VMware listens to customers, changes vSphere 5 licensing again

On Wednesday, VMware unveiled a list of changes to its vSphere 5 licensing model that the company hopes will calm customer concerns over higher costs after transitioning from vSphere 4.x to the new platform.

As InfoWorld detailed, with the release of vSphere 5, VMware decided to move from a licensing model based on the number of physical server cores to one that also takes into account the amount of vRAM, the memory that is allocated and used by virtual machines on the host server. Unfortunately for the virtualization giant, the new licensing model seemed to overshadow the new features in vSphere 5. The conversation quickly shifted from the new capabilities and features being made available to a black cloud hanging over the platform because of pricing changes.

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The change in the licensing model caused quite a stir in the virtualization community, which was an unexpected outcome for VMware executives. VMware claimed that its original change in the vSphere licensing would affect less than 5 percent of its users. However, what it didn’t count on was that a small minority of its users would also be the most vocal. Whether directly touched by the new pricing schema, quite a few people in VMware’s own forums or on well-respected community blogs who disagreed and disputed this claim.

It’s unclear whether VMware officials really understood the impact that the new pricing model would have when it launched the 5.0 product, or if they just didn’t expect to have such an outcry from its customers or, more to the point, its staunch supporters and evangelists in the blogosphere.

Licensing for something as dynamic as a virtualization environment isn’t easy. And VMware has every right to try and evolve its licensing to make money and to keep up with a growing server size and Moore’s Law. But perhaps this was a drastic move on VMware’s part to quickly implement a new vRAM-based pricing model without a bit of education up front and ahead of the change.

But give VMware some credit: It is listening and responding to the outcries, even if it’s coming from just a few.

Bogomil Balkansky, vice president of product management for VMware, detailed the new “updated” pricing changes for vSphere 5 in a company blog post, explaining the licensing changes this way:

We are a company built on customer goodwill and we take customer feedback to heart. Our primary objective is to do right by our customers, and we are announcing three changes to the vSphere 5 licensing model that address the three most recurring areas of customer feedback:

• We’ve increased vRAM entitlements for all vSphere editions, including the doubling of the entitlements for vSphere Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.
• We’ve capped the amount of vRAM we count in any given VM, so that no VM, not even the “monster” 1TB vRAM VM, would cost more than one vSphere Enterprise Plus license.
• We adjusted our model to be much more flexible around transient workloads, and short-term spikes that are typical in test & dev environments for example.

VMware also emailed this chart to customers, further explaining the new licensing updates.

With this updated licensing, VMware has increased the memory per virtual machine; however, it isn’t backing away from moving to a vRAM pricing model. The company said, “We remain confident that our vSphere 5 licensing model based on pooled vRAM is the right one for the cloud computing era. We are fully committed to meeting our customers’ and partners’ unique needs. Your continued feedback is important to us as we move forward together on the virtualization and cloud computing journey.”

The new updated pricing plans will reduce and take away much of the initial sting already encountered. However, it won’t eliminate the immediate impact, nor does it solve the longer-term outlook as others expand and upgrade their environments to larger VMs built on bigger host servers.

Is this latest move enough to keep you happy and remain operating on VMware’s platform? Or does the new pricing still leave you uneasy about future pricing intentions, causing you to look for alternative virtualization solutions?

This article, “VMware listens to customers, changes vSphere 5 licensing again,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.