Will we be Forced to Pay More – pt. 2

Posted on 3 mins read

To continue my previous post about the Enterprise license not being available after December 15, 2009. I received several comments – some on the blog and some I received offline, but the picture has become clear.

When vSphere launches, there will be 4 tiers

  • Standard
  • Advanced
  • Enterprise
  • Enterprise Plus

Thereafter:

  1. The Foundation License will be will be terminated immediately
  2. Enterprise will stay available until December 15, 2009.

Starting December 16th, 2009 there will be 3 tiers only

  • Standard
  • Advanced
  • Enterprise Plus

Below are a few slides that confirm the fact.

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So as you can see from the above, starting from December 16th, 2009 you will not be able to purchase vSphere Enterprise only Enterprise Plus.

Why did I label this post “Will we be Forced to pay more?”. I mean force is a pretty harsh word, but unfortunately, VMware will be leaving us no choice.

Let me explain why. Any Enterprise Customer makes extensive use of DRS and will find a huge benefit in using DPM. Those features come in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus only.

Take this hypothetical scenario for example. I have a 3 Clusters running with 5 ESX 3.5  Enterprise Licensed Hosts (with 2 sockets each). vSphere launches and with the launch I automatically receive with the new version the additional features of vShield Zones, Thin Provisioning, FT, Hot-Add and Data Recovery (don’t take me the wrong way – this is a lot and all highly useful and we should be extremely grateful). But for all different kinds of reasons we decide not to upgrade our ESX host licenses to Enterprise Plus. (I mean for that size environment Upgrades costs will be $295 * 2 * 15 = $8,850).

Comes January 1st, 2010. We need to add an additional host to each cluster. Now we need the Enterprise features (like all our other hosts). We cannot purchase an Enterprise license only Enterprise Plus.

  1. It costs more approximately $750 more per socket.
  2. But we do get the additional features of Host Profiles and Distributed Switch – so we should be happy shouldn’t we?

Here is the catch! Point 2 – is not completely true. Your will get the license to enable Host Profiles and Distributed Switches – but you will not be able to use it. And why not? Because in order for these features to work they have be applied cluster-wide to all hosts in the cluster. So in this case, we came out on the short end of the stick on both counts.

We would have been better off with doing the upgrade when we had the opportunity.

My thoughts – initially not pleased. But I will have some more to say about that in a later post.

And you?