As you may have heard, VMware has succumbed to good sense and has finally ended vRAM, a licensing scheme that was introduced with vSphere 5.0 last year. In its place, the company has moved back to per-socket pricing, but this time there are no core limitations as there were with vSphere 4. The new licensing is retroactive to vSphere 5 as well. VMware wants to our vRAM as far behind it as possible.
All prices below are per socket.
vSphere 5.1 is available in the following editions at these prices:
- Standard. $995 + SnS.
- Standard with Operations Management. $1,995 + SnS.
- Enterprise. $2,875 + SnS.
- Enterprise Plus. $3,495 + SnS.
In addition to the end of vRAM, VMware released the VMware vCloud Suite. This is not necessarily a brand new product but is a conglomeration of a number of existing products into a single SKU. From VMware, here is a list of the products included in VMware vCloud Suite:
- vSphere. Virtualized infrastructure with policy-based automation.
- vCloud Director. Virtualized datacenters with multi-tenancy and public cloud extensibility.
- vCloud Connector. Integrated viewing and dynamic transfer of workloads between private and public clouds.
- vCloud Networking and Security. Software defined networking, security, and ecosystem integration.
- vCenter Site Recovery Manager. Automated disaster recovery planning, testing, and execution.
- vCenter Operations Management Suite. Integrated, proactive performance, capacity, and configuration management for dynamic cloud environments.
- vFabric Application Director. Multi-tier application service catalog publishing and provisioning.
vCloud Suite is also licensed on a per socket basis and is available in these editions and prices:
- vCloud Suite Standard. $4,995 + SnS.
- vCloud Suite Advanced.. $7,495 + SnS.
- vCloud Suite Enterprise. $11,495 + SnS.
It should be noted that the individual vCloud Suite products are still available individually, too. However, if you do purchase them a la carte, they are licensed under their old pricing models, many of which were based on per VM prices.