMware, I don't care if your record profits aren't as high as you would like them to be. I'll continue with the licences I have thanks, and any future hypervisor builds will be made on a platform which I can rely on, not one that arbitrarily increases in price because I build another VM, or because the suits at EMC want to buy extra holiday homes.

JD

JD
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jmcar
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depping
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Justin Devereaux wrote:

Sorry VMware, I don't care if your record profits aren't as high as you would like them to be. I'll continue with the licences I have thanks, and any future hypervisor builds will be made on a platform which I can rely on, not one that arbitrarily increases in price because I build another VM, or because the suits at EMC want to buy extra holiday homes.

JD

Don't want to cause a shit storm here, but surely "reliable" is not only measured by the price of a license. I would hope that the product itself and the features it offers has got something to do with it.

Duncan

Yellow-Bricks.com

vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive - eBook | Paper

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hmtk1976
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No they did not listen.  RAM still is tied to the vSphere edition you buy. If you've got an environment with Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licenses you've got THREE vRAM pools.  This takes away a lot of flexibility.  They should have simply gone for a per CPU license without vRAM/pRAM and make you pay for the features and pay SnS.  For vRAM/pRAM they should have offered blocks of RAM that can be used without being limited to a single edition.  SnS for RAM blocks would have been idiotic (but that's a word that comes to mind easily when thinking of VMware these days) because RAM usage will always increase which would mean that you'd have to keep on buying RAM blocks and pay SnS for them.  This would make it extremely expensive a few years from now.  VMware doesn't even offer a roadmap of how licensing will evolve.  Will we get more vRAM/pRAM with the next revision of vSphere in the current licensing scheme?  What about the next major release?  No news whatsoever.  They just hit is with a really big sledgehamme a few weeks ago and now they expect us to be happy they're only using a baseball bat now.

Now they're also saying how wonderful that 96 GB cap is so 1 TB RAM VM's are not not nearly as expensive but they're just taking one extreme example to make their point.  There are loads of VM's between 4 and 96 GB whose RAM will count fully.  Say I've got a Proliant DL360 G7 with 384 GB RAM.  Without memory overcommitment I can easily run 24 16 GB VM's.  I'd need 4 Enterprise Plus or 12 Standard licenses to run those VM's.  I think this is more realistic than the silly 1 TB VM that has now become magically cheaper.

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hmtk1976
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Duncan wrote:

Justin Devereaux wrote:

Sorry VMware, I don't care if your record profits aren't as high as you would like them to be. I'll continue with the licences I have thanks, and any future hypervisor builds will be made on a platform which I can rely on, not one that arbitrarily increases in price because I build another VM, or because the suits at EMC want to buy extra holiday homes.

JD

Don't want to cause a shit storm here, but surely "reliable" is not only measured by the price of a license. I would hope that the product itself and the features it offers has got something to do with it.

Duncan

Yellow-Bricks.com

vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive - eBook | Paper

I think Justin means that VMware isn't a reliable partner anymore.  The licensing change in vSphere 4 left existing Enterprise users in the cold by introducing Enterprise Plus.  Now this.

VMware should remember VHS - Betamax.  Only one example where the best technology didn't come out the winner.

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depping
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hmtk1976 wrote:

No they did not listen.  RAM still is tied to the vSphere edition you buy. If you've got an environment with Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licenses you've got THREE vRAM pools.  This takes away a lot of flexibility.  They should have simply gone for a per CPU license without vRAM/pRAM and make you pay for the features and pay SnS.  For vRAM/pRAM they should have offered blocks of RAM that can be used without being limited to a single edition.  SnS for RAM blocks would have been idiotic (but that's a word that comes to mind easily when thinking of VMware these days) because RAM usage will always increase which would mean that you'd have to keep on buying RAM blocks and pay SnS for them.  This would make it extremely expensive a few years from now.  VMware doesn't even offer a roadmap of how licensing will evolve.  Will we get more vRAM/pRAM with the next revision of vSphere in the current licensing scheme?  What about the next major release?  No news whatsoever.  They just hit is with a really big sledgehamme a few weeks ago and now they expect us to be happy they're only using a baseball bat now.

Now they're also saying how wonderful that 96 GB cap is so 1 TB RAM VM's are not not nearly as expensive but they're just taking one extreme example to make their point.  There are loads of VM's between 4 and 96 GB whose RAM will count fully.  Say I've got a Proliant DL360 G7 with 384 GB RAM.  Without memory overcommitment I can easily run 24 16 GB VM's.  I'd need 4 Enterprise Plus or 12 Standard licenses to run those VM's.  I think this is more realistic than the silly 1 TB VM that has now become magically cheaper.

