VMware adjusts vSphere 5 licenses after criticism
VMware seems to be bowing to the criticism it received from vSphere 5’s new licensing structure. For example, the manufacturer is relaxing the restrictions on the amount of virtual memory and less consumption costs are charged.
In mid-July, VMware introduced a new version of vSphere, which would equate to a price increase, especially for much smaller users. VMware tries to persuade small users with new pricing policy to have a virtual data center in its vCloud but may not have counted on the much criticism from current users.
Where a virtual machine in vSphere 4 could have up to eight virtual CPUs, vSphere 5 supports up to 32 virtual CPUs per instance. The maximum amount of virtual memory has increased from 255GB to 1TB, while the maximum number of iops has been increased to 1 million. The maximum throughput per instance is 36Gbps. Up to 512 virtual machines can run per host.
Although virtual hardware specifications have been tightened, since version 5 customers no longer pay based on the number of physical CPU cores and the physical memory of a server, but per physical CPU. However, only a certain amount of memory may be used per CPU. This means that many customers need to purchase more licenses to use a certain amount of memory.
Due to all the fuss, VMware director Paul Maritz was forced to calm things down a week after the release of the new version. Although Maritz said at the time that vSphere remains a bargain and that 95 percent of customers will not be affected by the new pricing structure, the company now states in a blog post that the licensing structure is relaxed.
The amount of virtual memory is doubled in the most expensive variants and the cheaper versions are allocated 32GB instead of 24GB. Another big change is that VMware does not charge more than 96GB of ram per virtual machine. As a result, a 1TB virtual machine only requires payment for the first 96GB. Finally, VMware has decided not to base prices on peak virtual memory usage, but on the average of a year.