Neowin previously covered the major change in pricing that VMware had made for its vSphere 5 product. VMware has now changed its mind somewhat and announced a slightly different pricing scheme.
Each license will now include an increase in the amount of virtual RAM allowed. Enterprise+ will include 96 GB of virtual RAM, while Enterprise will now include 64 GB. The other three products (Standard, Essentials, and Essentials+) will only include a 33 percent increase. vSphere Hypervisor also will receive a boost of its physical memory limit to 32 GB.
For those who wish to run a 1 TB virtual machine, you will now only be charged for the first 96 GB of RAM. The rest will now be free. Pricing will be based on a 12-month average, allowing for those who use virtual machines for disaster recovery and testing to breathe a bit easier.
The downside is that impact of the changes will vary greatly. Users running a small number of virtual machines will still experience high costs due to the reduction of RAM to 96 GB per license. If your machines use less than 96 GB, the changes do help. Users who have less than 192 GB of RAM per socket pair keep the costs the same as they did with vSphere 4. However, for most companies the sting of the cost increase is only diminished, not removed entirely. Users may still choose to leave vSphere even with the pricing changes.
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