VMware’s subscriptions start at 16 cores, prices won't be made public

VMware will not publicly disclose the price of its vSphere+ and VSAN+ subscription bundles, though the virtualization giant’s partners have been given a figure to discuss. vSphere+ and VSAN+ are VMware’s first big move into subscription services. When VMware announced the suites a month ago, The Register was told pricing would …

[Pascal Monett]

"cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

Yeah, such a shame that there's not some piece of kit that would allow for typing the relevant parts.

We're all using VR, aren't we ?

[David 132]

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

Yeah, I’m sure there used to be a technology back in the olden days that would convert from images to text. But Oh Crikey Really, I can’t remember what it was called.

[Richard 12]

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

Maybe someone should start working on some kind of visual glyph detection.

I'm sure it could be done with some AI and blockchain.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

The operative word is "easily". The article's author isn't claiming it's impossible, merely pointing out that the newsletter's author has found an unusual way to make it gratuitously harder than it needs to be.

Seems to me that in an article about what boils down to corporate arrogance, an offhand remark about corporate arrogance is justified.

[Richard 12]

Re: "cannot be easily shared or copied and pasted"

Hence the piss-take.

Broadcom are putting a low kerbstone in the way, for no reason whatsoever.

Maybe next press release they'll give the text wiggly baselines and add some random dashes around it.

[johnfbw]

Cannot be easily read

As a frequent user of translation software putting text into images is extremely mean.

But if you are blind and require a screen reader it is just criminal - deliberately discriminating against disabled people!

[Paul Crawford]

Stinks

If you ever had cause to fear business changes, a move to subscription payment and opaque pricing are red flags.

[navarac]

Re: Stinks

Opaque pricing means they'll gouge to the linit of what a corporation can pay, I suppose. Yes it stinks - along the lines of yet another rip-off subscription.

[Anonymous Coward]

A good show of how crazier the business world is becoming....

Greed and arrogance will bite them too - sooner than they expect. They're going to demolish the very foundations their business is built on.

[DS999]

Re: A good show of how crazier the business world is becoming....

I think this shows they are going all-in on enterprises and giving up on the SMB market entirely. They know the latter has already been moving to paying Redhat or someone for support for Xen, or going with Hyper-V because everything they have is Microsoft anyway.

VMware will be something on big companies pay the extra for and won't notice the extra cost when it is pooled in with the TCO of the servers, operational costs of their datacenters, and people who manage the systems. They are already all-in on VMware, have a staff trained in VMware, and it would be too costly to change. Same reason why IBM still makes mainframes, but only the biggest companies are still in that market.

[khjohansen]

Re: A good show of how crazier the business world is becoming....

Not so much "won't notice the extra cost" as "will pass on cost to end-users"!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A good show of how crazier the business world is becoming....

Xen is a dying platform and has been so for many years, and even Hyper-V is unlikely to survive once its transformation into Azure Stack HCI has been completed.

Today, virtualization usually means either ESXi/vSphere or something based on KVM, and increasingly kubevirt for stuff that can't be containerized.

[Tom 7]

Prices wont be made public

So capitalism is now rejecting the market! And presumably the marketing department!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stating the utterly obvious; alternatives are readily available.

Both stuff you can run on your own metal or have someone provide a service if you prefer that.

[Charlie Clark]

Until they've been bought and shut down.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the more reason to switch to AWS or equivalent

At least Amazon isn't ashamed of their pricing structure.

[Peter2]

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

[Anonymous Coward]

List price is out there

You can find the list pricing if you Google a bit...

