VMware vSphere Essentials
One of the interesting things coming up in VMware Infrastructure 4 or vSphere as it is now known is the new licensing options aimed at securing a bigger slice of the lucrative SME marketplace.
Many SME’s were put off on the pricing of VMware Infrastructure 3 with Enterprise and Virtual Centre licences for a couple of ESX hosts not leaving you much change out of £10k.
vSphere will introduce an essentials and essentials plus which will offer a reduced feature set compared to the higher end vSphere offerings. Link below shows vSphere version comparison chart.
Although the essentials plus offering has VMware HA it is missing vMotion, DRS and the newly introduced vSphere fault tolerance, which I feel is a bit strange considering the essentials package covers licensing for 3 ESX hosts. Microsoft will include their vMotion equivalent for Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 so could make the essentials package a little less attractive to customers who are looking for the ability to live migrate VM’s between hosts.
Pricing for the essentials plus package is showing as $2995, this includes licenses for 3 physical hosts and vCentre Server for essentials to handle management.
Release date stated as May 21st .
Filed under: Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX/ESXi