What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?
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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.
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Here is the page that says that UK doesn't get support for Essentials. Maybe you used to and don't any longer?
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Checked Australia, same deal. US prices, no support.
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Not sure what you mean by Essentials doesn't include support. You can't buy support in the US? Like I said, I pay $59 a year for support. That's the basic support package as per the link.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Not sure what you mean by Essentials doesn't include support. You can't buy support in the US? Like I said, I pay $59 a year for support. That's the basic support package as per the link.
Yes, US and UK both allow you to buy support, but that's a separate cost and not part of Essentials. Essentials includes no support itself. If you want support, that is an additional cost above and beyond Essentials.
Basic Support is specifically not included in Essentials but only in Essentials Plus, which starts at $4500.
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@Carnival-Boy said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Like I said, I pay $59 a year for support. That's the basic support package as per the link.
You are getting quite the deal. The line item for both the US and UK is "required subscription" and does not include support until you pay ten times that amount. It's not a support fee, it's a mandatory fee to keep your systems licensed. If you stop paying it, you aren't allowed to keep running VMware. But it comes with no support. At least not officially. Maybe you got a special one time deal, maybe they supported you on accident, I have no idea. But I can't buy what you have for less than $4500 up front and $500 per year in either the US or the UK.
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Sorry, I keep misquoting the price. It's not $500/year. It is about $1,000 per year to get Basic support. Double what I was thinking.
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The pricing and support guide was screenshotted and posted. That's the current one for the US, UK and Australia (and I would guess everywhere else.) That's officially what we are able to get and what I would have to take to a manager to show what they would pay and what support they could count on.
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If you have a link to how to buy VMware ESXi Essentials with support for cheaper than VMware even lists the mandatory subscription, this is something that we need. That's a tiny fraction of the costs that we see from VMware in any market.
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For reference, when the new "no support" option became standard there were some questions about it. I've seen VMware clarify this many times that there is no support in Essentials (normally, at least.) Here is a VMware rep clarifying that Essentials has no support directly: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/393637-vmware-vsphere-essentials-kits-support-subscription-options
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I think the other issue is convincing others of the benefits of hypervisors like XenServer or Hyper-V. I want to use Hyper-V or Xen for 2 new hosts that will have Citrix XenApp running but convincing management to move from ESXi is a struggle but I think this also comes from our MSP that likes ESXi and pushes that even in the FREE version.
