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VMWare Screw Customers
- jjm 15y agoThis is a mean price increase.
- Andys 15y agoIts easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.
- jjm 15y agoWow, I never saw it that way. Brilliant move for the books though. But I guess if your box needs 24GB then you probably have cash no?
- Despite 15y agoTo me, 24GB per cpu seems very low for a VM host.
- nodata 15y agoReally? Per 10-core cpu or per core?
- Despite 15y agoBy my reading of this pdf, each physical CPU requires a license and each license allows for 24-48GB of guest ram. It seems they're specifically trying to limit licensing by vRAM, rather than CPU because there are more cores in CPU's now. http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf
- spydum 15y agoReally? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time. Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).
- Despite 15y agoTo be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores. But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.
- wmf 15y agois 24GB vRAM per license low? Several people have calculated that a vSphere license costs much more than the RAM itself.
- i2o 15y agoMemory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.
- CrLf 15y agoThose "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see what pain is).
- IamBren 15y agoYep - we just bought 54 x 8GB DDR3-1333 Registered DIMMs for about 10K, and we can sell the 54 x 4GB modules we are replacing for about 2-3K on eBay. But since this is a VMware cluster, now I have to scramble to see what this is going to cost me in additional licensing before I upgrade. :(
- gaius 15y agoYou can buy a 24G PC from Dell's website now, it's nothing exotic anymore.
- justincormack 15y agoBut the new wave of public cloud computing is not generally running VMWare's product, as it is too expensive; eg EC2 runs on Xen... they are doing better from the private cloud people who are less concerned about using commodity open source software.
- SRSimko 15y agoYour assertion that VMware is too expensive is just plain false. The company I work for (Virtacore) offers vCloud Express and we have come to great terms with VMware and our pricing reflects that. While we don't have all the features EC2 offers (because we are only a couple months old and still building out the product) we feel they are extremely expensive. IMO they like to nickel and dime users while we keep it very simple.
- SnowLprd 15y agoIn our experience, vSphere is indeed too expensive relative to the value it provides. We ended up much better off implementing a KVM-virtualized cluster that cost us nothing in licensing, allows us to keep Windows out of our cluster entirely, and frees us from fiscally onerous license changes such as the sudden vSphere 5 price increase that spawned this thread.
- SageRaven 15y agoThis is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days. I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion. A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop. Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs. P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!
- glhaynes 15y agoWould open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a few extra bucks. Hard for me to get outraged.
- hvs 15y agoThere's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.
- wilhil 15y agoAgreed... Only real enterprise alternative is Hyper-V - I have used it quite a bit and do like it, but, I just don't feel as happy using it as I am ESX. Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs. Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.
- jjm 15y agoI think Oracle does something similar and we all know how that went... they're huge and have lots of cash... "Enterprise/Big Corp" will buy anything with the right sales person. http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Licensing#Enterprise_Edition_Per-core_licensing http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Licensing#Enterprise_Editi...
- Duff 15y agoMicrosoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time. In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with their Unix workstations. Windows NT in comparison kind of sucked -- but over time the suckage was not enough to justify paying $20,000 for a workstation versus $8k for a NT Workstation. Ditto SQL Server. Back when I was a newbie Informix DBA, my older colleagues laughed at people messing around with SQL Server. Informix was an awesome product in many ways, but cost like $40,000/cpu when SQL Server cost alot less. Who's laughing now?
- bshep 15y agoOn the original page's comments some people mention it might even be cheaper to buy hardware instead of licenses, anyone have a take on that? Example: a) 1 x Large Server + VMware licenses -or- b) N x Small Servers If b) is more cost-effective then VMWare definitely dropped the ball here...
- spydum 15y agoCheaper? Maybe -- but people like VMWare for the management interface and often the other addions like DRS/HA, vMotion, vStorage. Certainly smaller hosts with DR capability can be done for lower capital spend, but you need more capable admins to manage it. VMWare does that for you out of the box.
- pinko 15y agoMy experience with VMWare is that they do a very good job estimating the TCO of N physical servers and then they charge you such that it's ~90% of that cost to virtualize them. I.e., VMWare is usually a better deal, but just barely. Drives me insane.
- Duff 15y agoMany large enterprises are exceptionally bad at managing physical hardware. And if they are ok at it, they spend obscene amounts of money to do so. One of the key advantages of VMWare from a operational point of view is the management capability, which is either much better than what most people have for physical hardware or much cheaper. Even with this new licensing model, VMWare still offers a positive ROI for a large customer, since that customer would also need to buy more licenses for products like IBM/Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC, etc. Those products are mega-buck, and enterprise customers are/were realizing cost savings by getting rid of them. It's hard to see this from a small/mid-size enterprise perspective. Imagine $2M in recurring licensing charges and $750k in annual consulting expenses for a product functionally similar or inferior to Nagios. Or spending $20M annually on maintenance on software that you don't use. This happens every day in the Fortune 500 and government spaces.