Have you ever seen any vendor offering a roadmap of how licensing will evolve? The changes made were caused by the loud voice of the community / customers. Saying that VMware doesn't listen is just not right. I can understand your frustration but you also need to keep in mind that there are two sides to this. Lets be honest, removing pRAM / vRAM / Cores would mean the price of the license would need to go up, that would have resulted in a similar response as the above.

You can tweak the numbers to always make it sound bad, and yes you can tweak the numbers to make it sound great. There are also loads of VMs between 2G  and 4GB of memory, which would be roughly 45 VMs on a single host, which is 9 times more than most enterprises run today.

Duncan

Yellow-Bricks.com

vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive - eBook | Paper

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hmtk1976
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Most vendors don't need a roadmap of licensing but we've seen that VMware drastically changes licensing with new product releases so yes, a roadmap would be a good idea.  Especially when they want us to pay through the nose for something that's changing as rapidly as RAM usage.

IMO the cost for the per socket license should have gone down and RAM blocks introduced like I said in my previous post.

Sure there are load of VM's with relatively little RAM but in the next few years many of them will be replaced by VM's with 4+ GB RAM.  VMware seems to think only of now and not of the future.

Let's just agree to disagree because I think our viewpoints differ too much.

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datacenterngp
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even if I have 6 or 12 core cpu, my license cost remains same and it discourages me to go for higher core in my data center. It also makes me difficult to sell the IaaS to the customer with better core.

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mrudloff
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Whether vmware pulled that stunt of changing "their mind" now or not, on purpose, is one thing. Another thing is confidence ... We did hear that some big customer of vmware simply lost the confidence in vmware, wondering if they do that in the future again .... so personally I heard that this was enough for people to move towards Hyper-V ... or at least starting to look into it,.

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chanaka_ek
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Look guys, I was one of the first contributers to this thread when superspike first started it and had already started my own thread about the same (http://communities.vmware.com/message/1804329#1804329) and my issue has always been that the initial vRAM limits were ridiculoulsy low. It was so low that it almost went against everything VMware themselves have been preaching for years (scale up).

Now that VMware have actually listened and doubled the limits, lets take the emotions aside, and have a look at this from a business-man perspective. (sure there is a business man in every one of us)

Facts / What VMware trying to say if you read in between the lines

  • VMware product demand has been pretty high - why?? cos its sh*t hot compared to others. Hence why the increased profits.
  • We live in a capitalist economy = Most of you should know this better... 🙂 (VMware is not based in China now is it??)
  • In capitalism, increased demand = increased prices (see what happens to oil prices??)
  • So with increasing demand over time, you gotta raise the revenue otherwise you are not exploiting the market and loosing out on potential revenue (heck I'd have done this myself, Dont forget ..... the beloved capitalism??)
  • Now VMware has tried to do this with minimum damage to their majority of the customers
  • So rather than increasing the per cpu price (which they easily could have, or even introduced a per-core price), they opted for vRAM model which is also aligned with utility computing = good intentions.... one slight problem....they got their sinitial izing so flippin wrong (unless it was a double bluff)
  • Now they've realised (or for our ego's sake, we've made them realise) that it was wrong and they've addressed it by doubling it. (64GB for ent and 96GB for ent+)
  • They've even capped max vRAM per VM at 96GB which really shows its well meant ( dont complain about not being able to run 128GB VM without paying your dues, I dont think it'll really stand)
  • They've even changed the licensing to be based on the average of pooled vRAM, spread over a year (C'mon, if that is not fair, what is??)
  • So, perhaps if you still want to run the odd monster VM without even paying the cost of a dedicated ent + license, how about switching off all those test / dev / UAT / and all non production VM's (where practical) outside of core business hours to keep the average down, annually ?? (can be automated easily)
  • And they've even increased the vRAM limits per free ESXi to 32GB from 8GB = They didn't have to do that. (If my product was the best in the world by a clear mile, I wouldn't give it away free in the first place) But they have and continue to do so.....with a very sensible limit of 32GB vRAM which meets majority of it's intended purpose (Again, dont forget Vmware is not an opensource freebie)
  • Isn't that fair for their average customers?? I've deployed many non production ESXi (standalone) standalone servers that can continue to benefit from this great product to host non prod VMs within this 32GB size limit ....

I think (atleast in my opinion), this is a fairer model (compared to before). Yes its not as great as it was with vSphere 4, yes we cannot milk vSphere to achieve crazy consolidation ratios like before without paying the tax (in a relatively small number of cases) but its a heck of a lot better than what was initally proposed for vSphere 5.0 and realistically keeps the majority of their customers unaffected.So on that front, kudos to Vmware...better late than never.....!!

This is based on my honest understanding and opinion and as far as Im concerned, all my concerned regarding this new licensing model have now been resolved by VMware. So thanks (and next time, perhaps try getting the decision right in the first place, we had the timemomb issue once and now this, while we are all human, it  probably dont reflect that great for a company of this size when you cant get things right in the first place).

