Suggestion to VMware
Posted by craig 
- on January 6th, 2009 in Announcement, Industry News, Virtualization | 3 Comments »
Welcome to the year 2009 and I do hope to see the changes from VMware in term of their products strategy & marketing strategy too. Everybody aware that the price for the ESX enterprise could be the show stoppers to some of the potential users who want to choose VMware instead of the competitors such as Hyper V and Xen. In the current economy downturn, VMware should try to reduce the licensing costing to increase the market share which could be benefits to their customer. Customer will always sign up for the support agreement on yearly basis and it does allow VMware to generate revenue in long term base.
Beside this, training and certification are big issues in here. Most users will not affordable the training fees which is very expensive today to get certify. The value of the VCP should be the quality of deliver, and it shouldn’t be restricted to rich guy who able to pay for the course fees. Most expert are capable and experience but had not been attended any training and not certify which due to the expensive training cost.
I am not agreed with the product name changing from VI4 to vSphere which created unnecessary confuse to the existing users as well as to the new users. ESX had been a strong name and even until today, when I chat with my friend, we still talk about VI4, ESX 4 but not vSphere. It will take a little while to make ourselves use to the new naming which defined by VMware thanks to the marketing team’s new IDEA. Personal Point of view, the IT products is survived and success by the products quality, and not the name. VMware and ESX is branding, which is not an easy built up & strong branding in the pass.
3 Responses
Hi Craig,
You have brought out some interesting points, let me try and reply to one of concerns
When comparing VMware offering with competing solutions we should understand what is that we are trying to achieve. For example if it’s basic virtualization of a “single” server that you need to have, you can do it either using VMware ESX or ESXi. ESXi is a free product from VMware and product support can be purchased but it is not mandatory. Even when virtualizing a single server it’s important to understand how optimally the server resources are being utilized – in a nutshell what is the VM density per server. A higher VM density is possible on VMware ESXi, as the product has built in optimization engine for Memory and CPU. More over it does not have any dependency on single OS to manage device drivers and is the smallest footprint hypervisor (32MB) currently available. So you have a free full blown hypervisor that is highly secure from VMware for free.
Now let’s talk about a case where you want to achieve more than just single server virtualization, such as have VMotion for eradicating planned downtime for server maintenance, or have high availability for VMs, or utilize the power of all your virtualized servers as a single resource to further optimize or optimize on server power consumption – VMware DRS & DPM. VMware is an undoubted leader here, well proven and to my knowledge, currently the only one providing such functionalities. It’s for such a requirement that you can upgrade from ESXi to the VI product suite.
Considering the customer needs VMware currently provides 3 suites of products, Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. What I have seen happening is that the price comparison is done with the Enterprise product from VMware and the current competition offerings. And the current feature offering from completion can be well provided by VMware ESXi or the lower VI SKUs.
Again when comparing prices the comparison should be $s spent per VM than per server or socket. As every company has a different pricing model and comparing those prices is like comparing apples to oranges. So what you should do to figure out the solution cost is list down all the functionalities you want from the competing products add the cost of hardware and then divide it by number of VMs that you can create. More often than not you’ll see that VMware would be cheaper. End of the day what you are bothered about is how much you spend per workload, as that would reduce your total outlay.
Hope I have been able to clear out the myth that VMware is expensive, in reality this would be one of the most economical solutions.
Thanks for your suggestion and not necessary right or wrong about your idea here, but the important point we should always remember, TCO is always important for project to be started. As most environment no longer virtualize from the development or test environment, and users are specify spoke about production and more to come. VMware have the nice and good features, and I am agree we need to pay for that always, but is just the package selling can be more attracted with some bundle and revise of the current licensing. As my personal experience, The license cost I paid for my servers ESX enterprise license is 35% of my 4 way servers. If I compare the license cost of my 2 CPUs servers with quad cores, the cost of the license will be 45% to 50% of the servers cost we paid. There is always some consideration in between.
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