I didn’t think they would do this, but Red Hat, along with RHEL 6 introduced some pretty dramatic price hikes.
They seem to have done away with the “unlimited socket” licensing and have at least two tiers – two socket and four socket.
What used to cost $2,499 for Red Hat Advanced Server Premium for unlimited sockets, now costs $6,498 for four sockets, a 260% increase.
That is very Oracle-esque, maybe even worse than Oracle, the biggest hikes I recall Oracle doing was in the 30-50% range. Wonder if there will be any push back from customers.
They don’t seem to mention socket licensing beyond 4 sockets.
I didn’t see anything about Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform for VMware (Unlimited Sockets) which is what I’m using now, (license for 10 systems per license) but did just get off the phone with RHEL sales who said they are dropping that line item and moving it into an unlimited model regardless of which hypervisor you are running.
So in my case I have 2 ESX hosts with quad sockets. I can run an unlimited number of RHEL guests on the quad socket box at $3998 per box. Since I have 40 guests that brings my cost per guest 1 year to around $199.00 which isn’t that bad.
Comment by tgs — November 12, 2010 @ 11:17 am
Interesting, I had never heard or seen of the product you mention. For my purposes I just plan to use RHEL as a guest not a host(as you seem to be too).
I do see the $3998 price for RHEL Advanced Standard edition (9×5 support), is that the product your referring to?
I don’t remember what the RHEL Advanced Standard edition price was before the hike
Comment by Nate — November 12, 2010 @ 11:23 am
I’d have to dig around, but I’m pretty sure it was around the same price as they are charging now, or a little less. RedHat wasn’t really pushing that vmware edition very hard, but if your a vmware shop it made a big difference on your licensing costs. We actually will probably come out ahead now that we can run an unlimited number of guests on our vsphere hosts with the new licensing scheme.
Comment by tgs — November 15, 2010 @ 8:43 am
Well the interesting piece is that with Suse Linux Enterprise you would have ended up spending $ 799 per ESX host, totaling to $ 1598 to run your 40 Guests. This would have brought down your pricing per guest / year @ $ 39.95….. is this Good ?
Comment by Apurva Shah — January 18, 2011 @ 5:42 am
[…] exactly hot on the heels of Red Hat’s 260% price increase, VMware has done something similar with the introduction of vSphere 5 which is due later this […]
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