What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware vSphere?

They should keep the old alignment with normal indexation, which would be fine, but now the gap is too much.

While VMware vSphere is a very strong and complex tool, the pricing should be more visible. Many customers are trying to avoid it due to its high cost.

The solution is too expensive. Licensing has become more difficult to obtain. About three or four years ago, I would have recommended VMware vSphere more strongly, however, currently, the price and licensing issues are deterrents.

We have no experience with the pricing as we are using the free version.

Costs significantly increased from perpetual to subscription, with prices rising by two to three times over three to five years.

The solution's licensing is costlier than other hypervisors.

Earlier, the solution had a perpetual license, but now, it has a subscription. Also, they have increased the price. The certification is costly.

VMware vSphere on-premises is still cheaper than the cloud. It's the kind of technology you can always count on.

The product is very expensive.

I find it highly expensive. I would rate it ten out of ten. It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities.

We are using the tool's free version.

The product is expensive. I rate the pricing a three out of ten. They have multiple products with extra services. It increases the cost.

It's a common trend as many progressive IT firms are transitioning towards cloud or virtual environments due to factors like pricing, SMAX, and VMatter. In this regard, I would rate VMware as moderately satisfactory. I would rate it seven out of ten.

The licensing model is yearly-based. It is quite expensive. Moreover, there are extra costs to the standard licensing fees.

Its price could be lower. There is the cost of one license, and then there is the subscription cost for support.

There are not any licensing costs.

Our customers typically use permanent licenses, not subscription-based. However, there are subscript-based licenses.

It depends on the contract they have with VMware.

Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis. The license is a one-time payment. You buy it once and own it forever, but you must pay for support, which is provided by the vendor, on a yearly basis.

We pay for the license of VMware vSphere yearly.

This solution is quite expensive, but it provides the same functionality as its competitors. Today, you have the Nutanix Hypervisor, which I believe is AHV and is also very good. However, because our infrastructure is so large, we have Nutanix servers that are similar to Hyperconverged, but we run VMware on them. However, we have some other sites where we have installed the Nutanix Hypervisor, which is AHV. And it is effective. And it's free if you buy the Nutanix bundle. The license is expensive. It is powered by the CPU. The more CPU' you have, the more you have to buy.

In order to maintain stability, you should ensure that your physical machine is equipped with enough RAM, else it becomes ineffective.

The solution has standard licensing fees. Support is the only additional cost.

The cost of the licenses is acceptable and we haven't seen any major increases from the vendor in the time we've been using it. This is not a cheap product but it's an investment. There is a cost associated whenever we need to add licenses.

We have an on-premises setup. There aren't any extra costs involved.

Its licensing is typically yearly. From a value standpoint, it's worth it.

Pricing can still be improved for this product.

You do have to purchase a license in order to use the solution. The solution should base its prices on what the market can handle. Right now, it's a bit expensive. The price is a little bit higher when you go for the enterprise edition. The Standard edition is quite low and the enterprise edition is quite high.

There is an annual subscription to use this solution.

Licensing fees are not paid yearly, or monthly.

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

The licensing model is not complex. It is a perpetual licensing but there is also an annual maintenance cost. The price of the solution depends on the features that you want. You can have a very basic setup or you can choose a more advanced set of features. The more features that you want and the more extensive your requirement is, the more you have to pay.

Our license is on a yearly basis.

We pay for the solution on an annual basis. There are no additional fees other than the standard license.

VMware is expensive, from the baseline, initial investment. It depends, though, because if someone goes for ESXi—the latest version, ESXi Essential, or even the opensource—then it is not available in Microsoft. ESXi opensource is totally free, and the only features that aren't available are some API features. But if someone has a small office with less than 50 users, and they just need to run the hypervisor, then VMware is a free solution for that. If someone is considering the price and comparing Business ESXi with Hyper-V, if they already have an existing Windows license, then I would suggest going for Hyper-V because it's much cheaper. Aside from that, I would recommend going for VMware.

On a government contract, everything's just a base price. You don't get much of a choice. We'd always like to see the price drop, but I realize that may not be realistic.

You do need a license. Most of these vendors also offer what they call the free version of the software. If you want more support, more features, you have to go for the paid versions. That said, you can still get the free or community version of it.

We have a yearly subscription that we pay for this product.

My customers pay for a license to use vSphere. In Egypt, the license is yearly, and we buy three years.

The organization pays the licensing fees.

I'm satisfied with the VMware vSphere price. They have a bundle that is priced well. However, any advantage feature is very costly.

