Justin Brodley's Blog

VMWare today announced the new Vsphere 4 product that will ship sometime this quarter. While there a ton of technical improvements and needed scaling enhancements, I am a little surprised by the pricing changes.

http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vsphere-launch.html

According to the press release:

VMware vSphere 4 Pricing Starts at $166 per Processor⁵
VMware vSphere 4 is expected to be generally available later in Q2 2009 and will be available in six editions meeting the requirements, use cases and budgets of customers of all sizes. In the current tough economic climate, VMware vSphere 4 offers unbeatable value to customers with up to 30 percent higher consolidation ratios, up to 50 percent storage savings, and up to 20 percent power savings over the previous generation of VMware Infrastructure 3.

• VMware vSphere 4 Essentials, priced at $995 for three physical servers, or $166 per processor, provides an all-in-one virtualization solution for the small office IT environment. VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus, priced at $2,995 for three physical servers, or $499 per processor, adds high availability and data protection capabilities that are otherwise out of reach for the small office IT environment. VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus is the only virtualization offering that provides integrated, built-in availability, data protection, patch management, and customizable alerts and reports at this price point.
• For datacenter deployments requiring the ability to scale and grow, VMware vSphere 4 provides four editions for four distinct use cases:
  • VMware vSphere 4 Standard priced at $795 per processor provides significant server consolidation ROI with new cost saving capabilities including thin provisioning for up to 50 percent lower storage costs and performance optimizations for up to 30 percent higher consolidation ratios than the previous generation of VMware software.
  • VMware vSphere 4 Advanced priced at $2,245 per processor provides application availability and protection.  Live migration with VMware VMotion, and the addition of VMware Fault Tolerance for continuous availability, VMware Data Recovery for backup, and VMware vShield Zones for security uniquely deliver Always on IT in one integrated package.
  • VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise priced at $2,875 per processor adds automated resource management with VMware DRS and VMware Storage VMotion.
  • VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor includes the full range of VMware vSphere 4 features for transforming datacenters into internal cloud computing environments including VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and VMware Host Profiles for simplifying the operational management of large deployments.
• Special Upgrade Promotions for Existing VMware Infrastructure Customers. Existing VMware Infrastructure 3 customers with valid support and subscription contracts are automatically entitled to VMware vSphere 4 editions. (For more information, visit the VMware vSphere 4 upgrade center at:http://www.vmware.com/go/vsphere-upgrade-center.) VMware is offering limited time promotions for existing VMware Infrastructure 3 customers wishing to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4 editions over and above what they are entitled to under their support and subscription contracts:
  • VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard to VMware vSphere 4 Advanced: At less than 50 percent of the upgrade list price, customers can add key features such as live migration with VMware VMotion, continuous availability, network security zoning, and data protection.  Suggested US list price: $745 per processor
  • VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise to VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus: At less than 50 percent of the upgrade list price, customers can add key features such as dynamic resource allocation, power management, live migration, the distributed switch, and host configuration controls.  Suggested US list price: $295 per processor

The new SMB products are a welcome addition, however the addition of Enterprise Plus is a hard pill to swallow.  To get the ability to standardize your ESX hosts and ESX Network switches you have to spend an additional $700.00 per processor. On Jason Boche’s blog he indicated that you would need Enterprise Plus to also get pluggable storage adaptors, which allows you to leverage software from Netapp/EMC, etc  This is really a shame, as this fault tolerance should be available in the standard enterprise features, but instead is used as a way to force customers into spaying more for additional high availability features.  While the addition of FT at the Advanced tier should help with some of these concerns, I still think its highway robbery to force people to upgrade to the top of the line licensing.

I also really wish they would add a platinum tier that would bundle SRM, Lifecycle Manager and Lab Manager and Stage manager as part of the up front licensing cost.  There are also several additional features I’m looking forward to in 2009, including CapacityIQ, ConfigControl, Appspeed and Chargeback modules. I am assuming that these too will also be additional charge items, that would be great to have in one platinum licensing sku.   Hopefully, I’ll be surprised and some of these features will get moved into the existing Vsphere licensing tiers.

I’m not happy about a suggested price of $295 a processor for my existing boxes, nor the increase of 700 dollars per CPU for the Enterprise-Plus license, but I’ll need to get the calculator and incident logs out and figure out what it cost me in storage faults, maybe there is a larger ROI then I’m willing to realize right now.

Looking forward to Vsphere, and will be excited to get it installed in our test labs!

UPDATE

Took a harder look at the Enterprise-Plus feature differences, there are a few other must haves in the new version.

- 8 way VSMP vs 4 way VSMP in the enterprise edition

In addition to the vNetwork Distributed Switch & VMware Host Profiles