Just got this link from Gabriel (thanks!), it seems the screwball VMware community has spoken and VMware listened and is going to ditch their controversial vRAM licensing that they introduced last year.
In its upcoming release of vSphere 5.1, VMware is getting rid of vRAM entitlements, which debuted with vSphere 5 and determine how much memory customers are permitted to allocate to virtual machines on the host, according to sources familiar with VMware’s plans.
I tried to be a vocal opponent to this strategy and firmly believed it was going to hurt VMware, I haven’t seen any hard numbers as to the up take of vSphere 5, but there have been hints that it has not been as fast as VMware had hoped.
I had a meeting with a VMware rep about a year ago and complained about this very issue for at least 30 minutes but it was like talking to a brick wall. I was told recently that the rep in question isn’t with the company anymore.
I have little doubt that VMware was forced into this change because of slow uptake and outright switching to other platforms. They tried to see how much leverage they had at customers and realized they don’t have as much as they thought they had.
Now the question is will they repeat the mistake again in the future – myself I am pretty excited to hear that Red Hat is productizing OpenStack, along with RHEV, that really looks like it has a lot of potential (everything I see today about OpenStack says steer clear unless you have some decent in house development resources). I don’t have any spare gear to be able to play with this stuff on at the moment.
Thanks VMware for coming to your senses, the harsh feelings are still there though, can I trust you again after what you tried to pull? Time will tell I guess.
(In case you’re wondering where I got the title of this post from it’s from here.)
Marge get to make her concluding statement, in which she asks all concerned parents to write to I&S and express their feelings. In his office, Mr. Meyers goes through the tons of angry mail he's received... ``The screwballs have spoken...''