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August 20, 2012

The Screwballs have Spoken

Filed under: Datacenter — Tags: — Nate @ 2:07 pm

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...'' 

3 Comments

  1. That’s great news. I could understand why they’d done it, over the course of three years or so we’d more than quadrupled the size of our hosts and VM counts without buying any additional licensing, but the caveats and exceptions they included to make it more palatable (counting linked vCenters, spare capacity from other hosts could be applied, etc) should’ve been seen as symptoms that the whole thing didn’t make sense.

    I think charging for the hypervisor license by feature set and number of hosts makes sense and I’m fine with the other products like SRM, vCenter Ops, vCD, etc being per VM licensed. They really do need to evaluate bundling and what makes sense for getting customers hooked, because MS is way ahead of them in that regard.

    I think Microsoft should really be commended for some of the changes they’ve made in licensing (although they obviously found it in their best interest). Server licenses covering two sockets, reducing number of editions, bundling all of the System Center apps into one very reasonable license, the CAL suite bundles, etc have made it much more palatable to use their products. And in our case, we would’ve been licensing e.g two or three products in the bundle anyway, so now we effectively get everything else for ‘free’ and may consider replacing the competing products we currently use if the MS offering is ‘good enough’

    Comment by Chuck — August 20, 2012 @ 5:24 pm

  2. […] 5, but there have been hints that it has not been as fast as VMware had hoped,” wrote blogger Nate Amsden. “… I have little doubt that VMware was forced into this change because of slow uptake and […]

    Pingback by Why VMware shouldn’t give up on new licensing - The Virtualization Room — August 22, 2012 @ 12:13 pm

  3. […] the announcement was surprising in that regard.  To borrow from another blogger…vmware thought they had more leverage over their client base than they did..they were wrong.  Now that a former Intel guy is there that insanity is gone along with sane pricing models again. […]

    Pingback by No more VRAM: VMware abandons controversial pricing model | Ars Technica | Emmanuel Computer Consulting, L.L.C. — August 28, 2012 @ 2:30 pm

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