What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
If SMBs want VM based backups, then most likely will look at something like Veeam, which is ridiculously expensive. in comparison the the hyper-visor license. $3600 for 3 hosts.
But that is available for free with XenServer. So I think remains an ancillary concern. Yes, Veeam is very, very expensive, no doubt there. But I think that that just adds to the concerns about the VMware ecosystem, that the things that you want or need are all extra. You are always paying a premium to get what is free and included in the other products.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
So I think the real question how much will my entire infrastructure licensing costs be, between Xen and VMware platforms.
Sounds like $4,600 compared to $0.
Support is a factor, but very few SMBs use VMware support, I don't think, and even fewer use the Essentials Plus license that gets them that. Most go for Essentials which does not come with support.
If, for some reason, you need support AND need to pay for it up front, VMware Essentials Plus is not too horrible - but leaves you with a lot of limitations. How unlikely would it be for someone that feels that support is that valuable to also not have qualified people staffed that wouldn't need support and/or would find having more than three nodes under a single pane of glass valuable?
I think that there is serious merit there, but that it hits an extreme niche. If you need support for your hypervisor, something else is almost always wrong. And if you can be limited to just three hosts, while still needing support and big time features, I would guess that you are in the massive minority.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
@scottalanmiller I kind of look at it slightly a different way... In Aus, the essentials license costs $1,025, for 3 hosts and 3 years of support.
Ah, just realized, you said Essentials in Australia. It is similar cost in the US but comes with zero support. So you get nothing that XenServer doesn't come with for free. Less, actually, since there is good free community support with XenServer to a level that Vmware doesn't really have. Both have some, of course.
People often mention support with Essentials but at least in the US, it's a myth. Only Essentials Plus has support.
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Vmware's entry level supported product in the US is $4,500. So with Veeam is just over $8,000. That's not for three years, that's just up front for the first year! That's non-trivial. Not many SMBs can start throwing $8,000 around without blinking. If they needed to spend it, sure, even someone at home can drop that if they have to. But when a lot of these SMBs have total server infrastructure budgets of only $4,000 to $15,000 and you want to tack on as much as 200% higher cost just for software that they could get for free from multiple other top tier vendors, that's pretty significant.
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Essentials, at $500 up front and $65 more per year does allow you to pay $300 per incident for support. But that's pretty crappy and is very different from coming with support. It's just access to buy support. Like Windows products. They are unsupported, but you are free to purchase support as you go. VMware has a much better support reputation, of course, but pay as you go product support tends to be bad.
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@scottalanmiller I think it really comes down to what you are familiar with... An hour saved by using VMware more than pays for the license cost. At least with the figures I put forward.
Even if you don't get support there is time saved in the fact that VMware is more prevalent / supported. VMware is by far the widest supported HV (which is what I meant by them being the market leader). This means you are always guaranteed to get driver support etc....
There are alternatives to Veeam, which are far cheaper. I was just stating it to show where the VMware platform falls short.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
@scottalanmiller I think it really comes down to what you are familiar with... An hour saved by using VMware more than pays for the license cost. At least with the figures I put forward.
You are making way more per hour than the people that I know in the SMB space! Even with your numbers we'd be looking at a day or two of labour, minimum, from normal IT staff. And having worked with both, I normally find that VMware has the larger learning curve (licensing alone tips the scales to XenServer's favour) with possibly break even up front but XenServer winning over time more and more as its ease of use and lower cost continues to be to its advantage.
Even knowing VMware well and XenServer not at all, the time needed to switch is only a few hours. Easy recuperated from a single licensing research incident for Vmware.
Effort especially is a place where XenServer wins pretty heavily, IMHO.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Even if you don't get support there is time saved in the fact that VMware is more prevalent / supported. VMware is by far the widest supported HV (which is what I meant by them being the market leader). This means you are always guaranteed to get driver support etc....
I'd call this only kind of true. Because Xen and KVM leverage the vastly larger and more broadly supported Linux ecosystem. So they have much broader driver support. Many times larger. So if driver support is a goal (I'm not saying that it should be) then Vmware loses big time. Xen and KVM would be tops, Hyper-V next to last and VMware a distant last with only a small fraction of the driver support of all of its competitors.
Now, that being said, I think that VMware's lack of driver support is actually an advantage that it has - it essentially blocks questionable products from being able to run VMware ESXi by lacking driver support. It's very effective at curtailing some common problems. But it limits the product. If your IT department has good processes you can voluntarily bring these advantages to Xen or whatever, too.
Xen and KVM also have enterprise software RAID drivers built in. And storage replication technology built in. These are non-trivial features in many cases.
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@markds said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
There are alternatives to Veeam, which are far cheaper. I was just stating it to show where the VMware platform falls short.
it's an odd one. If you ignore the Veeam advantage, VMware loses one of its biggest selling points. If you don't ignore it, you have to add the cost of Veeam into the cost calculation of VMware. SO many people just assume that the two will go together that it's almost worth referring to the combination as VMware/Veeam.
However, you can get Veeam for Hyper-V as well, correct? It's not a pure VMware sales point.
