There is much comment about VMware post its acquisition by Broadcom and what that means for Kiwi business.

To start with, they have radically reduced their product offerings. There will only be two enterprise products and two SME products.

Any other commonly used products are no longer available individually and will be sold as an add on to one of the following.

• VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF): This is the replacement for vSphere Enterprise Plus and be the sole on premises enterprise grade hypervisor offering. Customers running CPUs with more than 8 cores per CPU socket will see an increase in pricing.
   
• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): This is not really in the scope of our customer base as it covers enterprise hybrid cloud, with a mix of on premises and public cloud.

For SME customers the following 2 products have been retained.

• VMware vSphere Essentials Plus bundle: This is a single SKU, that supports environments with up to 96 CPU cores and 3 hosts. New annual subscription pricing has increased by 500% compared to previous annual support renewals.
• VMware vSphere Standard: This is now sold on a per core basis. Customers running CPUs with more than 8 cores per CPU socket will see an increase in pricing. This product no longer supports any add on features, such as VSAN or Distributed switching.

Many customers may either end up having to sacrifice features, to keep costs down or upgrade to one of the enterprise bundles to keep functionality and most likely end up paying for bundled features they do not need.

Support renewals or new purchases will be on a subscription basis only. Licence renewals will be mandatory to keep the systems running. Historically, with other vendors that have done this, it has resulted in significantly increased pricing over a period of time as customers have become locked into their product suites.

BTG can help. We offer a fully functioning VMware alternative for local Kiwi business.

We can take the risk out of the unknown future of VMware. We provide a reliable and scalable alternative, with a predictable cost structure.

Contact us to understand your alternatives.