Well looks like vmware is up to is old tricks again. Desperate to make more revenue they baited people in with the ROBO license less than 2 years ago and are now on their newest license model that basically comes across as a bait and switch. When they released ROBO as their response to Hyper-V it was priced very competitively in single CPU SKUs. Then less than a year later they changed the license model to require 10 packs be purchased and now less than a year after that they have switched to a per VM model. WTF!! They bait you in with attractive license model then every few months switch its so it becomes more expensive. On top of that they make these changes and give you less than a month to accommodate them as the old SKUs disappear and you have no option. This time the new license requires that you be at vSphere/Vcenter 5.5 U2 since the new keys do not work in anything older. Under the old model it used to cost us about $30 per VM to deploy 4-6 VMs at a location on a dual socket box, now under the new model it will cost us $120 per VM. Also we are constrained by rigid change control so having to implement 5.5 U2 in order to support new locations is not feasible in a short period and we were waiting for U3 since it is going to have fixes that apply to us. So now I can wait and not deploy any more VMs to my remote locations until U3 is out or I can rush in vcenter 5.5 U2 and update 70 distributed hosts around the country. This reminds me of the vRAM license change that they quickly recalled, and I hope enough of you speak up to your sales teams and voice your concerns to make them reconsider this 4X price increase. vmware wants to know why Hyper-V is in small ROBO locations this should tell them why, I am not spending 4x to do the same thing I was doing the last 18 months just because vmware decided to get greedy. I am regretting the decision to migrate off Hyper-V for our ROBO locations and will stop migrating the remaining 112 sites and instead move them to Hyper-V 2012 R2.
