Dear VMware,

 Hi there! It's me again. I thought it was a good time to write again.

After my last letter, I was concerned that you might not love me anymore. To be honest, I don't truly know that you loved me before, but you certainly did love the money for our licensing. But I now feel that we're still friends at the very least.

Now, we can't pretend you haven't taken a significant hit from the overall vSphere community. You really did make a monumentally bad move that made a lot of customers cranky. Even with all the noise made by customers who were affected, you made all manner of absurd efforts to rationalise it, to essentially prove customers wrong - and all for naught. The simple fact of the matter was that you made a really dumb move, and you took a big PR hit for it.

My last letter suggested that you could still fix it - and it looks like you've made some genuine effort, to your credit.. And by no means do I take credit for changing your mind! I think there were more than enough people out there with very good and reasonable points that played a far more significant role.

But I do like what I see. Raising Enterprise Plus entitlements to 96GB vRAM (up from 48GB) per CPU? Well, that's obviously going to be a winner to me, as an Enterprise Plus customer. Enterprise at 64GB (up from 32GB) makes a lot more sense, and Standard at 32GB (up from 24GB) seems fair. 32GB is now the base vRAM entitlement, and that does seem more sensible. Even the free ESXi Hypervisor's limit has been raised to 32GB vRAM, and that's great.

Capping vRAM counted per VM to 96GB vRAM ... okay, on this one, I'm going to suggest that you actually took my advice of locking marketing back in the dungeon seriously. Great move (but please remember to feed them)! This particular change really does address a big gap in your licensing model that was only going to hurt some of your more outrageous claims (a 1TB VM still seems crazy to me).

And of course, the 12 month average vRAM consumption .. well, I'll see how that goes. It seems a bit of an unnecessary gimmick that really belongs with high end cloud providers, but I'll give you some credit on this one and assume that it's for the best.

Now just to be clear, while I'm quite happy with the changes for my part, you're still going to face some who are unhappy - particularly those who are reliant on the old vSphere 4 limits to RAM. I can appreciate their viewpoint too; taking an entitlement for Standard from 256GB RAM per host to 32GB vRAM is a bit steep. Unfortunately, I don't think that everyone can feasibly win with the licensing model changes, and you will nonetheless have some unhappy customers.

I've said before that there's nothing inherently wrong with the vRAM model, and I stand by that. You've increased the limits to be more fair to customers, and that's certainly to your credit. I for one am happy with the changes. But is it enough to mollify the customers you've angered? Will you lose a lot of smaller customers at the Standard and Essentials end of the scale?

Time will tell, VMware. You've made changes that better reflect scaling up alongside scaling out. That's important, and you'll certainly still keep getting my licensing money as a result. Let's hope others see it that way too!

 Lots of love,

Matt Marlor

Somewhat mollified customer

 

I tweet a little to the left, and a little to the right, but it all goes to the middle anyway: @OhCrap

Posted in: [GeekThink], [IT Pros], [Virtualisation]

Popular tags: vsphere, licensing, rort, vram, adjusted, Customers, ftw, vmware, backdown