VMWare 5: a consumer victory? Just.

There has been a rather ominous rumbling of discontent towards VMWare as soon as it released it’s new pricing model for VMWare 5 (http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf) with all kinds of accusations of a “VTax” flying around and people talking about jumping ship.

These were no empty threats either; products such as Microsoft’s Hypervisor and Citrix’s XenServer (to name but two) are eager for a share of the market domination that VMWare currently enjoys. With the new pricing model we were, like many others, faced with having to buy more licences to run our VMWare farm should be follow the upgrade path from Version 4 to Version 5.

It’s not as if we are running massive servers either. By today’s standards our dual CPU, quad core, 64GB RAM servers are under-utilised and should have much more RAM in them. However under the original licencing models we would be buying a third licence per server just to keep them running. Even with the changes we are now maxing out our vRAM allowance at 64GB per server so we are going to be looking at upgrades anyway(http://blogs.vmware.com/rethinkit/2011/08/changes-to-the-vram-licensing-model-introduced-on-july-12-2011.html).

Yes it’s better, but with our server’s CPUs capable or running many more VMs we are going to want to put more RAM in them and therefore have to pay more for our VMWare licensing. Ultimately we may choose to move up to enterprise licenses as a cheaper option with more features, perhaps that was what this was about all along…..?