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Just for reference, if you did decide that you needed support with VMware vs. XenServer; the difference in lowest price is $4200. Vmware's lowest option is $4500 and XenServer's lowest option is $345.
Not that they are directly comparable, but XenServer does offer full support, just like Vmware, but at a granularity that is likely more palpable to the SMB market in many cases.
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I have a basic ESXi Essentials subscription and got telephone support recently. I'd originally e-mailed them and was surprised they phoned me be because based on this thread I didn't think I had telephone support! I paid less than $176 for a 3 year "licence support contract". That's $59 per year. That's pretty much free for unlimited telephone support.
It looks like you're just getting a bad deal in the US:
https://www.vmware.com/support/services/compare.htmlI think Essentials is a good fit for a lot of SMBs. At least outside of the US. I haven't worked anywhere where I need more than that. And it's cheap IMO. If you want/need more functionality then I can definitely see where alternative products might offer much better value, but not everyone does.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
I think Essentials is a good fit for a lot of SMBs. At least outside of the US. I haven't worked anywhere where I need more than that. And it's cheap IMO.
Here are my questions around that though, because I hear this a lot.
- What makes it a good fit when you give up so much flexibility and functionality?
- What makes $500 cheap compared to $0?
If the competition was expensive or the same price, I'd totally understand. But $500 isn't cheap to a lot of SMBs and even to rich shops, money always matters. That $500 has to buy something worth more than $500. But, in the majority of cases, doesn't spending the $500 also result in a loss of functionality and increased risk (through loss of flexibility?) So the loss isn't just the loss of $500 but additional cost from the extra work (license management for example, unique to Vmware) and loss of features.
One thing that I've noticed Vmware shops routinely do is throw out very usable gear because they exhausted their VMware license counts and are not willing to pay for VMware ESXi to be installed on the available hardware. The cost of VMware starts to influence other decisions making it often less valuable than it appears because people often ignore that factor. But if they had been running any other product, that usable hardware would have been able to have been virtualized and put under a single pane of glass for management for free. Doesn't impact everyone, but I see this commonly. Pretty much anyone that can spend $500 without it being a problem also tends to have enough hardware to where the $500 doesn't cut it.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
I have a basic ESXi Essentials subscription and got telephone support recently. I'd originally e-mailed them and was surprised they phoned me be because based on this thread I didn't think I had telephone support! I paid less than $176 for a 3 year "licence support contract". That's $59 per year. That's pretty much free for unlimited telephone support.
Your deal is nothing like what we get in the US. You are paying far less (we pay $500+ up front and like $50 per year on top of that) and if you get any support, email or phone, that's something that we do not get. We have to pay $300 per incident for anything whatsoever.
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@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Your deal is nothing like what we get in the US.
That's the key. If we're paying $500 up-front + $59 per year, over a typical 5 year life cycle that works out at a total cost of $148 per year. I don't believe you can get unlimited telephone and remote support on Hyper-V or XenServer for that? So ESXi could be seen as the cheapest option in many cases.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Your deal is nothing like what we get in the US.
That's the key. If we're paying $500 up-front + $59 per year, over a typical 5 year life cycle that works out at a total cost of $148 per year. I don't believe you can get unlimited telephone and remote support on Hyper-V or XenServer for that? So ESXi could be seen as the cheapest option in many cases.
But we can't get that with ESXi either. See the dilemma? In the US, at least, VMware includes no support at even a slightly higher price point.
So if you are in the UK and if support is considered the key deciding factor rather than functionality, that would make for a compelling argument. In the US, it's a pure loss as VMware has less support, less functionality, fewer features, license overhead and infinitely higher acquisition cost.
This is a tough one if VMware has a totally different price structure in the UK than in the US. We often face this with hardware in Canada, their prices might be literally double ours making things that seem like obvious choices possibly very, very different.
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@Carnival-Boy The price for what you are stating as the UK support features in the US is $4500 up front and $500/year. So in five years is $7,000. Three times the cost of XenServer with support, for example. And XenServer charges over time without the financially painful front loading.
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It's not the UK, Scott. If you take a look at the link I posted, it's standard VMWare support worldwide except the US. Why the US is different, I don't know. It seems weird.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
It's not the UK, Scott. If you take a look at the link I posted, it's standard VMWare support worldwide except the US. Why the US is different, I don't know. It seems weird.
Oh okay, I see. Well that makes a little more sense.
So the question then should be... "what is the upside to Vmware to the SMB in the US?"
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
It's not the UK, Scott. If you take a look at the link I posted, it's standard VMWare support worldwide except the US. Why the US is different, I don't know. It seems weird.
On the link that you sent to me, i don't see what part you are addressing for me to look at. It appears to not mention the Essentials package in any way but only lists support information once you have support, which Essentials (in the US at least) does not include. So given that there is no support to check against, I am not seeing where you see support available for non-US but not the US.
Can you screenshot the relevant part or something?
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
It's not the UK, Scott. If you take a look at the link I posted, it's standard VMWare support worldwide except the US. Why the US is different, I don't know. It seems weird.
If I go to the VMware UK page, it shows the exact same data that I screenshot above for the UK - even the pricing is in USD the same, and it says no support for the UK either.
