Lab Manager (retired) to vCloud - Update

Posted on 3 mins read

I received the answer back from VMware on the conversion ratio that I was waiting for from my
previous post.

  • Customers who bought LM before 9/1/2010 (Sep. 1) can exchange 1 CPU of LM
    for 20VMs of vCD.
  • Customers who bought LM after 9/1/2010 (Sep. 1) can exchange 1 CPU of LM
    for 10VMs of vCD.

Lab Manager goes for $1,495 per CPU

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And vCloud Licenses for a 25 VM  bundle for $3,750

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So I put the question out on Twitter

Quick question for those using VMware Lab Manager - how many VM’s do you have per host (vm/CPU ratio)?

The answers I got - which were completely reasonable - were approximately 4 vCPU’s per per core (and that was quite conservative)

A small bit of math. Most ESX hosts today are 2 Quad Core CPU’s.

4 vCPU’s x 8 cores = 32 VM’s

Taking the answer that I received from VMware this can be divided in two scenarios.

  1. You have Lab Manager Licenses from before Sep. 1, 2010.
    I trade my Lab Manager Licenses for 40 VM licenses of vCloud Director
    I am covered and I am happy!

  2. You purchased Lab Manager after Sep. 1, 2010.
    I trade my Lab Manager Licenses in for 20 VM licenses of vCloud Director and I now have to add another $3,750 to cover my licenses.
    I am not happy!!!!!!!!

I asked Support the question which I found to be the most obvious.

Why was the cutoff point defined at Sep. 1, 2010?

The answered I originally received was that there was a public announcement made stating that this would be the case. As far as my memory serves me there was not such announcement made, and
September 1st 2010 was smack in the middle of VMworld  in San Francisco. I asked for a link to that public announcement. Support retracted their previous statement and indeed said there was no previous statement issued about the conversion option.

Personally, my environment is not largely affected by this “strange” decision, but I am sure there are others that this change will have a much larger impact, and if so then I would suggest you take it up with your local representative. I do think that VMware are making a mistake here but because there is no other product that is anything like this on the market, we as the consumers have little / no choice. It does not leave the customer with a “warm fuzzy feeling” about VMware and their transparency.

Now I am not going into functionality features that are not available (in the current version) of vCloud Director - like linked clones, and the fact that you are tied to an Oracle DB at the current version. I am pretty sure these will all be non-issues in the upcoming versions of vCloud Director, and that’s enough said.

What do you all think?