VMware channel partner rates new product bundles and subs-only licenses 'very attractive'

VMware by Broadcom, as the former VMware is now known, has in recent days dished out welcome news for its faithful. Earlier this week, Michael Roy, product line manager for the Workstation and Fusion desktop hypervisors, revealed the products will continue. "VMware by Broadcom is committed to our focus on the desktop …

[Nate Amsden]

perpetual licensing still available for vsphere?

Maybe a mistake, or maybe the people responsible aren't with vmware anymore but I noticed a few days ago (and checked again now) that the basic vSphere licensing appears to be perpetual still on vmware's store.

https://store-us.vmware.com/products/data-center-virtualization-cloud-infrastructure.html

The pricing looks to be about the same as well.

I've been a vmware customer since 1999, the only products from them I care about are vSphere, vCenter, and Vmware workstation.

I forgot to check if VMware had their typical black friday sales for workstation this year, though my version is still current from last year seems like. Normally that is when I buy it for myself, every 2-3 years. I still have vmware workstation for linux going back to v3 (Nov 2001 is the time stamp) just for nostalgia, misplaced my "Vmware for linux 1.0 (or 1.0.x?)" CD a decade ago sadly.

[talk_is_cheap]

Re: perpetual licensing still available for vsphere?

They have stated that their 2 entry level vsphere offerings would remain perpetual based.

But the price has been increased by nearly 3x as last year I signed up for a 3-year Sub of vSphere Essentials for £597 and it is now priced at £502 for a single year.

We now have a side project to evaluate Proxmox in place.

[Nate Amsden]

Re: perpetual licensing still available for vsphere?

I noticed that though specifically was referring to the vsphere enterprise plus 1 cpu with production support. Cost seems the same as before. Same as it's been for what seems like 13 years.

[Michael Duke]

Re: perpetual licensing still available for vsphere?

New pricing does not kick in down here in NZ until early Feb 24.

[Kurgan]

The innkeeper says that his wine is the best in the world.

I would have not expected that people who make a living out of selling Vmware products would have said "the new pricing sucks".

[Anonymous Coward]

On a 20 socket farm running Enterprise Plus licensing with 1 vcentre instance, at the leaked German us$ pricing we are looking at about 3.5 times increase in annual costs compared to renewing maintenance on our current farm. Luckily out 3 year agreement doesn't expire till 2025, so Broadcom have better not cancel that and force us onto the new pricing schedule immediately. I fail to see where the saving are supposed to be when ours costs will go up by 350% for the lowest tier we can consume.

All we want is the ability to just license vsphere hosts and vcentre like we can at the moment. Couldn't give a rat's arse over any of the other VMware portfolio TBH. Their core products are what matters, rest of it is largely fluff.

[Anonymous Coward]

This was largely our stance and experience too. We weren't a major VMware customer, and were probably pretty simple in the grand scheme, e.g. maybe 3-4 dozen ESXi hypervisors at any given time, at least 2 vCenter ("VCSA" nowdays, I guess) and often an extra one for R&D / eval purposes.

I don't think we even had VMware Workstation or the like running around. Somebody in another group supposedly had a P2V instance/license or something, but I never saw it.

But VMware Sales were still focused on all the other products, even when we declared going in "we really only care about ESXi/vSphere pricing, and maybe VCSA for the next release" or similar stories.

Presumably there are organizations out in the world using some of the VMware ancillary products, but I can't imagine they're a big revenue stream -- why else would they keep raising ESXi prices, aside from normal corporate greed, of course.

[43300]

Well, at least that's positive to an extent - Workstation is useful for local testing on a system which overlaps with ESXi.

[Doctor Syntax]

"VMware channel partner rates new product bundles and subs-only licenses 'very attractive'"

And how do the customers rate them?

[Groo The Wanderer]

I suspect Broadcom read all the commentary on the 'net and realized that people would ditch their entire product line if Workstation were dropped, because the gateway into the rest of the product suite they offer! It'd be like shipping a version of Linux with no GUI for a modern PC.