Today VMware announced some big chanced to their vRAM Entitlements on vSphere 5, basically doubling the amount you can assign on the two enterprise levels and increasing all others by 33%. For more information check out Tim’s post.
This will be a very welcomed change especially with VMworld coming up, it will definitely reduce the “elephant in the room” effect… and probably a lot of bitching (pardon my french).
But what about a year or or 18 months from now?
Well when I was designing SMB clusters 18 months ago I was seeing 32-48GB of RAM per host most times…. now I’m seeing 72-96GB… and I’m dealing with SMALL clusters. Normally 3-4 hosts and 50-100 VM’s max….. So I can still understand where alot of the comments are coming from about how even with the changes … it’s still not going to be enough.
Hopefully VMware will continue to calculate their per VM revenue and as things go forward they will continue to adjust their vRAM entitlement numbers to make sure they don’t give the competition any more revenue then they already have.
Their pricing model seems fair to me, and fits in with the utility based model that the cloud is designed around. Its the future. I only had a problem with the low numbers, and they’ve quickly adjusted them to something more realistic. I don’t see the point in worrying about the future too much. I expect other vendors to start following the same model.
My only concern is that there were a bunch of VMware managers sitting in endless meetings who concluded, for example, that setting an 8GB limit in the free version was a good idea. These people are competing with Microsoft. I fear its boys against men when it comes to marketing.