VMware has addressed customer concerns over its new vSphere 5 platform by overhauling the pricing model. When VMware launched its vSphere 5 platform last month, most of the talk was about the new features, but a few concerned customers raised the point that new licensing model could actually raise their costs dramatically.
This chart from the e-mail VMware sent to customers spells out the changes:
It’s unclear whether VMware didn’t fully realize the impact of the new pricing model when it decided to launch with it, or if it just didn’t expect the negative reaction. Maybe it was both. Licensing software to run in dynamic, cloud-like environments isn’t easy, and VMware was making quite a drastic move in trying the new vRAM-based model.
However, while the price points have changed by allotting more memory per virtual machine, VMware isn’t backing down from charging based on vRAM. The e-mail reads, “We remain confident that our vSphere 5 licensing model based on pooled vRAM is the right one for the cloud computing era.”
It looks a bit like a bungled product launch, but I guess we should give VMware kudos for trying something new and for being flexible enough to amend it when potential problems arose.
Feature image courtesy of Flickr user rutlo.
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