VM /ETC

Holding off on vSphere implementation until early next year probably, at least in the production environments. I'm sure it will be run extensively in the lab first. VMware has added a few nice features but I'm not in a real hurry to roll out vSphere to be honest. I don't feel I've gotten enough mileage out of 3.5.0 yet. I'm struggling to keep up with the evaluation and implementation as fast as the product is coming from manufacturing. I'd like to see VMware slow down a little and improve quality. There are plenty of feature enhancements that could have been made to the current product.

lets be careful when saying its too expensive for the SMB...

when you look at how virtualization impacts an organizationa
infrastructure holistically, there are alot of indirect savings
that make the investment still very sensible. administration,
server provisioning, network, storage, security, reliability, and
availability and recoverability are all area that benefit in many ways
by virtualization. so when you look at overall ROI/TCO, its not
just a matter of "licensing cost".

-omar

The new pricing for SMBs is an improvement, they've cut the price by a lot.
Unfortunately, they haven't cut the price enough, and they still aren't providing the SMBs
the ability to manage unlimited hosts, and vMotion, which the competition is and will be providing equivalent capabilities to for free.

This is too little too late; this price improvement should have come a year ago. The competition is providing unlimited central management of unlimited virtualization hosts, and live VM migration, at no cost.

An SMB is not defined by the number of VMs. There's no reason a SMB wouldn't
necessarily have reason to make 50 VMs and need 4 or 5 server hosts.

A SMB embracing virtualization properly and taking full advantage of it
would be expected to have more VMs than 'physical servers'
most SMBs would have without virtualization.

Nice poll. I was wondering what the VMware customer base was going to do once vSphere 4 comes out. In the past, uptake on new releases typically seemed fairly slow. I ran into quite a few shops running ESX 2.5 for a while, all the way until ESX 3.5 or 3.5 Update X was released.

Tom,

If you mean vSphere is more expensive for the open source SMB market then yes, but too expensive for the entire SMB market? If you compare a 20 server shop that uses a 2 host VI even with shared storage to 20 physical host data center how can you make that claim? Maybe you are looking at just licenses, but that's rather narrow sighted. Consider all that is involved from system administration to hardware maintenance and VI, whether using VMware or not, is a better solution. Don't generically claim that VMware is too expensive for the SMB!

Besides, even the open source SMB can use the free VMware hosts. Now if you have beef that you can't get all the best features in that price range, then you need to adjust your expectations. "You get what you pay for."

Lou,

You are correct. vSphere basically still uses the same database back ends as VI3 but there are some changes. Oracle 9i and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 are no longer supported. IBM DB2 is now supported as well.

How many vm's defines a SMB? We run about 80 on 4 vm hosts - 50% used on Dell 2950 - and we are medium-sized. If you need more than 3 vm hosts to run your SMB I kinda think you're not a SMB anymore.

As far as the DB is concerned. vSphere has internal DB Sql 2005 in beta.

Louw

I would like to vote for all three.
I still consider VMware too expen$ive, particularly for the SMB market.
I would withdraw this objection if VMware removed the 3-host limits and just sold a vCenter without limiting what one can do with it.
I have not seen any comments anywhere on whether vCenter 4 will have an internal DB like vCenter 2.5 has (SQL Express 2005, which I expect to be SQL 2008 in vCenter 4).
Thank you, Tom

The VMware licensing is a drop in the bucket for SMB compared to the cost of the storage to make HA and VMotion a reality. It is also a drop in the bucket when compared to the systems administration time it saves you over the long haul.

I personally can't wait to get vSphere going in production. Typically as long as you stay on the beaten trail (following best practices and many default settings) the benefits will outweigh the risks. After last summer's issues with shoddy code releases, I think Paul has pre-chewed the right butts to make sure good product is being released.

That being said, I will probably recommend customers stay on 3.5 so they can continue to leverage the supporting software from companies like Veeam, Vizioncore and VMware themselves (View, SRM and other products won't work out of the gate.).