With the launch of vSphere 4.1, VMware announced a new “per-VM” licensing model that will take effect starting September 1.
The new licensing will be applied to most management products, including vCenter AppSpeed, VMware vCenter Chargeback, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vCenter CapacityIQ.
It won’t extend to vCenter Server for now but there’s no reason to believe that VMware will make this exception forever.
iTnews published an interesting piece earlier today about how the per-VM model is impacting the VMware Service Provider Program: while most providers already switched to it, some of the smaller ones are in trouble.
The key point is that the new licensing may negatively affect those companies that have very high consolidation ratio.
This leads to consider what could happen in VDI environments, where the number of virtual machines per core is higher than in server consolidation scenarios, also thanks to multiple techniques like memory overcommitment and linked clones.
View is not yet in the list of products that will have the per-VM license, but like for vCenter Server, it’s likely going to happen.
So the question: is the new per-VM licensing going to increase the cost of VDI?