The licensing and pricing need to be improved. The price is not an issue for our mid-sized or large-sized customers, but it can be expensive for our smaller customers.

The licensing is perpetual licensing that you pay for once. As far as the price of the license, I can't think of anyone who will say, "I'm happy with the pricing." There's always room for improvement. But, you get what you pay for. It's as simple as that. With vSphere, from my perspective, I don't want problems. I want it to be as seamless as possible. That's unfortunately why you've got to pay for it.

The solution comes with a yearly subscription license.

We pay our licensing fees on a yearly basis.

We pay for an annual subscription. We recommend users pay for VMware support because you might need it. We cannot use it without the support license. Here in Egypt, we would like everything free. So if you give us the license for free, we would be thrilled.

There's a yearly licensing fee, however, it isn't overly expensive.

In my opinion, the price is not cheap, nor it is expensive. It's average.

Our customers incur a yearly licensing fee, one of three or five years, in fact.

While I'm sure we are paying some sort of licensing fee, I cannot speak to any exact details. That's handled by management and is not something that I have to deal with directly.

Our customers have the option of paying the licensing fee when they purchase the solution or renting it from us. If a customer chooses to rent the solution, the customer pays us and we purchase the solution.

We don't have an active subscription. We have a prepaid or permanent license.

The price of the solution could be cheaper compared to others.

The biggest pain when it comes to VMware is that licensing costs are pretty high. The product itself has been around for so many years, I'm sure they can offer much better terms. The licensing is paid on a yearly basis.

Considering the number of users, it is pretty reasonable. I am not aware of any costs in addition to the licensing fees.

We are on a perpetual license for VMware vSphere and the price can be expensive compared to other solutions, such as Hyper-V. They should lower their price.

As the vSphere platform allows for a variety of additions, it is quite good. There is enterprise plus, enterprise and standard, so the pricing is not too bad.

They can do better by giving better pricing. Their pricing is on the expensive side. As a matter of fact, we are considering switching to OpenStack. We only work with perpetual licenses. As a company, we don't do subscriptions.

The price could be better. The license is definitely expensive.

There is a perpetual license for this solution and the support is a yearly subscription.

The solution requires a license and it could be cheaper.

There are different licensing costs depending on whether you're using the standard or enterprise solution. A socket in the standard solution might cost $1,000 whereas it would cost $4,000 for the enterprise socket.

We pay for our license.

You can save quite a bit using this solution.

The licensing could be lower.

When comparing the price of VMware solutions to other vendors, such as Nutanix, they are costly.

There is a standard license required for this solution.

I'm not a pricing or budgeting person, but I know that its price is a little bit high, and they can consider reviewing it. Its price is probably the highest in this domain.

I think the licensing cost depends on the number of users.

One of the problems with the solution is the pricing. The licenses are not cheap. We do pay a yearly licensing fee. Originally, it was a five-year package. Now we pay either every 12 or every 24 months. If I have three hosts, just three hosts, a minimum of three hosts plus the vSphere and Center, I'm almost spending close to $250,000 a year. That's half a million in every two years inside just three hosts. In a serious medium enterprise where we would need at least 20 hosts, it means our annual fee or annual license cost could jump into the million-dollar range which means in three years you're spending three million alone on software.

We do pay for the solution. It's on a yearly basis.

It is very expensive as compared to other competitive hypervisor solutions in the market today. Its competitors are actually more aggressive. Even though most of them are less established solutions, they have started to catch up in functionality and capacity, and their pricing is extremely aggressive.

There is an annual cost for the use of this solution. The price is a little high in developing countries. If they were able to reduce the price they would receive more customers now and even more in the future.

The pricing is a little bit on the expensive side, and the licensing is on a yearly basis.

It's a monthly subscription model.

This is not the cheapest solution, but when you consider the stability of VMware vSphere, it is a great solution.

The licensing price is fair compared to other similar solutions.

The price could improve for the enterprise versions.

It's a pricey solution. The price could be better. We pay for licenses on a yearly basis.

Our licensing fees on paid on a yearly basis and the pricing is fine.

The price is reasonable.

I'm not sure what the pricing of the product is. It's not an aspect of the solution I typically handle.

Normally our clients go for a one-time cost because that's easier for them. They don't want to go for recurring costs. But some clients prefer to go for recurring costs. It depends on the client and doesn't depend on us. Once you pay for the standard license, that's it unless you want another feature to be activated. That's a different thing.

We are currently buying some more licenses to be able to move to version 7. The solution is expensive, however, due to the criticality of the features on offer, for us, it's worth the cost.

