The new licensing scheme is complex, but I was going to suggest they do something about their previous one if they hadn't implemented it. My concern was that the licensing for the old free versions were far too unlimited, which put the priice for the next step impractical and not cost effective. What that did was made sure people stayed on the free version, and spend time working around the limitations, instead of buying what they needed from VMware. The new way, if you need a little, you pay a little, not a lot. The way I see it is this way.
Free = 32 gigs total VM declared memory that can be run at once on the server. The number of processors doesn't mattter.
Essentials = You would need to move to this if you wanted more than 32 gigs. Since it limits you to 2 processors, the max per server is 64 gigs. You pay $560, which includes a year of upgrades, and you use the second processor, and have 64 gigs of RAM to work with. That's more cost effective than another server by far. They throw in licenses for 2 more boxes to do the same thing. You may not need boxes 2 and 3 yet, or ever, but at least you can afford to get where you need to go.
*If you want to pool vRAM across servers, you need to add features.
The scheme isn't exactly what I wanted to see because it causes a consolidation problem. You are limited by the DECLARED RAM in the VM setup, even though they may be only using a fraction of it. This in turn requires you to know accurately in advance, the minimum RAM requirements you can get away with for the VM, rather than simply set it for the maximum it should ever need, because your vRAM quota gets docked for the full amount the moment you start the VM, whether you use the memory or not. Thus, the new licensing favors heavily utilized servers that generally do use everything you set in the VM parameters, while the old license favors consolidating underutilized servers. As operating systems, programs, and anti-virus software grow in size, you lose capacity that you cannot get back through hardware advances. My suggestion is to use something along the lines of computing units. That way customers are not hemmed in by RAM or CPU. The result is they don't need to spend time trying to see how little RAM they can get away with when setting up VMs, it doesn't matter if they have a whole lot of servers that sit idle, or a few that use the resources to the max, they can scale it by buying computing units and VMware's revenue scales with it, you could give away the pooling abilities without losing a dime in revenue, and some of the features could auto-enable after a certain level of units at a point they commonly make sense. Licensing gets real simple. It makes no difference to VMware if they run it on 5 fast boxes, or 50 dog boxes. This eliminates all situations where it would be more cost-effective to buy another box. It opens up the market in a huge way in areas VMware doesn't make sense today. Installing ESXi on a server becomes a no-brainer, and matter of standard practice, because there is no scenario where it's cheaper to buy a dedicated box. Nobody minds paying VMware money if it's always cost effective, and their VMware costs scales with their utilization, which is normally tied to revenue. VMware could also make it where there are no limitations if there is only 1 VM. That way they don't even have their hand out until they are saving the customer money. At that point, VMware starts earning its keep, and is entitled to a portion of the money they are saving. Who's going to say no to that? It would be one budget line item from the CTO that even a CFO could understand. What's not to like? If people want more speed, they could buy more units. You could instrumentation to show if they were being limited by license or hardware.
X Units = Free
+500 Units = $XXX
etc.
VMware is faking processors inside the VM now to where it shows a virtual processor as a physical processor. Thus, when software is licensed by physical processor, to use a dedicated box where you could leverage multiple cores, still makes sense. So close that hole up too by allowing VMware customers to specify the number of physical processors. Thus, you could specify you have a single-processor computer with 4 cores, so that software in that machine limited to 1 physical process, could use multiple cores, just as with bare metal.
These changes could make VMware ESXi ubiquitous, and people say Hyper what?, and what is XEN? There is no point in fumbling your lead.
Thanks