Good summary Derek!

We just renewed ours in Aug. I don’t like subscription licensing personally. VMW tried their darndest to get us on it, and I was like NO WAY!

I like socket-based; even with Veeam. Main reason I don’t like VMware’s subscription-based licensing is two-fold - 1. I get more ‘bang for my buck’ with sockets; 2. cost → 2-fold increased cost here, at least for SMBs. a. is as I stated..less VM density allowed w/out sockets; b. you are *forced* to renew support each yr. For the past 11yrs here at my org, I’ve used VMW support 4x...and maybe twice in 1yr. In other words, we don’t purchase it cuz we don’t need it. Generally, my boss and I can handle most issues. Also, we are not quick to upgrade to new versions, so I let all those quirks get worked out by others 🤪 As you stated tho...it’s all about the “cha-ching” 

I think you nailed it exactly part of the reason they moved to subscription.  Higher renewal cost equals more revenue.  SnS was pretty cheap for renewals honestly, especially when it came to Essentials and Essentials Plus Kits.  I very rarely use VMware support.  I had a couple times at my old private cloud hosting job, but since then I think in 7 years I’ve opened maybe 2 cases with VMware.  Really, it’s the entitlements to the newer versions that makes it worthwhile.  vSphere+ sounded kinda neat, but that extra cost….not worth it for most of us. 

For Veeam, I was resistant to moving from Perpetuals socket-based licensing at first, but it’s gotten better after Veeam revamped the pricing structure early on.  That said, internally I use rental licenses as a VCSP, and honestly it’s probably a bit easier to sell BaaS to some of our clients than it is to buy licensing and then constantly have to deal with renewals.  Plus you pay for what you use.  For some businesses that just makes sense, but for larger enterprises with high VM density, VUL’s may not make as much sense.  As I understand it, Enterprise agreements can still get perpetual licensing.  But for most, or those with hybrid loads, VUL’s might make more sense.

VMW (basic) support is a joke. Not worth any money imo. Premium..or whatever it’s called..is ok. Well, was the last time I used it several yrs ago. I really wanna look into another virtualization solution, but time to play around with it is always an issue.

Great summary Derek.  I am waiting to see how our Partner status moves with them now but we have been assured we are good.  Hopefully it does not change much for us.

That’s a whole different animal.  I was concerned about not even maintaining a partnership with VMware due to the new Partner Program being invite-only.  However, after some deeper reading, Broadcom has published that they intend on bringing along all active partners.  That is, all Partner’s that have had an active contract in the past year.  However, I believe partnership levels will be affected based on their information published.  But most folks don’t quote know where they will fall.  More of that information should be coming out by the end of the month with emails going out to the primary and secondary contacts for each partner.  There is/what a lot of FUD around the initial annoucements, but I think it won’t be as bad as folks assumed early-on.

Love the write up @dloseke, especially the call out that vSphere Standard might actually be cheaper now than essentials for some SMBs. 

As mentioned by others, I’m watching and waiting to see what shapes up for Service Providers as well, given they were always licensed very differently to end-user agreements. 

Very helpful article.

It is a bummer for the SMB space if the prices you laid out stick.  

For those entry level customers with a single host or two hosts, I suspect this is going to be a difficult sell going forward.  

With all the talk about Proxmox and those alternative options, I don't really see one sticking or being the leader of the pack until a big player like Veeam comes with support for backups.

Whoever can pick up some backing by the larger software vendors I think will ultimately come out on top.

I’m quite concerned about our environment when we renew. We have many hosts and SRM. I’m going to consolidate as many hosts as I can and see what the future holds. 

This is MSRP pricing.  Prices will vary.  I can say that our partner pricing from Disti was better, but still not going to make the Essentials Plus Kit reasonable.

Yeah, that was something I questioned them on….in what scenario would it make more sense to utilize Essentials Plus instead of Standard.  And really, it’s only when you have 3 or less hosts but you’re using more than 72 cores in total, so basically 3 hosts with 24 cores, like dual 12-core processors (or 2 hosts with dual 18-core processors if those exist.  Something along those lines.  If you’re in the narrow area of having between 72 and 96 cores and 2-3 hosts, then it makes sense.

Great post, thanks @dloseke !

Ruh roh…

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/10/broadcom_ends_vmware_partner_program/

Yeah this is going to be a painful ride.

I feel like this is the sticking point as well.  This is the reason I feel products like Hyper-V and AHV will still be the top choices if enterprises choose to move away from vSphere.  However, I did mention here in the past that Veeam should be looking at backups for alternatives like Proxmox and XCP-NG.  With that said, I’ve been told a few times in other forums when people talk about Proxmox and I question backups that Proxmox does have a backup server built add-on.  I doubt that it’s going to be as featured as Veeam and will have the basics, but it does have the function.  I don’t know anything about XCP-NG and backing it up.

