What now for VMWare? What now for virtualisation?

Semple said:
It's not a great story from a vendor's perspective either. I work for a big OEM so we chuck a lot of business in VMware's direction, we've been developing various features/products that make use of VMware so we've been making use of NFR licensing for years. But it looks like Broadcom are happy to ditch/sour relationships with vendors too. They've listed extremely specific use cases that you can use NFR licensing for and seems we now fall just outside that and either have to purchase licensing or find alternatives.

Doing some pricing research online, for 12 new servers I've speced up to buy, which totals just under 800 cores comes up with a price of around $100,000 a year for vSphere licensing.
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I'm all for bashing BC, but that works out at $125 per year, per core for vSphere. Not sure where your numbers are from, but thats wildly expensive for vSphere.

VVF is RRP'd at $150 a core and that is vSphere, vSAN and some of the vRealise/Aria products. I'd be shopping round if those are the prices you're seeing.
 
Spammeh said:
I'm all for bashing BC, but that works out at $125 per year, per core for vSphere. Not sure where your numbers are from, but thats wildly expensive for vSphere.

VVF is RRP'd at $150 a core and that is vSphere, vSAN and some of the vRealise/Aria products. I'd be shopping round if those are the prices you're seeing.
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I don't know if it's the same, as things have changed - but when they only had VVF/VCF at the original takeover you could get VCF licensing down to <VVF RRP too. Which is what they want, their desire is to primarily sell VCF and get people into the whole product set.

Although 12 node setups is also not something that is the ideal market for Broadcom as they're interested in big Enterprise.
 
ChrisD. said:
One customer I'm working with has ~12000 hosts. :cry:
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I did some on-the-side contracting about a year ago for a consultancy that probably managed even more than this, one of the big, big names - and they announced they were staying on VMware, albeit they weren't just VMware either as you can imagine places that big don't have their eggs all in one basket. Let's be honest they're not paying RRP at that level, and to get buy-in from the businesses they manage it's going to be a multi-year plan alone. Let alone implementation.
 
Yup. Also depends if you were on VCF before. It works out quite well for the bigger enterprises who are already using VCF. People seem very quick to judge legacy vSphere licensing compared to VCF, and forget the extra benefits such as training etc.
 
ChrisD. said:
Yup. Also depends if you were on VCF before. It works out quite well for the bigger enterprises who are already using VCF. People seem very quick to judge legacy vSphere licensing compared to VCF, and forget the extra benefits such as training etc.
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Broadcom are popular to hate, and unfortunately I don't disagree with a lot of what is being said - we had a strong licensing deal with VMware and the fact that they could rip up the agreement and force us in to the new pricing despite signed contracts seemed unfair, but I am also not savvy with how the legal elements worked. I think overall, also VMware's licensing portfolio was getting too complex, and people also equate subscription with Broadcom which is false as VMware were going Subscription long before that were announced.

I don't think they've done themselves any favours with a lot of the messages they've sent, VCDX email leak, VMUG announcement without proper news on the new programmes etc. The very quick move to VARs for none VCF support (where people like IM did not have any capacity to support OEMs) and the fact that they did a lot of layoffs which they'd specifically stated they wouldn't, but it's not all bad thus far.

I've been a heavy VCF user since the 3.0 days, maybe even a bit earlier, I can't remember - and whilst I think the future isn't anywhere near as dire as SMBs are making out, and FOMO complainers who want to make the news, I am definitely branching out to ensure I'm not stuck in case the worst happens.
 
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malachi said:
Shame that Microsoft more or less ditched Hyper-v because of Azure.

They could make a killing from this.
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There are still a ton of alternative (Nutanix, Proxmox, etc.) it's just different. I liked the idea of Hyper-V as they could have had a vCenter equivalent quite easily instead it was very convoluted to set up and not having a 'vCenter' made everything that much harder.

Nutanix is pretty good, still not as intuitive, but better than Hyper-V from a setup and go point of view.



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
There are still a ton of alternative (Nutanix, Proxmox, etc.) it's just different. I liked the idea of Hyper-V as they could have had a vCenter equivalent quite easily instead it was very convoluted to set up and not having a 'vCenter' made everything that much harder.

Nutanix is pretty good, still not as intuitive, but better than Hyper-V from a setup and go point of view.



M.
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I moved from Hyper-V and Vmware to Proxmox for personal use. Its just a shame MS doesn't take Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager seriously anymore.
 
Very true - it could be a game changer. Get rid of VMM, do a 'proper' vCenter equivalent, get rid of the failover clustering requirement and do proper multipath / multidevice storage (i.e. FC or iSCSI) and you'd be there. The licencing, although I haven't checked in an age, used to be very generous for Windows based devices so, in todays market, it could be amazingly good.


M.
 
m4cc45 said:
Very true - it could be a game changer. Get rid of VMM, do a 'proper' vCenter equivalent, get rid of the failover clustering requirement and do proper multipath / multidevice storage (i.e. FC or iSCSI) and you'd be there. The licencing, although I haven't checked in an age, used to be very generous for Windows based devices so, in todays market, it could be amazingly good.


M.
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SPLA licencing on MS was pretty good. Your infra licencing costs were extremely low if 70% (or something number) were customer VMs/workloads. This is going back a while and I've slept a lot since then!

It's been shunned for Azure though. On-prem Hyper-V hasn't changed since pretty much Server 2016. I know a company that sold to MS a few years ago and they were told that their products would undergo "Azurification" - that tells you a lot.
 
We ended up at £100 per core per year for VVF for 800 cores. Just in the process of renewing, we have had some new developments though, watch this space....... ;)
 
Relentless81 said:
Can't remember the last time I did anything in VMware, everything has migrated to Azure where I work
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Still stuck in the dark ages for a lot of things being funded by cyclical capital investment every 5 years, revenue is hard to come by in the sector i work in..
 
kefkef said:
Still stuck in the dark ages for a lot of things being funded by cyclical capital investment every 5 years, revenue is hard to come by in the sector i work in..
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It's not necessarily a good thing, there is lots I miss about VMware, logging into a server directly and general snapshots or snapshot management for Citrix MCS is much more intuitive and simpler in VMware
 
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