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Simplifying VMware vSphere licensing and pricing |
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By Vinod Krishnan
29 Jan 2010 | SearchDataCenter.in |
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Major changes have been brought in the VMware's vSphere licensing
model, with the offering for the SMB segments in the form of vSphere
Essentials and vSphere Essentials Plus (launched in India during 2009).
Here's a look at what the new licensing
models
entail.
vSphere Essentials and vSphere Essentials Plus:
The focus with these editions is not to burden small and medium
businesses with unnecessary functionalities and accordingly price them
moderately. These two editions give them the same hypervisor
that VMware
has been improvising over the years.
The Essentials edition will start from $165 per processor. The vSphere
Essentials edition comes as a pack of six processors with a management
console. Essentials is priced at $995 for six pack processors.
vSphere Essentials Plus provides SMBs with high
availability features, data
backup
capabilities, and centralized management capability along
with patch
management. Essentials Plus is priced at $2995 for the pack of six
CPUs, which also includes the management console. Per incident support
pack has been launched specially for the SMB segment.
With Essentials, SMBs have the option of going with or without support
pack. In Essentials Plus, they have the option of going for annual
contract or per incident contract.
vSphere Enterprise Edition:
This edition has been targeted at the commercial and enterprise
segment, which requires increased manageability and availability. The
same hypervisor is used in all the four enterprise editions. The stack
of functionalities changes along with the package.
The standard version is priced at $795 per CPU. vSphere Advanced
edition is priced at $2245 per processor. vSphere Enterprise is priced
at $2875 and Enterprise Plus at $3495 per processor
respectively. The pricing for support and subscription are additional.
In the Essentials and Essentials Plus versions, vCenter server is
bundled free with the six processors pack. Standard and above customers
have to separately opt for vCenter.
Licensing and support options:
VMware basically has three licensing options vSphere for vSphere. These
models are as follows.
-
The first licensing option for vSphere
is a CPU based licensing model. Support and subscription components
need periodic renewal. The licensing for Enterprise editions is socket
based. Each CPU could be up to 12 cores in the newly launched stack.
Customers are charged on the basis of each physical socket, and the
customer can have up to 12 physical cores within it. For Standard and
Enterprise editions, the limit is up to six physical cores. Customers
can upgrade their services by paying the differential amount. This
model is preferred for primary
server
virtualization and virtualization for disaster
recovery requirements.
-
vSphere's second licensing model is
for desktop
virtualization
requirements. The intention is to make licensing
more logical and give these users a sense of ownership. VMWare has
taken a per concurrent user based desktop licensing model for vSphere,
which is based on the number of employees in an organization and the
number of desktops to be provisioned. The software required to
run in the background is provided accordingly. The organization needs
to think of the concurrency percentage and perform concurrent based
licensing on VMware. This model has really taken off, as it simplifies
the whole vSphere licensing process for customers and gives them a
price advantage over CPU based licensing.
- vSphere's third licensing model is
based on the new cloud
based
offerings, where the partners would offer virtual
machines on a rental basis to buyers. The payment could be on a
monthly basis or a pay per use model. There is definite interest in
customer communities to embrace the cloud, which is diverging into two
directions. One is the large enterprise, which wants to set up its
internal cloud. The other is the SMB which does not have a large IT
requirement, and wants to opt for individual virtual machines on a
cloud basis. This vSphere licensing model is still emerging, and should
take off in the next six to 12 months.
There are three types of support models for vSphere.
- Per incident support for SMBs.
- There are two support models for the
enterprise segment. One is the basic model which gives a full
subscription (patches, upgrades and updates). Apart from that, VMware
also offers 9 to 5 support, which is available five days a week. This
is also known as the Gold support pack.
- Mission critical support, which is the
same Gold subscription, but offers 24/7 support. This is also known as
Platinum support.
About the author: As the regional manager for VMware India,
Vinod
Krishnan is responsible for leading the business development and sales
efforts of VMware in India. His areas of expertise include key account
management, new business development, direct sales, reseller
partnerships, product management, pre-sales consulting and solution
sales.
(As told to Jasmine Desai.)
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