- 15y ago
- patrickgzill 15y agoProxmox.com integrates OpenVZ and KVM virtualization with a decent Web GUI. Might be just the ticket for those not needing all of the ESX features.
- malandrew 15y agoHaving worked with VMware in the past and spent literally millions of dollars in licenses, I had the opportunity to meet lots of VMware employees. My observations is that the company had some very technically brilliant people, but also a lot of people that epitomize the super smart MBA that but naïve MBA that can understand high level business models and financial cleverness, but that are terrible business people because they are completely oblivious to the skill that all great business people have and that is empathy for your customer. This is ridiculous. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I am their customer anymore.
- rfreytag 15y agoVMware has had some significant management changes: http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-to-recent-vmware-ceo-change.html http://managementaschangeagent.blogspot.com/2008/07/update-t... so you are maybe right about the MBA, non-founder thinking at the C-level there. Compare VMware's 20110331 net income to 20101231 net income: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:VMW&fstype=ii - note how it has flattened. Since VMware is public quarterly results are vital to the naive MBA. Said MBA might decide to improve profitability by pushing small customers to cloud services (Amazon) who are already customers of VMware. This also has the advantage eliminating VMware as a competitor to some of VMware's largest customers. ESXi is already free with limitations. This will definitely be the reasoning if we see VMware make workstation free thereby bring even more potential users in.
- sc68cal 15y agoRed Hat and Oracle should start making some sales calls, right about now. They should capitalize on this opportunity to convert some disaffected VMWare customers, and fund software development for migrating off the VMWare stack.
- sciurus 15y agoRed Hat needs to get RHEV 3.0 out the door first.
- bdunbar 15y agoOracle is just as bad, in it's way, with respect to licensing.
- newman314 15y agoActually, worse. I've been involved in a project where we have actually had to change the direction of technology as well as deployment schedule to avoid incurring a massive (think over $100 million) license upcharge.
- chaostheory 15y agoA strong open source alternative is sure to come now.
- wmf 15y agoRed Hat's been working on it for years and they're still years behind VMware. I don't think they could go any faster.
- zem 15y agothey might get a new influx of corporate code contributors thanks to this
- jlawer 15y agoYeah, but its not surprising that converting from a .net codebase to a java code base takes a few years.... they should have just re-written from scratch.... Once RHEV-3.0 is released though RHAT will open source it, so watch the product grow at that point, just like KVM has been growing in leaps and bounds recently. I say that as someone who was part of the RHEV support team at launch.... RHEV 2 was a mistake. Red Hat should never have sold a product that depends on windows. They just don't know how to support it.
- wmf 15y agoIs that what they're doing? I thought maybe the new RHEV manager would be built on oVirt.
- jlawer 15y agoWould you believe I heard something being bandied around about a $200 bit of software that converted c# code to java... and then have the devs fix the 20% that didn't convert.... I kid you not.... There was also talk about bringing in parts of the JBOSS stack... and I am not exactly sure why... but synergy might have something to do with it. RHEV 3 will use more oVirt developed technologies (libvirt, etc) but now they have Enterprise customers who need compatibility for an extended period... so its going to be the ugly stepchild of RHEV2 (aka Qumranet's Product) and oVirt (redhats R&D). I suspect that RHEV is going to be carrying around baggage for a while.
- wazoox 15y agoI know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.
- jjm 15y agoSmall little detail about myself, I helped out in creating a unified driver package for ESXi and wrote a couple custom *nix net drivers for hardware VMWare wouldn't support (cheap commodity hw). So I agree with you that after I had ditched VMware for KVM I was in heaven. Shoutout to those ppl that used my stuff, and try KVM!
- monochromatic 15y ago> I know this is getting old Yes, it is.
- slowpoke 15y agoStill doesn't make it less right.
- ssmoot 15y agoI have two iSCSI Targets. I want to pull a LUN from each, and mirror on the KVM Host system, exposing the mirrored disks for my guests. Compared to using ZFS on OpenSolaris with Xen 3.1, this process is incredibly cumbersome and unreliable. Plus I just don't get the need for libvirt. It seems an incredibly complex and useless abstraction over a simply documented configuration file for Guests, and a tool to start/stop/add/remove them. I'm sure a big part of that may just be that I'm not familiar enough with KVM. Still, it's 2011. Tying all your data to a single host with limited redundancy and depending on live-migration seems like a fundamentally flawed approach to me with a lot of needless complexity.
