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VMWare Screw Customers

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Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#21

Post by SageRaven »

Andys wrote: post #3
jjm wrote: post #2

This is a mean price increase.

Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

This is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days.

I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hobby/academic cheap licensing and the price jumped to something like $150 per seat. I remember calling our sales contact and complaining about how much the jump sucked, and when they wouldn't budge, I essentially told no thanks and that I'd wait for the open source options to mature. He, of course, chuckled at this quaint notion.

A few years later I had to chuckle back when they started giving away the basic versions of VMWare, since open source options and Microsoft were by then eating their lunch on the desktop.

Funny how history repeats itself. I hope VMWare lives to regret this latest trend in greed of theirs.

P.S. -- I also had a similar exchange with the Accelerated X folks, back when xfree86 didn't do multi-head very well (or at all). I accused them of gouging their faithful customers and that open source would catch up and they'd be toast. Three cheers for xorg!

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#22

Post by jjm »

wilhil wrote: post #6
jjm wrote: post #2

This is a mean price increase.

Agreed... Only real enterprise alternative is Hyper-V - I have used it quite a bit and do like it, but, I just don't feel as happy using it as I am ESX. Like Windows is dominant on the desktop, ESX pretty much owns the (paid virtualisation) ecosystem through many third party programs. Microsoft is getting there, it is just much slower, but, a price increase like this could be (but I doubt it) VMware's undoing.

I think Oracle does something similar and we all know how that went... they're huge and have lots of cash...

"Enterprise/Big Corp" will buy anything with the right sales person.

http://www.orafaq.com/wiki/Oracle_Licensing#Enterprise_Editi...

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#23

Post by wazoox »

I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#24

Post by glhaynes »

SageRaven wrote: post #21
Andys wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its easy to do this when you have no strong competition, and don't care if you piss off your existing customers. The irony is they want to ride the new wave of public cloud computing, going so far as to sponsor development of a memory database (Redis), and then go and do something regressive like slapping a 24GB-per-CPU memory limit on their core product without a price decrease.

This is an example of VMWare getting high on their horse again. Back in the early 00's, I was working at a large university, and thanks to VMWare's $49 academic/hobby Workstation license, I got my entire department onto it (we all used Linux on the desktop), and I bought myself a personal home license. This was the v1.x days. I forget if it was the 2.x -> 3.x or 3.x -> 4.x upgrade, but they eventually dropped the hob…

Would open source have been way slower to catch up if not for the gouging? If not, then it seems very likely that the "gouging" maximized shareholder value by extracting maximum profits during the period in which they were the sole supplier of a valuable-to-you service. You get (during the period in which they are the only supplier) usage of a product that no one else in the entire world is supplying and they get a few extra bucks. Hard for me to get outraged.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#25

Post by jjm »

wazoox wrote: post #23

I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

Small little detail about myself, I helped out in creating a unified driver package for ESXi and wrote a couple custom *nix net drivers for hardware VMWare wouldn't support (cheap commodity hw). So I agree with you that after I had ditched VMware for KVM I was in heaven. Shoutout to those ppl that used my stuff, and try KVM!

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#26

Post by monochromatic »

wazoox wrote: post #23

I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

> I know this is getting old

Yes, it is.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#27

Post by aliguori »

This is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software. No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project (Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going (LibreOffice).

Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that happens to be free, but it's fundamentally better because it is free (as in speech, of course).

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#28

Post by ssmoot »

wazoox wrote: post #23

I know this is getting old, but here's another nice example of why you should be using Free Software for everything that's really important. KVM works very well; I know it misses some of the nice, pretty interfaces but at least it won't stab you in the back at the next upgrade.

I have two iSCSI Targets. I want to pull a LUN from each, and mirror on the KVM Host system, exposing the mirrored disks for my guests.

Compared to using ZFS on OpenSolaris with Xen 3.1, this process is incredibly cumbersome and unreliable.

Plus I just don't get the need for libvirt. It seems an incredibly complex and useless abstraction over a simply documented configuration file for Guests, and a tool to start/stop/add/remove them.

I'm sure a big part of that may just be that I'm not familiar enough with KVM. Still, it's 2011. Tying all your data to a single host with limited redundancy and depending on live-migration seems like a fundamentally flawed approach to me with a lot of needless complexity.

Re: VMWare Screw Customers

#29

Post by eru »

aliguori wrote: post #27

This is really the primary value proposition of Free and Open Source Software. No matter what happens down the road, no one can suddenly jack up licensing fees. Even if one company decides to try to change the direction of a project (Oracle; OpenOffice), another group can fork it to keep it going (LibreOffice). Alternatives to VMware like KVM aren't just a better version of VMware that happens to be free, but it's fu…

There's also XenServer that's free as in beer and speech. But the freedom in speech is mostly theoretical, because it's so hard to build.
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