The cost varies from customer to customer. VMware offers various price policies, and therefore I'm unsure of how it differs from client to client.

I currently use the yearly licensing option, and I think that the pricing is fine for this solution.

It's a perpetual license paid on a yearly basis. A customer can buy a license and support on a yearly basis. The pricing should be more flexible and more affordable for the customer.

This is an expensive product and the price needs to be reduced.

I don't handle the licensing or payments process and therefore don't have visibility into how much the solution costs or what the payment structure is.

The price could always be lower, but I think it's fair.

Its price is slightly higher for India. It is a little bit expensive on a monthly basis when considering the value of the Indian rupee.

The licensing has become cheaper over time. As there are multiple offerings, it depends on how you are leveraging.

The licensing is on a subscription basis. The solution, in general, is quite expensive. They should work to make it less costly for their customer base.

Its price is quite high. VMware licensing is quite costly. You have to pay for the CPU and Threads, but if you want good service, you have to pay the price. Its cost is not more than 1 million for us.

The cost of the solution is relatively low. VMware proposes the Essentials kits which are very affordable for SMB companies.

This is quite an expensive product, although everything is included in the standard licensing fee.

It could be cheaper. But not only cheaper because Nutanix's hypervisors are free of charge out of the box. You don't even have to pay for the hypervisor's enterprise version. Given that, I don't think VMware should be charging so much for the hypervisor. The hypervisor is a commodity now.

vSphere is very expensive.

Basic vSphere, without centralized management, is free. When you get into the centralized management vCenter server, it starts adding cost. Then, it's license-based upon the number of CPUs in your host servers.

I don't like the price because it's too expensive.

Licensing costs aren't too expensive, although you pay extra for additional features.

The pricing is reasonable and you are able to purchases licencing for certain time frame intervals, monthly, yearly etc.

The price could be lower.

As far as I know, there is a standard licensing fee. It all depends on the options that you choose and what you need for each business. Every company that I've worked for has had a different pricing model and a different set of use cases. So pricing can range anywhere from $700-$800 per server core, all the way up $2,000-$3,000 per core.

It is expensive.

This is an expensive product, especially because we need to pay in US Dollars. Really, it depends on the exchange rate. If the exchange in our country is bad then the product becomes even more expensive.

The license growth of vSphere depends on the growth of the visual environment and the addition of more hosts.

In terms of pricing, a little bit of improvement is required. There is a lot of competition in the market. If you talk about Nutanix, Nutanix is much cheaper than this product. Very recently, we lost out on a contract due to the pricing.

It's not a cheap solution. The maintenance specifically is quite expensive. I also find that it's more expensive than the higher tier products. We've looked at buying into something like a vROPS or whatever they call it today. However, when you look at the cost and the benefits, although there is great benefit in the product, it's just never been a cost discussion that we've been able to entertain with management. Similar to vSAN, we looked at that a couple of times. It's a great product and it has proven itself. It's brilliant. It's stable. However, as soon as you look at any peripheral products, it becomes quite expensive, as it's licensed per socket or per blade or per server or whatever.

Pricing is a little bit on the higher side, compared to other products.

vSphere 7.0.1 offers a lot more than the previous version. Container support is the last great addition for VMware and it is worth the money you spend on it.

Everything is always too expensive. Of course, they could improve on that side and then probably they will have to. I know they revisited the licensing costs of the user charge. Now they charge per core instead of per socket. This will make them more expensive than they were and maybe it will make them also less price competitive with some other solution on the market. On a Windows environment, Hyper-V is pretty much free, however, you need to license all the cores anyway if you're going to install any Windows on the physical server. Therefore, when you use Windows servers and virtual machines, you have to pay an additional tax, let's say, for vSphere if you want to use vSphere for the hypervisor. That's something that you don't need to do with Microsoft Hyper-V. Of course, there are other hypervisors that are free - like KVM. On the cost, right now, they pretty much are the most expensive solution Ion the market.

The price of this solution is mid-range. There are additional features that can be purchased for an extra charge. For example, if you want replication between sites then you have to pay more.

We have the licensing for the solution and the perpetual license which we have allows us to choose whether we want a support license separate or not. It's not an overly expensive solution. The pricing is average.

It is expensive.

The solution is extremely expensive, especially for startups such as ours, who don't have the capacity to invest so much in such a product.

In my opinion, the essential version is a good price.

