64 licenses of enterprise
How stupid is this - if you were to take that same 2TB box and configure it for enterprise instead of enterprise plus you'd need 64 licenses and pay $184k for less features.
There really should be no way to configure a lesser version of software to cost more than a better version of software on the same hardware.
VMware's competitors I'm sure will waste no time in taking advantage of this, much like the Netflix fiasco today I can hear the onslaught of customer outrage by this kind of change. It won't happen right away since well you can't get vSphere 5 yet.
Not even Oracle has had the balls to pull this kind of price hike on their customers, the biggest one I've seen from them has been in the ~30% range.
Red hat did something similar on their RHEL 6 last year increasing the price of the product by upwards of 260% for quad socket, and likely 300-500%+ more for 8-socket (Red hat doesn't even list pricing for higher than quad socket, and they used to have a product that supported "unlimited" sockets). Sticker shock going from $2500/system to $6500/system is not nearly as bad as this move from VMware of course, percentage wise it's bad but your still talking about a fraction of the cost of the hardware, vs VMware your talking about the hardware being a fraction of the cost of the software in many cases.
There isn't anything that I have seen that would justify the price increase, if you really need to scale _that_ high for I/O and CPU cores just run it on physical hardware. A million IOPS is roughly the equivalent of what - 4,000 15k RPM disk drives(assuming a highly efficient system)? Being able to drive a million IOPS - or even half a million IOPS from a single host is nothing more than a marketing gimmick. Just look at how VMware tested vSphere 4's (or was it 3, I forgot) I/O using SSDs a couple of years back, they had to use 3 EMC storage arrays connected to a single server to test with in order to drive that amount of I/O.
as a vmware customer/user for the past 12 years (since before 1.0), consider me disappointed by this move, and sad.
I just hope that they preserve vSphere 4 pricing for the vSphere 4 product line for the lifetime of the product. vSphere 4 is more than capable enough to run practically anything out there. There are indications that you can upgrade/downgrade licensing between vSphere 5, 4 and even 3.
who said there's not inflation in this (U.S.) economy?
*big sigh*