SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
VMware did not say what the per-VM charges would be on the vCenter add-ons, but did say that the new pricing scheme would go into effect on September 1 and that features would be sold in "VM packs," which means forced bundles. The vCenter AppSpeed and ChargeBack features, which were announced last July, will get the per-VM pricing first, along with Site Recovery Manager. The vCenter CapacityIQ capacity planning tool gets per-VM pricing in late 2010 or early 2011, says Balkansky. It's not clear that vCenter Lab Manager, the VM jukeboxing and staging tool, will get per-VM pricing, but there is no reason why it shouldn't.
Rejiggering entry vSphere tools for SMBs
Just to be consistent with the vSphere brand and to try to wipe out the ESX name from the VMware vocabulary, the freebie ESXi embedded hypervisor (which is used in conjunction with the VMware Go online VM management tool and which was originally intended to be stashed on baby flash drives in servers) is now being called the VMware vSphere Hypervisor. And like the hosted VMware Server (formerly GSX Server) variant of VMware's hypervisor, ESXi is free. ESXi is just the ESX Server hypervisor with the console manager ripped out of it, giving it a more streamlined memory footprint on servers and, significantly, one that could fit on what were relatively skinny flash sticks back in 2007. It was intended to be sold on an OEM basis, but two years ago VMware slashed the price to zero as a freebie counterpunch to free Xen and Hyper-V hypervisors from Citrix Systems and Microsoft, respectively. The product is still free, so a lot of users not only won't care what VMware calls it, and will no doubt still call it ESXi no matter what VMware says.
To continue to compete against XenServer and Hyper-V in the SMB space, VMware has also taken a promotional price on its entry vSphere Essentials packaging and made it permanent. The promotional price, which took effect in March, chopped the price of the vSphere Essentials tool from $995 to $495. The Essentials package provides basic server virtualization for up to three two-socket x64 servers. This is the most popular choice for VMware customers that are virtualizing under 30 applications, according to Balkansky.
One other change in packaging with vSphere 4.1 is that VMotion live migration is now being added to the vSphere Essentials Plus and vSphere Standard editions of the software. (You can get the full scoop on the vSphere 4.1 editions and their features here and a detailed explanation of pricing there .) To get VMotion before, you needed to have vSphere Advanced or higher, with vSphere Advanced costing $2,245 per processor socket. Now, Essentials Plus (which includes ESX Server 4.1, a patch manager, management agents, and high availability and data protection features) has VMotion, too. But don't think it is free. The vSphere 4.0 Essentials Plus cost $2,995 across three machines, but the 4.1 release costs $3,495 across three machines. So you are paying $83 per socket for VMotion.
Ditto for vSphere 4.1 Standard, which now has VMotion unlike its 4.0 predecessor. The Standard Edition is sold on a per-socket basis, and now costs $995 instead of the prior $795. So VMotion costs $200 per socket with this license.
Yes, this was just a clever way for VMware to have a price increase at SMB shops. When you are the industry juggernaut, you can do that.
Bootnote: This story originally said what VMware said in a prebriefing ahead of the vSphere 4.1 launch, which is that the ESX Server 4.1 hypervisor could only span 64 threads in a host machine. But the documentation shows that it can support 128 threads, which it needs to do to run on the biggest Xeon 7500 iron today. ®
COMMENTS
128 cores - 2TB memory, sounds familiar...
How nice of vmware to finally adapt their specs to suit the machines they have been helping develop...
In this case the Bullion server, built by Bull.
specs can be found here : http://www.bull.com/bullion/bullion_specsheet.pdf
Launched back in april, it comes with Esxi embedded for all your virtualization needs, with a particular focus on virtualizing those business critical applications you never dared to virtualize before.
How come every coverage has missed the most important thing in 4.1?
"ESXi is just the ESX Server hypervisor with the console manager ripped out of it"
Actually, starting with the next release after vSphere 4.1, vSphere is actually "ESXi with the ESX Server ripped out of it".
Apparently, VMware is terminating ESX and going for just the ESXi path. I think that's a big deal, and I think a lot of their other big customers will think so too.
Release notes state: "VMware ESX. VMware vSphere 4.1 and its subsequent update and patch releases are the last releases to include both ESX and ESXi hypervisor architectures. Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture."
and
"VMware recommends that customers start transitioning to the ESXi architecture when deploying VMware vSphere 4.1"
IMO this means a substantial part of the article should have been focused differently, but maybe that's just me...
"VMotion? Seriously? Why does that sounds like a name of a toy to me?"
I think you took a wrong turn somewhere...
Re: Milking it as long as they can
Keep up Michael. All of those features have been available on all platforms for well over a year (2 or 3 in some cases).
Xen also has DR capability out of the box which VMware charge $1k per processor for.
System Center Suite costs less than vCenter and vSphere and includes the ability to manage your entire estate including patching (and offline VM patching), building desktop and server images, deploying software, monitoring and managing, DRS/HA equivelants which also monitor app level metrics.
If anything, VMware is starting to drop behind when you look at the bigger picture, and many of the products are shoddy and poorly implemented when you get over the "ooh shiny" factor.
I think you'll find that once all of the lazy consultants (yes, you) actually read the up to date info on alternative products then VMware will not be able to "get away with it".
for the record I'm qualified in all 3 and want to keep my VCPs therefore anon :)
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