Virtualization vendor VMware Inc. revved up its vSphere product line to version 5.1 while reducing prices and adding features. Many improvements are aimed at the small and midsize business market.
“We made our products lots easier to use, lots cheaper, and dumped our vRAM licensing model altogether, because users and resellers said it was confusing,” says Ed Hsu, group manager, product marketing, infrastructure at VMware.
For those resellers not working with his company, Hsu has two pitches: “We have a new wizard-based setup and management tool, Go Pro, which you access through a browser, click a few buttons, and get people up and running. And we dramatically dropped the price of VMware.”
Officially, VMware vSphere 5.1 and VMware vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 should be available now. VMware vSphere pricing starts around $83 per processor with no core, vRAM, or number of VM limits. VMware vSphere Essentials is $495, and VMware vSphere Essentials Plus is $4,495. All VMware vSphere Essentials Kits include licensing for 6 CPUs on up to three hosts.
VMware Go Pro is expected to be available directly to customers and through VMware’s channel partners in Q3 2012 with prices starting at $12 per managed system. For a limited time, VMware will include VMware Go Pro free with VMware vSphere 5.1 Essentials and Essentials Plus purchases. Hsu says the new pricing, “gives you scalable solutions for 30 percent less.”
By the Numbers
Market research by VMware says there are 62 million small businesses worldwide, but to VMware, the term “small business” includes up to 1,000 full-time employees or equivalents. vSphere Essentials Plus is aimed at customers with up to 250 employees and about 25 server workload instances.
Of those 62 million small businesses, only about 20 percent are virtualized, says Hsu. But at this year’s VMworld conference, held August 26 to 30 in San Francisco, about 30 percent of the 21,000 or so attendees identified themselves as working for a small business.
VMware vSphere 5.1 Essentials Plus now includes:
- vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 that turns a server’s internal storage into a shared storage resource and supports business continuity tools like vMotion and High Availability without external shared storage hardware.
- vSphere Data Protection for reliable virtual machine backup and recovery, including angentless backup and built-in deduplication.
- vSphere Replication for simplified disaster recovery, including the ability to replicate virtual machine data over LAN or WAN links.
- Vshield Endpoint to protect any workload and eliminate the need for antivirus agents within virtual machines.
- vCenter Protect to provide centralized patch management and asset inventory management.
- VMware Go Pro for cloud-based deployment and management.
Hardware resellers will be happy to learn new servers are still the preferred VMware platform. “People often use a server refresh to move to their next hypervisor,” says Hsu.
