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So with the recent announcement from Broadcom that perpetual licensing will be dropped in the future, are you planning on buying a perpetual copy of ESXi before they are yanked off the shelves? I know that they got me to “Buy It Now!”, but I’m just a floozy essentials user with a sugar buzz after the holiday pot-luck lunch, and it wasn’t difficult to justify the $600 end of year, emotionally fueled spur of the moment purchase. Got to say, feels very passive aggressive… so much so that it reminds me of a redhead I used to date. Now I just have to wait for the make up coitus. I hope Broadcom is gentle.

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The licensing procedures are still up in the air. First we heard it would be end of sale that day. Now we are hearing that customers might have until mid January to complete existing renewals and purchases that had previously been quoted.

The biggest impact to buying a Perpetual license now is that they WILL be suspending the renewal of SnS maintenance which will effectively end the ability to upgrade your perpetual keys. The license you buy now will be the last major version available for you. Now that might not mean much as long as the 6.x family lasted and even 7.x still the preferred choice for most businesses, but unless I had an impending project I would not run out to try to oversubscribe on perpetual seats.

Hope that helps.

Jason

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Yes, bought earlier this year, along with the longest support contract we could get.

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I am using 7 now, but under current support so I expect that they will let me convert my keys to 8 and even 9 in the future, as my support is until 2026. I do need to get more licensing though, so this should be interesting…

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I renewed for 3 years before all the changes earlier this year since I knew it was headed that way. We will reevaluate at the end what direction we may want at the end of the 3 years.

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I’ve seen a (possibly cherry-picked?) example touting of a potential cost reduction for ‘some’ VMWare/Broadcom customers, but, given a new ‘cost per core’ model, many will likely be looking at massive price increases forthcoming. (At least the new ‘reaming per core’ pricing model is ‘simplified’, however, right?)

Wonder if the search hits on XCP-NG, TrueNAS Scale, and Proxmox have ticked upwards? :slight_smile:

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You also need SnS to get updates and patches which most people running prod need to have. The weird thing about people mad about perpetual going away, still always had a SnS payment (if they wanted to patch it).

For The smaller Essentials Plus customers I would go ahead and quite Standard edition as it should be cheaper up to ~62 cores, as it now INCLUDES a vCenter Server license. If you are using vSAN or VROPS you’ll want to quote VVF, and if you are doing dense vSAN (1TB per core or more) or need NSX, you should look at VCF.

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The price of VCF is basically 1/2 what it was before, and it now includes more things (Except the IDS/Microsegmentation stuff from NSX).

If you were on the VCS bundle, VVF should be cheaper. All licensing tiers now include a vCenter Server license so no more 4K or whatever that was.

Technically licensing has been for per core for over a year now for licensing from VMware. If you bought OEM you could still get sockets, but it had a maximum core rating as of the newer release, so in some ways it was less flexible.

TrueNAS is a storage platform, that you can run a few apps on, but not one I would see anyone replacing vSphere with. We actually use the free version (FreeNAS) for some things in VMware HOLs (Simple nested NFS endpoint for a datastore in a nested environment). If your going to run KVM in production I would STRONGLY suggest you call Redhat, but all the things you listed don’t have perpetual licensing, and do subscriptions also for Support and extra features.

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SnS is relatively inexpensive. I have SA on Microsoft licenses I purchased over 10 years ago! :slight_smile:

One of the selling points I have repeatedly heard from John on his excellent podcast is that with VSAN, you paid server commodity pricing for media and not storage vendor pricing (and the storage vendor markup over commodity seems typically ~5x), and then just VMware SnS going forward, even as you refresh to new hardware. With traditional storage, you pay for everything all over again as you refresh.

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Unfortunately, none of them are even close to what VMware is doing… I can dive deep into details if needed, but I think you did enough of the homework already to know what I’m taking about.

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