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Jonas_B
Contributor
Contributor

VMware forcing us to buy SRM Enterprise licenses?

Hi,

We have been using SRM since 1.5 years, and this was prior the Standard and Enterprise licensing packages was available. At that time we bought a 25-pack of licenses, the price we paid was equivalent to todays Enterprise licenses listprice.

To my knowledge sometime during the summer VMware changed the licensing for SRM and created a Standard and a Enterprise option, with the only difference between them beeing that Enterprise is for 75+VM protected. Enterprise is 2x the cost also.

The company im working with is not seeing any need to protect more than 75 vm's in any close future so we are quite happy with Standard-license and thought that we could save some money there.

What we find out is chocking though, our licenses has been converted to Enterprise (without any word from VMware) and we are not allowed to downgrade them. We can't mix Standard + Enterprise in the same installation. One would think that when VMware changed licensing for SRM they would contact current customers and give them the choice to either take 2xStandard or 1xEnterprise per 25-pack licenses allready purchased. Or at the very least give the customers the choice to go either 1xStandard or 1xEnterprise.

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5 Replies
Linjo
Leadership
Leadership

Hi Jonas.

I would recommend to talk to your local VMware Sales-team, they can assist you with this.

// Linjo

Best regards, Linjo Please follow me on twitter: @viewgeek If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".
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Jonas_B
Contributor
Contributor

Hi Linjo,

My information is coming from my local VMware Sales-team.. The question went from Sweden->EMEA office->US Office

What we got back is what i typed in my original post.

/Jonas

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Customers using SRM 4 can either continue using their current version or upgrade to SRM 5.1 if they have current Support and

Subscription contract for Site Recovery Manager.
Since the original purchase was an edition without scale limitation, customers receive the higher end edition - SRM Enterprise. While it is not possible to downgrade at this point, having SRM Enterprise licenses and current SnS means that going forward new features that may be added in SRM Ent (but not Std) would be available to you. In addition, if you grow the environment beyond 75VMs you won't need to upgrade the entire license base.
More info about SRM licensing policies can be found here:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/SRM/VMware-vCenter-Site-Recovery-Manager-FAQ.pdf

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Jonas_B
Contributor
Contributor

Hello Ghab,

Thank you for your reply!

The environment is way beyond 75VM's, however we do not see the need to SRM-protect more than 75VM's in any near future.

What im upset about is that we are beeing force to take the Enterprise license and no option to downgrade or receive 2xStandard packs.

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maytrix0
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Two years later, we're facing this same issue.  I'm not sure why it wasn't a problem earlier, but I guess that's because we have 50 standard licenses so we never needed to make use of the 25 enterprise.  But now we've hit 57 VM's that we want to protect and can't because of this.  I've been given the same answer so far.

I find this complete BS.  It really makes me hope Microsoft comes out with a product equivalent, because everything else we do is available in Hyper-V and will cost us nothing saving us probably about $30k a year.  I'm hoping VMWare can give us a better response than we've had so far, but I'm not holding my breath.  At this point it looks like we'll just have to end up purchasing 25 more standard licenses as that will be the less expensive solution.

VMWare - wake up!  If your customers don't need the enterprise features, let us choose standard!