As you have probably noticed, over the last few years, software vendors have been pushing cloud subscription a lot more heavily than on-premise licenses. We first had the example of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2022 announcement which removed the free Hyper-V edition, making managing your on-premise infrastructure in the cloud with Azure Stack HCI the only available method.
Companies are all jumping on that train because it brings them recurring revenue which is a lot safer than big one-shot licenses that will be dragged on for as long as possible (CAPEX vs OPEX). Granted these still require maintenance costs if you want support and major updates, but it is much lower than monthly payments for could resources.
In summer of 2022, VMware followed suit on that trend with the vSphere+ program. You can read our blog on the topic to know more but the gist of it is that you get a cloud console with various services to manage your on-premise VMware SDDC across several locations of course.
In this blog, we will talk about vSphere+ Standard edition which VMware rolled out to address requests from customers.
What is included in vSphere+
vSphere+ Standard edition is a new cloud-connected edition in the vSphere product family to offer the option to have cloud connectivity for those customers that run vSphere Standard on-premise. As opposed to vSphere Enterprise+ which was the only supported version by vSphere+ up until now.
vSphere+ Standard subscription includes vSphere Standard and vCenter Standard. Note that customers can deploy as many instances of vCenter as they need as licensing is now based on cores. The features (pdf) included in vSphere standard edition will then apply.
For more details on the benefits of vSphere+, read our blog on the topic.
Licensing and pricing
Just like the original version unveiled earlier this year, the vSphere+ Standard edition is also available as a subscription following the per core model and does not require license management via keys. Once vCenter is registered in the cloud portal, entitlements are distributed from there.
While we don’t have any public figures yet, a few resellers have already listed the SKUs on their websites such as SoftwareOne which lists it at $110 per core with 1-year commitment or 300$ per core for a 3-years commitment.
Note that, if I understand correctly, 16 cores per server is the minimum, so even if your server only has 12 cores you will still pay for 16.
Whenever the current subscription usage exceeds the subscription capacity you purchased, Organization Owners will receive an email from VMware Cloud Services with a CSV file including information about usage such as the overage time, and the overage amount. You can either remediate the excess usage or purchase additional subscription capacity. As you can see, non-licensed cores incur overage charges of 20% per core, taking it to $132 per core in the case of this reseller.
Additional discount is offered as you buy more cores in some cases.
Let’s try an example for a 3-years commitment of a cluster made of 8 hosts each equipped with dual Intel Xeon Silver 4314 (16 cores at 2.40 GHz).
8 hosts x 2 processors x 16 cores x $300
If I understand the documentation correctly, this 8 nodes cluster would cost $76.800 for a 3-year period.
How to try vSphere+
While the decision to move to vSphere+ will most likely be 95% financially based, you may want to give it a try so you know what to expect and if it is worth rolling with it or if you would be better off sticking with perpetual licenses for as long as VMware will allow you to do so.
Try vSphere+ risk-free with a Hands-on-lab at vmware.com/go/try-vsphereplus
Wrap up
From what I witness thus far from testimonies or online comments, current customers don’t seem too happy about this shift and most expect VMware to make cloud subscriptions like vSphere+ mandatory in the future to run on-premise workloads. While this may make sense for a chunk of customers, this incurs the risk of driving existing customers away by running their current perpetual licenses and not renewing at the end of the support period.
My personal opinion is that cloud subscriptions make a ton of sense for many use cases but so far, vSphere+ doesn’t exactly strike me as an evolution or a solution to a global problem. However, I would obviously be glad to be proven wrong on that front!
While the prices mentioned above seem pretty high for an 8 nodes cluster, these are public prices on which customers usually get significant discounts when ordering from their reseller of choice. It is also worthy to note that vSphere+ includes more features than the perpetual licenses through cloud services like unlimited vCenter instances, cloud gateways, Cloud Console for admin services, Tanzu Standard Runtime and so on.
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