As you should have heard by now vCloud Suite will be available as a free – well almost free.
According to the VMware vCloud Suite Upgrade Promotion you have until December 15, 2012 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (PT) if you have purchased vSphere Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise Plus as of August 27th, 2012 and you have an active Support and Subscription agreement to upgrade to vCloud Standard Edition
So for the Enterprise Plus customers this is a no-brainer … or is it???
What many people do not understand is that from a CAPEX perspective you come out on top. But OPEX is where you will feel the hit - with your renewal of your support. Brian Knudston started to address this in his article.
From the Support FAQ
Q. Is Subscription and Support (SnS) required?
A. For the “$0 upgrade” from vSphere Enterprise Plus to vCloud Suite Standard, the existing SnS contract will persist and no additional SnS is required at time of purchase and the new SnS rate will be charged at the next renewal When the upgrade is selected, the same level of support must be chosen for the upgrade that covered the original vSphere Enterprise Plus license. For example, if the vSphere Enterprise Plus was covered by VMware Basic Support, then the upgrade to vCloud Suite Standard must also have VMware Basic Support.
Let’s put this into numbers for a minute. I have taken the list prices from the VMware site.
(Of course not many people pay list price so your exact number will differ)
Take the following example. My infrastructure has 50 vSphere Hosts (Dual socket) with Enterprise Plus edition. My SnS expires on December 31, 2012.
$874 x 100 = $87,400 to renew my Support and Subscription for one year. 
I decided to take VMware up on their generous offer and upgrade all my Enterprise Plus hosts to vCloud Standard for a huge amount of 0$.
Sweet deal!! I now have vCloud Director which I can deploy in my Enterprise – and it did not cost me anything.
Along comes January 1st, 2013 and I have to pay for my SnS renewal.
Here is the math.
$1,249 x 100 = $124,900 to renew my Support and Subscription for one year.
Hey – my support costs just jumped by – yep… 43%.
Is this worthwhile – I think that each and every organization will have to do the math for themselves. If your SnS is already paid up for the next 3 years then you might even save money. If you were already going to invest in vCloud director then it could be that will come out on top.
There is no such a thing as a free lunch.
11 comments:
Thank you very
much for making me aware of this. A very important observation.
"the existing SnS contract will persist and no additional SnS is required at time of purchase" <- Does that mean that if you extend your SnS before upgrading, the extended SnS is valid? The upgrade site does not mention SnS bought after August 27th, just that licenses purchased after that date are not eligible.
If that´s the case, you can potentially extend the "free" period by a few years...
Christian, You are correct, as long as the licenses were in place before 27th Aug you can extend the current SnS prior to upgrading to the suite. Thereby extending the SnS for a period of 3 years (if you like)
Unfortunately not enough people are aware of this. Glad you could make use of it
Your original SnS cost is double my whole IT budget for a year :(
Thanks for the tip Christian.
I confirmed it with our VMware rep. We could extend our SnS out to 2016. Then the savings made over 3 yrs would cover the higher costs of the vCloud SnS in 2016. So the business would only feel the increase in 2017. The downside then is who knows what the virtual world will look like that far out, and if we'd be using external cloud providers.
Thanks for the update. You are right about the future - way ahead in 2017. Who knows...
The SnS for vCloud Suite Standard provides support for vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware Networking and Security Standard, vCloud Director and vCloud Connector Advanced.
Support is based on a percentage of the the list price of the products; that is normal. The license cost is free for this promotion, that is promotional. The increased license cost occurs only at renewal not immediately; that is promotional (as Christian Mohn pointed out).
So there are two promotions actually; one for the license (permanent) and one for the SnS (until renewal). Inversely, you could focus on what is not free, and for that fee customers get support, upgrades, and patches on additional products beyond vSphere Ent+, namely vCD, VCC and VCNS.
(Neal Mueller, vSphere Product Team at VMware).
Thanks for your comment Neal.
The value in both the promotion for the upgrade and the SnS are very worth while but the hidden cost is still there and not something that everyone notices up front.
I still think that VMware made a very smart move providing this free upgrade not only from a financial perspective, but even more so to provide vCloud larger exposure and to extend the customer-base as well.
Thank you Maish. Feel free to reach out to me again. My email is my first name at vmware.com.
thanks you so much for the article
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