- rednaught 15y agoLibvirt is not needed to use KVM but the purpose has been to provide stability (and an abstraction as you mentioned) over the changes QEMU has had in various releases. Update: Here's a blog related to your very question that was written just a few days ago: http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libvirt-offer-to-developers-targetting-qemukvm/ http://berrange.com/posts/2011/06/07/what-benefits-does-libv...
- aliguori 15y agoThis is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software. No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project (Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going (LibreOffice). Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that happens to be free, but it's fundamentally better because it is free (as in speech, of course).
- eru 15y agoThere's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.
- zacgarrett 15y agoXenServer is actually the product name from Citrix. Xen is the open source project that is Open Source. I know its being a stickler for the tiny facts, but when you are a XenServer admin find the differences rather quickly.
- eru 15y agoXen is a hypervisor. XenServer is the product name from Citrix which uses Xen underneath. Xen Cloud Platform is actually the name of opensource xenserver. You wouldn't use just Xen as a hypervisor, in most cases. Amazon uses Xen plus their own stuff on top. To make it more complicated, there's also XenClient, which also builds on Xen. It's also mostly open source.
- westajay 15y agoI think the conceptual switch in licensing model is fair.. from cpu-cores to vRAM entitlement.. But the vRAM allocations per license are not right. It puts sysadmins in a real bind.. having to report bad news to mgmt. They need to to the right thing and adjust the vRAM untitlements. Sad thing is.. people are so locked in to VMWare infrastructure that they'll likely make money short term, at the expense of pissing of customers. Oracle plays this game too..
- IamBren 15y agoTheir marketing materials say this is much easier but it doesn't seem easier to me. Right now, we have a three node Enterprise Plus, six CPU cluster. This is six licenses period. Now, I have to track vRAM usage and decide to purchase EP licenses for all available RAM or just go with usage + growth for the year...or something. I'm not sure how that's easier.
- known 15y agoCompanies care about Profits. Everything else is secondary for them.
- hillad 15y agoVMware Customer here. Lots of FUD coming from the community- at first glance it sounds bad, but a lot of us should do the math before getting the pitchfork ready. ( Script to help "do the math" http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/ http://www.lucd.info/2011/07/13/query-vram/ ) We will actually be saving money with the vRAM licensing changes.
- dave1010uk 15y agoIt looks like by changing the pricing to reflect more of the provisioning they're encouraging people to stick more CPUs per guest. I guess the more people are overloading their hardware at the moment, the bigger the license price jump.
- schiptsov 15y agoWhy use proprietary (less tested, less stable) solutions while there is community-tested and community-supported ones? ^_^ People still stuck with a stereotype that most brilliant programmers work for corporations. This is, obviously, not true. Most of corporations outsource their R&D and QA and spend for marketing instead. That is a very common strategy. Now tell me - how this strategy correlates with a quality of a code or services? ^_^ Oracle vs. MySQL is a very good example - high quality community code is usually much better and well tested. (hint: it is about comparing the code quality, not a feature lists) Being attached and depended (that is exactly what their marketing department is for) or not is your own choice. In some cases, like SAP, there is no community-supported alternatives, but it this case there is more than one. Some people could say that we really need all those modern features, such as iscsi per lun mirroring, etc. But it is exactly this code is less tested and lower quality. One cannot compete with Linux (Ubuntu/RHEL/CentOS) communities in matters of testing and code quality. No code is better tested than those included in mainstream kernel or a polular distribution.
- dave1010uk 15y agoHas anyone had any experience with VMware's products being untested or unstable? I've heard annectodally that VMware's hypervisor is miles ahead of the others in terms of performance and useful features. Does anyone have any info on this?
- bostonvaulter2 15y agoI've found that vmware's vsphere is much better than KVM. I'm not sure about the performance but in terms of useful features and a nice interface vmware is much better. I still need to try Eucalptys sometime.
- schiptsov 15y agoI have seen crashed ESX servers with unreadable error messages while no information or support except PR and forums full of new users trying to convince themselves they did right choice. (post-purchase rationalizations).
- 15y ago
- tcarnell 15y agoVMWare have started Screwing their Customers? Thats quite a diversion from virtualized operating systems. Does it scale?
- abalashov 15y ago+1 for making me spit out my drink in a hearty chortle.
- hm2k 15y agoDid anyone else see this? http://i.imgur.com/5OyW7.png http://i.imgur.com/5OyW7.png