In a surprising move, VMware is moving to end the Enterprise licensing level, leaving only Standard and Enterprise Plus licensing levels, along with the Essentials and Essentials Plus packs.
VMware in fact has already removed Enterprise licensing from their product page.
As a consolation, VMware apparently will be offering existing Enterprise licensed customers special promotion pricing to upgrade to Enterprise Plus.
Also, vCenter Standard licenses will be bundled with 25 OS instance licenses for vRealize Log Insight, which definitely adds value for vCenter customers. Log Insight is actually a really good product seemingly few people are aware of that aggregates event logs from Windows OS’s and syslogging, and allows for analysis and monitoring for specific events. I hope this encourages customers to take a good look at Log Insight, because I think it’s a really good product that deserves more attention than it gets.
But all and all, I think these changes are not good. The elephant in the room is DRS. I have many customers who thought the price jump from Standard to Enterprise to get DRS was hard enough to swallow. Some did, and some didn’t. But now there’s a gaping canyon between Standard and Enterprise Plus in both features and price. For many customers, all they really wanted in additional features above Standard is DRS, and they’ll now be forced to pay more to get it when many already didn’t due to price, so I don’t see this working out for VMware nor customers in the end, as more customers will opt to either stick to Standard instead of begrudgingly stepping up to Enterprise Plus, or consider other less expensive hypervisors such as Hyper-V or KVM.
It’s impossible to avoid having flashbacks to the vRAM licensing debacle. If they truly wanted to simplify licensing, in my opinion DRS should be added to Standard even with an increase in licensing costs for Standard. Most environments that cost conscious are typically small and often would have the ability to use Essentials packs. Plus, EVERYONE can make use of DRS somehow, so at least somebody would pay more for something they could actually use.
Totally agree, DRS and vDS should be moved to Standard Edition.
In fairness, I think asking them to move VDS to standard would completely blow the entire reason for anything beyond Standard out of the water, especially if you also already had DRS. There’s pretty much nothing left in Enterprise Plus to speak of at that point. Quite frankly, VDS isn’t for everyone. Most small private cloud environments I’ve deployed or did some consulting don’t need it, so it’s nice to offer a licensing SKU at a lower cost to them. Putting VDS in Standard is asking a lot.
But DRS to me is basic cluster management, and it would give VMware a clear competitive advantage over Hyper-V and others, so it gives people a reason to pay for VMware over potentially no/lower cost solutions in the form of Hyper-V, Citrix, Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor, and KVM.