Thank you @dloseke , great post. I just want to mention about “Many of the alternatives discussed are enterprise-ready products such as Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV (which is built on-top of RedHat KVM).”

Nutanix AHV doesn’t built on-top of Redhat KVM, AHV is KVM based hypervisor.

Sure, I suppose that it’s semantics and saying that AHV is KVM-based is probably a better way to state it. AHV has a lot of other tech added as well as I understand it as it’s been a couple years since I took a good hard look at AHV.  Thanks for the input and correction.

you mention that there is a 16core minimum per host 

Documentation I have seen states that its 16 cores minimum PER CPU. 

might be worth confirming as that changes the costs a lot… 

Keep in mind, this article simply references the fact that Broadcom has ended the VMware partner program. That information came out almost immediately after the acquisition finalized. I’m not really sure why the register wrote this article so *long* after the information came out, but it added nothing of value to the discussion other than quoting people that don’t know what’s going to happen next.

This information you screen capped here is far more interesting and valuable than that article. 

Great summary Derek.  I am waiting to see how our Partner status moves with them now but we have been assured we are good.  Hopefully it does not change much for us.

That’s a whole different animal.  I was concerned about not even maintaining a partnership with VMware due to the new Partner Program being invite-only.  However, after some deeper reading, Broadcom has published that they intend on bringing along all active partners.  That is, all Partner’s that have had an active contract in the past year.  However, I believe partnership levels will be affected based on their information published.  But most folks don’t quote know where they will fall.  More of that information should be coming out by the end of the month with emails going out to the primary and secondary contacts for each partner.  There is/what a lot of FUD around the initial annoucements, but I think it won’t be as bad as folks assumed early-on.

 

 

Seems a lot more information has come out about how the non service provider crowd will deal with licensing. I’m still waiting to see how service providers will be affected.

I hope all this gets ironed out shortly. So much confusion and speculation. Reddit threads are going wild 

Oh wow….I went back and read the slides and that is something I’ve missed.  You are correct….so if you have dual proc machines, but something like 8-cores per proc, you’re actually looking at 32 cores for that single machine rather the actual 16-cores.  I have to wonder if that’s a typo on their part, but given how expensive VMware has become with the new licensing (many customers are reporting 300% price increases), I can’t say I’d be super surprised about it being that bad.  Fortunately most of my clients are running single processor hosts, but that’s insane.

you mention that there is a 16core minimum per host 

 

Documentation I have seen states that its 16 cores minimum PER CPU. 

 

might be worth confirming as that changes the costs a lot… 

 

Oh wow….I went back and read the slides and that is something I’ve missed.  You are correct….so if you have dual proc machines, but something like 8-cores per proc, you’re actually looking at 32 cores for that single machine rather the actual 16-cores.  I have to wonder if that’s a typo on their part, but given how expensive VMware has become with the new licensing (many customers are reporting 300% price increases), I can’t say I’d be super surprised about it being that bad.  Fortunately most of my clients are running single processor hosts, but that’s insane.

 

No, the 16-CPU core count is correct.  We learned that for our sites so if you are under 16 core count you still pay for 16.  If you are over there is a charge too.

 @dloseke, As mentioned by others, I’m watching and waiting to see what shapes up for Service Providers as well, given they were always licensed very differently to end-user agreements. 

Ruh roh…

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/10/broadcom_ends_vmware_partner_program/

Keep in mind, this article simply references the fact that Broadcom has ended the VMware partner program. That information came out almost immediately after the acquisition finalized. I’m not really sure why the register wrote this article so *long* after the information came out, but it added nothing of value to the discussion other than quoting people that don’t know what’s going to happen next.

This information you screen capped here is far more interesting and valuable than that article. 

Great summary Derek.  I am waiting to see how our Partner status moves with them now but we have been assured we are good.  Hopefully it does not change much for us.

That’s a whole different animal.  I was concerned about not even maintaining a partnership with VMware due to the new Partner Program being invite-only.  However, after some deeper reading, Broadcom has published that they intend on bringing along all active partners.  That is, all Partner’s that have had an active contract in the past year.  However, I believe partnership levels will be affected based on their information published.  But most folks don’t quote know where they will fall.  More of that information should be coming out by the end of the month with emails going out to the primary and secondary contacts for each partner.  There is/what a lot of FUD around the initial annoucements, but I think it won’t be as bad as folks assumed early-on.