I will stop contributing to this thread now as its served its purpose (for me anyways) and will give my reseller the go ahead for all my planned (and then temporarily stalled) VMware projects.

A little advice to others if you are still complaining about wanting to standardise on one platform but resistent to changes driven by capitalism, you really ought to think about whats best for you...you have few options.

  1. Move to a non-capitalist economy
  2. Accept consequences of the market (where reasonale, by all means shout otherwise) but plan accordingly by not putting all your eggs in one basket or if you really want to, negotiate an acceptable enterprise agreement with VMware that suites your needs.

Dunkan: Better late than never but it would have been even nice had you joined this thread prior to these changes were annouced....

Superspike: You've got enough beers to last you a lifetime now mate.... Smiley Happy well done....!!

Cheers

Chan

P.S. When is vSphere  available for download again??

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mdonovan
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I am now having to look for an alternative to VMWare. It's worked  well here, but this new scheme will double or triple licensing costs,  and that's too much to deal with. My new task is to look at how to  replace VMWare. Shame they brought this on themselves by getting greedy.

Matt

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AaronKratzmann
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I am currently working part time. I am in the office Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. If you require urgent assistance please contact the IT Service Desk on ext 6999. Regards, Aaron

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rbtwindude
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@wuffers

I may put some together as well. Ill let you know. I haven't seen the new entitlements yet but it should be interesting.

Rbtwindude

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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freefall
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From my reading of http://blogs.vmware.com/vcloud/2011/07/update-on-vmware-service-provider-program-vspp.html you don't actually have to set reservations. The system will automatically assume at minimum a 50% reservation.

Lets assume an enviornmnet with 3 servers. Each server has dual sockets with 10 cores each and 256GB of pRAM (physical RAM). If we run a cluster, we can only consume 60% of the RAM on each blade or roughly 153GB. This gives us a total of 459GB available for virtual machines. If you don't set reservations, the way I would read the above blog is you would at maximum need to license 230GB.

Now if that were the case you would require 3 Enterprise+ licenses (if we were not using CPU counts). Irrespective of the size of the virtual machine the most one machine will attribute to your license count is 24GB.

This sounds infinitely more paletable. In this scenario your license count would actually half. (probably why they aren't looking at it Smiley Wink ).

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ClueShell
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  • In capitalism, increased demand = increased prices (see what happens

to oil prices??)

I've stopped reading your post there, its simply not true for software.

Okay you maybe need more people in support BUT THAT is being done in

India anyway!

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odonnellj
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vmware: Thank you for buying our products and paying SnS year after year helping us to grow to what we are today.

customer: no, problem. It's a great product. Just like you promised, I can really load up my servers and reduce my costs.

vmware: Yeah, about that. We're going to charge you double for the next free upgrade.

customer: What!? That's outrageous. After all these years, you're going to pull a stunt like that? With all the other options out that already cost significantly less than vmware's? I'm going to have to start looking at our future technology plans.

vmware: Hold on, give us some time to

customer: (starting to evaluate Xen/Hyper-V for the first time ever)

vmware: We've listened to your feedback! We're only going to charge you 50% more for the next free upgrade.

vmware [what they want to hear]: Awesome! Thanks for listening and making such great consessions.

customer [what is really happening]: (deploying free Xen servers to host new project requirements)

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GVD
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DSeaman wrote:

In fact VMware makes a strong case why allocated vRAM does not make sense and why basing it on reserved pRAM is more appropriate. I agree..just too bad we can't use the same, more logical IMHO, model.

Reserved RAM is commonly used for shared deployments when leasing/renting VMs to customers, but when you're using it for internal purposes only, you rarely use reservations, except for the most crucial VMs. As such, reserved RAM will be fairly low in most SMEs, and VMWare isn't about to let that piece of the pie have a free lunch. Smiley Wink

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hmtk1976
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@ ChanEK

- VMware was first and built a large cusomer base.  A lot of them stay(ed) with them not only because VMware has good products but also because of momentum.  They're products may be sh*t hot but a hot sh*t licensing scheme may turn that momentum away.

- In a capitalist economy people and companies buy what is cost effective.  If a given price is too high, demand will decrease.

- If you sell more for the same price you make more money.  If you sell more and charge an insane premium for a product that has strong competitors people will stop buying your product.

- Who says this licensing does minimum damage to the majority of their customers?  The company that's raising prices?  The customers seem to beg to differ.  Loudly.

- Per core pricing would work even less than vRAM pricing.  CPU's change even faster than the amount of RAM our VM's use.  IMO limiting the corse to 6 or 12 in vSphere 4 was already a bad idea.

- Oh wow, they doubled the vRAM allotments because they're so nice.  Not because the had planned for this.  Sure..

- We never had to pay more to run a 128 GB VM and now all of a sudden we do.  We paid our "dues" we we purchased licenses and SnS but now VMware wants to punish us for using their product as they advertised.

