Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers.
The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.
This is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days.
I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion.
A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop.
Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs.
P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!
Would open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a few extra bucks. Hard for me to get outraged.
There's also something called "killing the golden goose." If they had more reasonable pricing, they may have been able to extract money from more clients for a longer period. I'm not sure what they current profits look like, but gouging your customers for short term gain while destroying long term profits isn't generally considered a good way to maximize shareholder value.
The other scenario is that keeping prices reasonable means there isn't as much demand for an open source version. Developers who balked at paying $150 a seat wouldn't be sufficiently motivated if the cost was a more "reasonable" $20 say.
I just remembered a pretty good example of this with the story of BitKeeper and Git, you can read http://kerneltrap.org/node/4966 for more information. It was the catalyst of losing the cheap enough/free option that motivated the work on Git.
But the new wave of public cloud computing is not generally running VMWare's product, as it is too expensive; eg EC2 runs on Xen... they are doing better from the private cloud people who are less concerned about using commodity open source software.
Your assertion that VMware is too expensive is just plain false. The company I work for (Virtacore) offers vCloud Express and we have come to great terms with VMware and our pricing reflects that. While we don't have all the features EC2 offers (because we are only a couple months old and still building out the product) we feel they are extremely expensive. IMO they like to nickel and dime users while we keep it very simple.
In our experience, vSphere is indeed too expensive relative to the value it provides. We ended up much better off implementing a KVM-virtualized cluster that cost us nothing in licensing, allows us to keep Windows out of our cluster entirely, and frees us from fiscally onerous license changes such as the sudden vSphere 5 price increase that spawned this thread.
Memory is cheap these days - you can get 24GB for a couple hundred bucks depending on speed/ECC requirements. I always try to max out the memory based on the median cost per GB.
Those "ECC requirements" really make a difference though. And whoever is running servers without ECC memory in production should be shot dead (just wait until you have data corruption because of a faulty memory module to see what pain is).
Yep - we just bought 54 x 8GB DDR3-1333 Registered DIMMs for about 10K, and we can sell the 54 x 4GB modules we are replacing for about 2-3K on eBay. But since this is a VMware cluster, now I have to scramble to see what this is going to cost me in additional licensing before I upgrade. :(
Really? The standard host hardware for the place I work was 128gb/16 core for the longest time.
Prior to that, it was 64g/8 core.. which did suffer of memory overcommit for a while. The 128/16 balances quite nicely. 128/16 leaves plenty of room for over a dozen reasonably sized VM's (8gb/2vcpu) without even approaching oversubscription of memory. Sure, if you want to go crazy and stack more than 15-20 VM's on a host you might need more memory, but I find for most app server work loads, you end up overloading your storage i/o (even 4Gbps HBAs have their limits).
To be clear, I was talking about physical cpu's, not cores.
But honestly, that's not the right way to think about the licensing. Sure, you need a license for each physical cpu, but beyond that you're just licensing for vRAM. So the real question is, is 24GB vRAM per license low.
By my reading of this pdf, each physical CPU requires a license and each license allows for 24-48GB of guest ram. It seems they're specifically trying to limit licensing by vRAM, rather than CPU because there are more cores in CPU's now.
Agreed... Only real enterprise alternative is Hyper-V - I have used it quite a bit and do like it, but, I just don't feel as happy using it as I am ESX.
Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs.
Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.
Microsoft is good at making products that are good enough and staying in the game for a long time.
In 1990, high-end engineering users were very happy with their Unix workstations. Windows NT in comparison kind of sucked -- but over time the suckage was not enough to justify paying $20,000 for a workstation versus $8k for a NT Workstation.
Ditto SQL Server. Back when I was a newbie Informix DBA, my older colleagues laughed at people messing around with SQL Server. Informix was an awesome product in many ways, but cost like $40,000/cpu when SQL Server cost alot less. Who's laughing now?
