Re: Im surprised they are bothering with this...
Just curious what are the specs of those 30 physical servers? 30 physical servers could literally host thousands of VMs, so the cost really isn't that bad at all for Enterprise+, and at least at the moment the cost of Enterprise+ hasn't changed in at least the past 10 years(~$5k/socket, doesn't take into account inflation even). Although of course now they are limiting the license to 32 cores, so if you have a 64 core CPU then you of course need 2 licenses. But still that's a damn good value I think.
Now of course if you are running small systems, then there is less value. But if you're running at least 30+ cores and 300GB+ memory (I have had this config for going on 8 years now originally with dual Opteron 6176(24 cores)->6276(32 cores), newer systems will be 64 cores and 768GB memory at least) it's a good value.
Now if you add in the other shit, beyond the basic hypervisor that's where I lose interest. vRealize, NSX, and the ever massively increasing list of addons(checked VMware's site and was overwhelmed by the number of products they have that I don't care about) that I have no interest in(and so don't know the cost). I do remember at one point pricing vRealize because my senior director was interested (I was not), for our servers at the time it was going to be $250k I think(don't recall the # of servers at that point in time, it was less than 30 though). I said I'd rather buy another half dozen VMware hosts(at ~$30k+/pop with licensing) then get that product. His main want was something that could predict future capacity needs, and he heard that product could do that (I don't know if it can/could but I wouldn't trust it or anything else that could predict that regardless given our custom application stack which in my experience such stacks can change capacity requirements in an instant with a new version of code, so you really need solid performance testing not some magical tool that will extrapolate past performance and predict future, because the app is ever changing).
LogicMonitor is by far my favorite tool for vSphere monitoring, I even have it able to report real time vCPU:pCPU ratios, and CPU Mhz for everything(otherwise not available out of the box), and tons of cool custom dynamic dashboards(and it's super easy to use).
Obviously the hypervisor market has matured a lot in the time since but your comment reminds me of a situation I was in at a company back in 2008. We were a very basic VMware customer, no vmotion, no vCenter just the most basic licensing, back when you had to buy licenses in pairs because VMware didn't support single CPU systems (and their licensing didn't really take into account multi cores). ANYWAY, my director at the time hated paying for VMware (we had licenses for maybe half a dozen 2 socket systems it really wasn't much). We were a CentOS shop mostly, and some Fedora as well at the time. He wanted to use Xen because it was free. He hated the VMware tax. I disagreed, and we got into this mini argument on the floor (open floor plan office). I'll never forget this because it was just so weird. He said something along the lines of he didn't think I wanted to run Xen because I was a pussy. (used that word exactly). I didn't know how to respond(and don't recall how I did). But anyway I left the company a few months later I think(it was on it's way to going out of business anyway). Right after I left he directed the rest of my team to ditch VMware and get on Xen. Ok so they did, well they tried. After a month of trying they gave up and went back to VMware. They had an issue with Xen(on CentOS) and running 32-bit CentOS VMs. It didn't work. Don't recall the problem they had but no matter what they tried it didn't work. We leveraged some 32-bit systems at the time just for lower memory usage. I suppose they could of ditched all 32-bit and gone everything 64-bit but for whatever reason they didn't and instead dropped their Xen project and went back to VMware.
I didn't like that director for a long time after, we got into another big argument over Oracle latch contention(which I was proven right again in that situation as well). But we made up over email several years later. He apologized to me, and we are friends now(though not really in close contact).
But the hypervisor is core, it's the most important bit, has to be good quality, stable, fast, etc. I think VMware still owns that pretty well. Granted if you stay on the bleeding edge(vSphere 7 was a shitshow I heard), you may have issues, I don't stay on the bleeding edge(still ESXi 6.5 in production baby, re-installing to 7.0U3 soon though, not going to risk an "upgrade"). also support is shit that is true, though for me it doesn't matter too much my configuration is quite conservative as a result I have hardly ever needed support over the past decade. Really blows my mind how well it works.
Been using VMware since 1999 when it was a linux-only desktop product.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