 

 

 

Seems a lot more information has come out about how the non service provider crowd will deal with licensing. I’m still waiting to see how service providers will be affected.

The Register article is referencing CSP’s being dropped, whereas the almost immediate press release just listed Partner, and not specifically CSP’s as far as I know.  With that said, there’s be a huge lack of information all around from Broadcom, so it wouldn’t surprise me if they sat on some of this info as well before publishing as there certainly has been changes where they reversed course briefly, etc.  I will note that since I’m not a CSP, I don’t get to see the CSP-specific information in the Partner Connect portal.

Now I’m seeing reports of partners not being invited into the new Partner Program unless they are bringing in $500,000+ in annual revenue.  I personally haven’t gotten an invite into the program yet, and we for sure do nowhere near 500k as a small MSP.  The frustrating part is that if we end up terminated as a partner, how do we procure licensing for our clients?  To my knowledge, that information hasn’t been released and I know others are asking the same question.  

I also find it interesting the shear amount of opinions and information that is being released/leaked.  Broadcom said they would handle this acquisition better than they did CA and Symantec, but I agree that it sure doesn’t seem like they’re doing that.  If feels like they’re very much targeting enterprise customers and are pretty much leaving SMB’s out in the cold. 

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/broadcom_vmware_channel_disruption/

you mention that there is a 16core minimum per host 

 

Documentation I have seen states that its 16 cores minimum PER CPU. 

 

might be worth confirming as that changes the costs a lot… 

 

Oh wow….I went back and read the slides and that is something I’ve missed.  You are correct….so if you have dual proc machines, but something like 8-cores per proc, you’re actually looking at 32 cores for that single machine rather the actual 16-cores.  I have to wonder if that’s a typo on their part, but given how expensive VMware has become with the new licensing (many customers are reporting 300% price increases), I can’t say I’d be super surprised about it being that bad.  Fortunately most of my clients are running single processor hosts, but that’s insane.

 

No, the 16-CPU core count is correct.  We learned that for our sites so if you are under 16 core count you still pay for 16.  If you are over there is a charge too.

But is that per processor or per server?  If you have a server with dual 12 core processors, do you have to buy 32-cores of licensing?  Because the documentation says “per CPU minimum”.  Microsoft licensing for Windows is a 16-core minimum “per server”.

you mention that there is a 16core minimum per host 

 

Documentation I have seen states that its 16 cores minimum PER CPU. 

 

might be worth confirming as that changes the costs a lot… 

 

Oh wow….I went back and read the slides and that is something I’ve missed.  You are correct….so if you have dual proc machines, but something like 8-cores per proc, you’re actually looking at 32 cores for that single machine rather the actual 16-cores.  I have to wonder if that’s a typo on their part, but given how expensive VMware has become with the new licensing (many customers are reporting 300% price increases), I can’t say I’d be super surprised about it being that bad.  Fortunately most of my clients are running single processor hosts, but that’s insane.

 

No, the 16-CPU core count is correct.  We learned that for our sites so if you are under 16 core count you still pay for 16.  If you are over there is a charge too.

But is that per processor or per server?  If you have a server with dual 12 core processors, do you have to buy 32-cores of licensing?  Because the documentation says “per CPU minimum”.  Microsoft licensing for Windows is a 16-core minimum “per server”.

It is per processor not per server.  So, if you have a dual 12 core system you are going to get 2 x 16 core licenses from VMware.

you mention that there is a 16core minimum per host 

 

Documentation I have seen states that its 16 cores minimum PER CPU. 

 

might be worth confirming as that changes the costs a lot… 

 

Oh wow….I went back and read the slides and that is something I’ve missed.  You are correct….so if you have dual proc machines, but something like 8-cores per proc, you’re actually looking at 32 cores for that single machine rather the actual 16-cores.  I have to wonder if that’s a typo on their part, but given how expensive VMware has become with the new licensing (many customers are reporting 300% price increases), I can’t say I’d be super surprised about it being that bad.  Fortunately most of my clients are running single processor hosts, but that’s insane.

 

No, the 16-CPU core count is correct.  We learned that for our sites so if you are under 16 core count you still pay for 16.  If you are over there is a charge too.

But is that per processor or per server?  If you have a server with dual 12 core processors, do you have to buy 32-cores of licensing?  Because the documentation says “per CPU minimum”.  Microsoft licensing for Windows is a 16-core minimum “per server”.

It is per processor not per server.  So, if you have a dual 12 core system you are going to get 2 x 16 core licenses from VMware.

Okay, yeah, that’s….greedy.  Thanks for confirming.