VMware vSphere is a top enterprise solution, so we pay the price for a major product. We use vSphere because when we get the project, the customers were already using it. But currently, for example, if we have a new project and we are setting up our environment, and we have no constraints about the technology, like using vSphere, we rather go for Proxmox. We are using it because it was already there before. The cost of migration, for example, is too high to move into different solutions, and the cost of keeping it is enough, and so we accept it. Overall, I would like to have cheaper licensing costs and maybe a different policy for licensing. However, we don't see that as a big issue because we are paying for a good solution. That's why I think it's a fair price. We are using it on the production side, and everything is good from our experience. That's why I would say that the cost isn't too high. However, it would always be nice if it was cheaper.

It is expensive in terms of cost, licensing, and professional services.

After getting a headache, you will find the cost is reasonably cheaper.

Do not buy based on price alone. Many of my customers chose the lowest cost option only to discover that the additional funds needed to access even a few more features would have been money well spent. Likewise, if you are going to spend more money on additional features, then have a plan to actually deploy and integrate those features into your infrastructure. Many customers never take full advantage of the many features that they are paying for and that can be avoided by being proactive in developing your overall vision for the infrastructure.

The license of VMware is a one-time payment and you can continue to enroll in support for troubleshooting and also administer the licenses.

The licensing fees are on a yearly basis.

This is really a niche area, but we have an enterprise license for our business. We have many users on our cloud applications, so we went with a costly enterprise license. VMware does provide organizations with discounts. The customer service license fee we got discounts on from the supplier in order for us to get the best out of the license fees. That's our experience. We possibly paid less than our partner company. The partner is only local and not global like our firm.

Depends on your budget and skill set.

VMware licensing and pricing are a bit more expensive compared to others, like Hyper-V. However, you get what you pay for.

The pricing is expensive but we really do not have a choice.

The price is high. It would be nice if VMware made a price reduction.

The pricing is a little expensive, and the licensing is a bit complex.

The pricing is a bit complex.

It is expensive. Other solutions on the market are free. We had to plan with VMware how many hosts that we needed in order to determine the price.

The pricing is justified. It may be a bit high, but the features are worth it.

Pricing is competitive I would say, because usually we buy the software, along with the hardware stock so it's usually a bundle thing that we try to squeeze the hardware windows in to get us proper discounts. So, it is regularly higher than what a Microsoft overall solution turns out to be. But, the capabilities are worth it. The price is justified. Licensing is pretty standard.

The price is high, but you get a lot functionnality included with the product. You can also start with the free version of ESXi.

The cost is a bit high.

I think that vSphere is an expensive solution.

The pricing could be improved.

Pricing is the one "ding" I have against it. Except for VMware vSphere Essentials, it would be pretty challenging for anything but a medium or large size company to use.

We would like it to be affordable to use the manage services on the cloud, then let VMware manage it and have AWS a part of it. This would make the easier transition from on-premise to cloud and be of value. We don't want to go through a third-party vendor.

Pricing is insanely expensive. We spent millions of dollars on NSX. If you want anything, it costs you more. The pricing model is constantly changing. We wanted to look at HCX, but we had to get it bundled with NSX and vRNI. We already have vRNI. I will be installing, architecting, and rolling it out. However, how does it affect the cost for HCX? We still haven't received a real answer.

It is cost effective.

I miss the Enterprise tier. When they went to Enterprise Plus, it increased the price. I was one of the guys that operated well inside the Enterprise tier. I paid a little bit more than standard but I got a lot more features. Enterprise Plus has a lot of things that I'll never use. So when they chopped that tier out, they kneecapped me. If you go with a standard license, it's very affordable. If you start digging into how they price all of their add-ons compared to Hyper-V, you get into the mud, because Hyper-V bundles everything together. So, at least you can customize your pricing to exactly what you need, so that is a plus.

Pricing can be an issue in terms of scalability, depending on how quickly you want to expand. If you budget every year, put some aside that you know you need to get another host and you plan for it, then it shouldn't be that hard. If you're going to try to all of a sudden say, "I want to add six hosts to my environment," then it's going to a little bit pricey and you're not going to want to spend the budget on it.

The pricing is too expensive. The reason why we implemented Hyper-V is because of the licensing costs. They are way too high. This is tough when you have to present to management with a flat budget, and everything will be more expensive.

It is easy to understand the licensing of vSphere. We have standard enterprise licensing. The pricing is more expensive than Microsoft.

VMware is costly versus other competitors but is still one of the market leaders and expanding now with partners like AWS. Ensure you get the right licensing for the feature sets you want within the product and research what those are. Setup can be easy if you have someone that has worked with VMware before or costly when hiring external help, but research in to implementers prior to hiring them is always the best method to get good ones.