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Why Socket-Based Pricing is Better than Per-VM Pricing
Wednesday, June 1, 2011 | (comments: 1)
Spring is VMUG season, and we have been at many, many VMUGs and vForums. Beyond the excitement about vOPS 3.0, another theme keeps emerging. Virtualization admins and their managers don’t like pricing models based on the number of managed VMs. Socket- and server-based models appear to be the way most directors of infrastructure want to buy.
We agree, and we are not pricing on a per-VM basis.
Why not? Two reasons.
- First, a major purpose of a capacity management solution is to ensure the performance of a
VM at the lowest possible cost. Beyond the operational costs associated with maintaining operating system images for each of the VMs, the other major expense is the fixed cost of the data center. This includes the servers, supporting network and SAN, rack space, power and cooling.To minimize costs, these fixed costs need to be spread over the maximum number of VMs. Increasing VM/host density is the metric used to express this efficiency for a data center. Per VM pricing passes on none of the benefits of proper capacity management to the virtualization admin. With per-VM pricing, increasing VM density does not lower licensing costs. VKernel uses per-socket pricing, enabling customers to essentially lower their overall cost per VM, the greater the VM/host density. We believe end users should reap the benefits of improved density.
- But there is a more important reason why per-VM pricing is not ideal for a virtualization administrator. Virtual environments are highly variable. VMs start and stop, are created and destroyed. Per-VM pricing causes potential licensing issues with virtual admins unless they over procure licenses to accommodate for their "peak" VM count. Read this post on VMware communities for an example of the problems users face. Per-VM pricing just adds unneeded complexity to a virtualization administrators world. Physical hosts are easy to license. Virtual machines that come and go are not.
Per-VM pricing benefits the selling vendor, not the end user.Charging for virtual goods like VMs might be a good idea if you are the makers of Farmville, but not for purveyors of virtualization management software.
Bryan Semple
CMO
Add a comment
Comment by Chris Dearden | 06/02/2011
I'm almost totally with you for most virtualisation scenarios , however per VM pricing can help drive a 100% virtual strategy for that last few % of workloads that would need an almost 1:1 vm:host ratio. Per VM licencing would enable very simple calculations for a service provider / private cloud model as the cost of licence can be rolled into the per VM charge.
Is there scope for a flexible model where you can cherry pick the most suitable licencing mode ( like with many microsoft product ? ) of course this opens up a big can of worms regarding licencing complexity , of which Microsoft is a great example!