Carl Eschenbach, President Of Customer Operations At VMware
"Selling licenses based on virtual RAM is a different mindset for solution providers, but it's not going to change the way they do business with us. I actually think it's going to be received quite well because it's a better way to measure than actually being tied to a physical device."
In vSphere 4 and vSphere 4.1, VMware uses a per-CPU licensing model based on the number of server cores. But in vSphere 5, VMware pegs licensing cost to the amount of physical memory that customers allocate to virtual machines on the host. Customers can pool the allotment, called vRAM, across their entire data center, and VMware isn't imposing any size limits on the pooling. VMware says the new licensing model is a reflection of the utility-based, cloud model. That may be true, but for many customers, it's going to mean paying a lot more for the server infrastructure they already have in place. Still, VMware customers and partners reaped impressive benefits from using VMware products and the company is simply adjusting its licensing to reflect this value.
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