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What are the pros and cons of VMware's new licensing model?
I've seen a number of discussions on VMware's new licensing model, which was announced yesterday. If you're interested in learning their reasoning behind this change, they've outlined it here. Who will feel the most pain from VMware's new licensing model? Who will gain the most from this change?
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3 Answers
VMWare will gain the most. :)
The changes bring in a few nice features at the high-end, and potentially a better ability to track costs (especially for service providers and larger enterprises doing chargebacks), but it will make things costlier for many.
Smaller and mid-sized businesses who have heavily invested in virtualization, and whose workloads are not CPU intensive, will be the most impacted, because they are likely to have fewer hosts with more RAM.
This will drive them to greater use of ESXi or Hyper-V or XenServer, for those who don't *need* to make use of some of VMWare's higher end features.
It almost seems as though VMWare is aiming more at the very high-end and service provider market, vs the SMB and mid-range market.
This is just the reaction of VMWare realizing what the end users have known for a long time. VMWare is much more efficient at the processor level than anyone would have guessed. In systems with a single quad core processor and 32 GB of memory, you will run out of memory well before you will run out of CPU cycles. Their own processor efficiency was/is potentially impacting their per CPU sales as physical hosts are being purchased with very few processors and huge amounts of memory.
This is simply a very transparent way for VMWare to keep their licensing revenue up as the technology matures. VMWare is by far the one who gains the most. There is a small gain in simplifying licensing and anyone who has looked at a VMWare price list will appreciate that for a few minutes.
Significant downsides to VMware’s licensing model are its complexity and lack of scalability. This is an advantage for other virtualization/private cloud providers like Microsoft. VMware private cloud solutions are licensed by either the number of virtual machines or the virtual memory allocated to those virtual machines – charging you more as you grow. Microsoft private cloud solutions are licensed on a per processor basis, so customers get the cloud computing benefits of scale with unlimited virtualization and lower costs – consistently and predictably over time. This means that the ROI for a private cloud built with Microsoft solutions increases as the workload density increases. With VMware, the customer’s cost increases with their workload. – Crystal Bedell (http://goo.gl/9dKsm)
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