VSCEP-TSPC-12MPCS VSPHERE+ 1YR PREPAID COMMIT P CORE $140.00

VSCEP-TSPC-36MPCS VSPHERE+ 3YR PREPAID COMMIT P CORE $300.00

VSCEP-TSPC-60MPCS VSPHERE+ 5YR PREPAID COMMIT P CORE $500.00

VSCEP-ODPC-1HUCS VSPHERE+ HOURLY OVERAGE RATE P CORE $0.03

VSCEP-TSPC-12MPVSECS SUB UPG TO VSPHERE+ 1YR PREPAID COMMIT $75.60

VSCEP-TSPC-36MPVSECS SUB UPG TO VSPHERE+ 3YR PREPAID COMMIT $198.00

VSCEP-TSPC-60MPVSECS SUB UPG TO VSPHERE+ 5YR PREPAID COMMIT $330.00

It is like double the cost of existing SnS renewals for a 16-core processor and only gets worse...

[Richard 12]

Re: List price is out there

So nobody at all would even consider the 5-year plan.

Even anyone that genuinely believes they have a good enough idea of their future needs would be insane to choose it.

[brianmills]

Looks like suicide to me given Azure Virtual Machines are mature enough for any use.

[VoiceOfTruth]

Imagine if "new" VMware sold (rented) cars

You commit to driving your 16 wheel car 2,000 miles a month. You will pay for all 16 wheels even if you only need 12 or 10. While it is easy to go less than 2,000 miles, it is very difficult to hit exactly 2,000 miles and not slightly over, and when you go over you will be charged more. And on top of that, the prices will not publicly be disclosed.

When your workload hits 17 wheels, and you are gullible enough to rent yet another VMcar, you will pay for 32 wheels. And your inefficiency will drop to close to 50% from 100%.

[OldCrow 1975]

Priced for AWS

If you have to ask the price for VMware. Then you can't afford it.

[Scotthva5]

Crystal ball

Is any of this even remotely surprising given the current corporate love affair with subscriptions and the possibility of a continuous, renewable revenue stream?

[Rgen]

Time to move on

You do t want to be stuck with Broadcom.

[Richard 12]

Priced to die

If you buy a 3 or 5 year commit, then that immediately means all new expansion must not be vmware.

You won't buy more than you expect to use at the end of year 1 (or maybe 2), because that means you're paying for something you aren't going to use at all.

And the existence of an overage rate means going over your estimate becomes very expensive.

So now vmware is only for legacy systems, no matter how big you are.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Priced to die

So the three year plan provides breathing room for companies that have decided to move off VMware over the next three years. The five year plan is for companies planning the same but know their migration project plans will run behind schedule.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

If you're building a new native public cloud environment can someone explain to me why you would spend the extra to bring VMware in?

I like things like VMotion but I just see a lot more complication and cost but not being a VMware expert maybe I'm missing something?

[JohnSheeran]

Re: Why?

Running your data center with VMware was a very smart move in the current climate of public cloud. The reason it was a smart move was that it was substantially cheaper, performed better and was more transparent. This is all in the context of the kind of applications that large corporations still use and have a hard time migrating to a modern architecture.

Now, with this kind of stuff, there is almost no reason not to just suck it up and pay a public cloud provider after a lift and shift. While it may cost slightly more, it's within the range of value add that's probably justifiable.

For the record, I'm not sold on public cloud because it's just a new version of the mainframe with a lot of illusion in that walled garden.

[J. Cook]

Re: Why?

and, depending on the app and a few other factors, the outage notifications are "we found out it was broken through twitter from everyone complaining| or that there was an outage after the fact" and the notification for updates or patch fixes is "oh BTW we are doing this tonight- Have A Nice Day."

On the plus side, it means that the admins who are being dragged kicking and screaming to this Brave New World get to say to the end users "I don't know when they'll fix it, they know about it, etc." (If you can call it a plus side...)

I'm not pleased that it's a 'per core' model instead of what VMware was charging for the perpetual model, which was 'per socket'. There's a lot of people running CPUs with more than 16 cores in them and dual sockets; that's a lot of lettuce for a single server. (dual socket, with a 28 core processor... 56 cores, so you'd need a minimum of 4 SKUs in order to get all of it, and you'd be paying for cores you don't have.) And bog help us all if they want to include HT cores in it...