- Capped vRAM usage at 96 GB per guest.  So?  We still need to buy 2 Enterprise Plus licenses for running one (1) VM.  How"s that for value?

- Switching VM's on and off because silly licensing makes it too expensive to work in a normal way is not feasible.

- 32 GB for ESXi is still not enough.  The free ESXi isn't better than Hyper V server or XenServer.  It's just a hypervisor.  But it was nice to have at home and at work to run tests on and get basic acquaintance with it.  Now I'm going to do the same with XenServer.  I'd have thought that they would give a version to VCP's without crippling vRAM.

You talk about us milking VMware.  It's the other way around.  We paid so they could develop a solid product but now they increase prices with ridiculous amounts and they want us to become accountants simply to follow their crazy and unwieldy vRAM scheme.  No thanks.

I'm happy to live in a capitalist economy.  Makes switching to a product that's better suited to my needs easier.

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scowse
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tom11011 wrote:

Dear VMware Partner,

On July 12, 2011, VMware announced our new Cloud Infrastructure Suite. The launch featured vSphere 5, the newest version of our flagship product.

As many of you know, as part of this announcement, we introduced changes to the vSphere licensing model in order to align costs with the benefits of virtualization rather than with the physical attributes of individual servers. While our goal was to provide a licensing model based on consumption and value rather than physical components and capacity, we strived to make the new model as non-disruptive as possible.

These changes generated much debate in the blogosphere, in conversations with our partners and customers, and across VMware communities. Some of the discussion had to do with confusion around the changes. We have been watching the blog commentaries carefully, and we have been listening to the partner and customer conversations very intently. A great deal of feedback was provided that examined the impact of the new licensing model on every possible use case and scenario, and equally importantly, reflected our partners’ and customers’ intense passion for VMware.

Our success depends on the active involvement of our channel partners. We are a company built on partner and customer goodwill, and we’ve taken your feedback in earnest. Our primary objective is to do right by our customers, so we are announcing three changes to the vSphere 5 licensing model that address the most recurring areas of your feedback.

• 

We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. This change addresses concerns about future-looking business cases that were based on future hardware capabilities and the previous vSphere licensing model.  Below is a comparison of the previously announced and the new vSphere 5 vRAM entitlements per vSphere edition:


vSphere edition

Previous vRAM entitlement

New vRAM entitlement

vSphere Enterprise+

48 GB

96 GB

vSphere Enterprise

32 GB

64 GB

vSphere Standard

24 GB

32 GB

vSphere Essentials+

24 GB

32 GB

vSphere Essentials

24 GB

32 GB

• 

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.

Finally, we introduced the vSphere Desktop edition to address vSphere licensing in a desktop environment. The vSphere Desktop edition does not have any vRAM entitlements, and allows customers to purchase vSphere for VDI use case on per user basis. Our price books are being updated and will be distributed shortly.

We are confident that our vSphere 5 licensing model based on pooled vRAM is the right one for the cloud computing era. We are fully committed to meeting our partners’ needs, and have several resources on Partner Central available to help you and your customers understand and calculate how the new licensing model applies to existing environments. We also have a vmLIVE session available for replay as well as an additional vmLIVE session on August 10th.

We would like to hear from you about this change; please join the conversation on our Partner Blog.

Thank you for your continued passion in our mutual sucess and partnership.

Bogomil Balkansky
SVP, Product Marketing, Infrastructure Product

Hmmm....trotting out Bogomil with his well rehearsed and dare I say premeditated spiel of weasle words may appease the sycophantic bloggers whose very livelihoods relied on this ignominious backflip but not me!

"in order to align costs" = price gouge

"generated much debate" = outraged indignation and rebellion

"Some of the discussion" = threats of law suits

"confusion around the changes"= sense of betrayal

"A great deal of feedback"= abusiveness

"intense passion for VMware"= deserting in droves

"objective is to do right"= but not straightaway

"announcing three changes"= backflip with three pikes

"recurring areas of your feedback"= persistent threats to leave

Thre is no mention of the free version which in my opinion has done more to attract users to virtualisation and VMW than the rest of the packages combined. Whist this may not have contributed directly to the overflowing coffers it certainly had the effect of keeping people away from the competion, gave them (the users) time to get used to the idea of paying eye-watering prices for licenses and the priceless benefit of recruiting an army of VMW evangelists.

Bogomil and his cadres are still well in charge and think that they are on top of it all so forget the frog at your won peril.

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rjb2
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GVD wrote:

.... and VMWare isn't about to let that piece of the pie have a free lunch.Smiley Wink

Speaking of the "free lunch", there was a lot of discussion about how unfair the entitlements for the free version of ESXi were, but there doesn't seem to be many kudo's now for the 4x increase on that version - 8GB to 32GB.

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