ELA's (Enterprise License Agreements)

[#1]

Has anyone entered into an ELA with VMWare? How has it worked for you?

Our company is investigating the "all you can eat" licensing model. We are trying to determine the tipping point for justifying the up front costs.

can anyone out there tell me what kind of difficulties you had and what you did to overcome them? Thanks.

[Blisstar55]

Bill,

My company has negotiated several ELAs and they are all different. For example, some organizations are consolidation heavy with say a touch of Lab Manager. While others focus on VM grow in a specific area like VDI say for 100 virtual desktops today with plans to be at 700 in 2 years.

As for the upfront cost justification that is easy to justify when you put together the TCO comparision that is built on your growth assumptions and savings from power/cooling, hardware capx, DR, and the typical soft costs associated. We find doing an assessment with tools such as Platespin's PowerRecon or VMware's Cap Planner is a good way to create a baseline and then build your vm growth plans based on where the organization is going to be in the next 3 years.

The more groups you incorporate in your ELA the better. What I mean by that is you'll get more bang for your buck and make that intial upfront cost esier to justify if you've incorporate all the potential solutions areas VMware has to offer. Top of mind are the usuals suspects of server consolidation & containment but don't forget Virtual Desktop Infratructure, Lab Manager if Test/Dev/QA is of importance, and DR/Business Continuance.

I hope this helps.

[wbednarzyk]

Hi Bliss,

Thanks for the reply. I agree that the more internal groups we get involved in the ELA, the more palatable it will become with upper management. We are s-l-o-w-l-y getting there.

We rebranded our P2V initiative as "Datacenter Space/power/cooling recovery project" in order to get the datacenter manager and his chain of command on board with this. The added benefit is that we have a "high power" driving the project and this will hopefully apply the needed pressure on the application teams to work with us as we migrate their servers.

The more physical servers we can eliminate, the more attractive the ELA will become Thanks again.