vmware's new pricing

have you seen vmware's new pricing structure for vsphere 5? there's a lot of folks complaining over there and alot may jump ship.
so how does kvm stack up against it? is kvm's virtual manager free? from what i understand, it isn't with rhel.
just weighting up the options at the moment as we may have to jump ship ourselves.

Welcome to the forum, louis-m. I thought they were high a few years ago I haven't looked in a long time. I'm sure someone will jump in here.

Lots of chat about this on the mailing lists, if you want to trawl the archives. I think it would be fair to summarise though, that KVM isn't really ready for primetime yet, and Vbox much the same, largely due to lack of support from Oracle. I would suggest a review of SL-Users list though.

http://listserv.fnal.gov/archives/scientific-linux-users.html

i thought things had moved on with rhel6 and kvm?

see here with oracle

good article on the new vmware pricing structure

hi joutlan,
another centos refugee here. after watching the centos saga from the sidelines for the last six months or so, we decided to give other distro's a shot and here we are.
we've made the jump and will be staying with sl. thanks for all the work etc

with regards to vmware, we're unsure whether it will affect us or not but sl6 & kvm is looking tempting for us to try.

Hi Louis-m,

This says it all to me (from your linked article):

I consider the whole concept of "cores" totally disgusting and reprimand-able.
I haven't delved into KVM, at all actually. Per Spoovy I would search the mail list as there's been a lot chatter on there about KVM.

PS: Good choice on SL. I don't see how you can go wrong with it. They are pretty quick with the security errata.

i don't think we will go wrong either.
i'm not an old fuddy duddy but watching the centos saga unfold and then the centos pub crawl did raise some eyebrows with us. see here and see here

i like a beer as much as the next person but advertising and going on a public pub crawl when things weren't quite going to plan is possibly not the smartest thing to do in some people's eyes.

but hey ho, here we are and i don't think we'll look back (apart from not knowing about sl previously)

Here's a review of KVM from the Mail List, from Mr. J. Pulver. Reading it made me think of this thread:

If you're considering KVM, I would jump in on that thread if you're subbed.

we're having a close look at proxmox at the moment which is bare metal kvm based.
from what i can see, even if we went with sl kvm, there are loads of management clients (inc web based) out there as compared to vmware's own offerings.
lots of testing me thinks!

I consider the whole concept of "cores" totally disgusting and reprimand-able.

I agree.

You own this software but only for use on one core... if you want to add another core, buy a license!

I'm amazed that this has even worked as a business model for them, it's just a matter of time I think before this gets crushed as alternatives pop up.

The more people use your software, the more will need it.
And thus change the license and many will simply cough up the money...

That's very true. We're now having to look at possible migration of vm's which is no easy task. Some will simply cough up to save all the aggro but others (like ourselves) will look at alternatives and slowly the word will grow.

Vmware's esxi 5 (free version) only allows you to use 8gb vRam (total for the host, not per vm) before you have to spend some cash. So if you have + 8gb pRam on the host, it's simply ignored.