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

The licenses are very expensive. The renewal of licenses has extra costs attached to it.

Due to recent changes in VMware's licensing approach by Broadcom, the cost has increased significantly, making it less attractive from a cost perspective.

The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions. The OpEx and subscription models are expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten.

With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer. The old cost model was X, and the new model might be 50% more.

We've encountered challenges, particularly with the recent policy changes after Broadcom acquired VMware. The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues. It is difficult to explain the cost implications of upgrades to the customers. I rate the pricing a three out of ten.

Users can use the free version of the product. Users may also start off with the demo version of the tool. After you learn to use the solution, you can buy it if it is beneficial.

If you're willing to have good infrastructure, you need to invest first. Ensuring a stable network and meeting computing requirements ensures proper workload distribution to end users. VMware vSAN offers peace of mind by utilizing applications despite its higher price compared to free or cheaper alternatives. It is expensive but its reliability and technological advancements justify the investment.

The solution's licensing pricing could be improved. The level of discounts available on the solution's licensing price varies from customer to customer. Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license.

It's quite expensive, even too expensive. There are some extra costs, which can be quite pricey. But overall, not too many additional expenses.

Licensing costs are more or less on par with other similar products.

Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run.

Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. Whether it'll be a yearly or a monthly subscription, you have to check with the vendor, because you can buy it for one year, two years, or three years. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years.

The cost of VMware vSAN is reasonable.

VMware vSAN is not expensive. We compare it with Nutanix and the discounts from VMware are really good for vSAN.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees because they are standardized and negotiated by the Ministry of Education. We provided the sizing and after that, the Ministry arranged for the correct licensing.

VMware vSAN is less expensive than having a traditional three-tier solution or a full virtual VFX using a hyper-converged soluton. The cost is still too high and should be lower.

There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive.

The solution can be expensive. However, if you are a big company, such as a telco, likely you can get a good deal on pricing. That said, being so big, likely the cost won't be a deterrent.

The product is quite expensive, regarding the open-source solution. The cost of the solution is a mixture of monthly user and licenses purchasing. So for the internal user, we use licenses purchasing. For an external customer, we use the Pay-Per-View model.

VMware is quite expensive compared to Microsoft's Hyper-V. However, when you factor in flexibility and comparability of use, it's reasonable enough. For the high price of VMware, you get seamless operation and manageability. At the same time, I think VMware is lowering the price for its cloud-based solutions. And it's stable enough that some organizations might want to put part of their setup on the cloud and the other part on-premises. VMware's advantage is that they were already preparing for cloud solutions many years ago.

We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually.

When it comes to the renewal of the license, it's a very expensive solution. We require price protection. VMware doesn't provide price protection. Many other products provide that, however, it's not something that VMware does.

I do think that VMware vSAN's cost could be lower. We pay for the license every year. The cost depends on your contract. The pricing for the government is not the best, but for each licensing, because its arrays are in your servers, it can cost $4,000 for each of the servers for a simple solution and up to $20,000 per server for vSAN solutions. It's very, very expensive.

In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey.

The price of the product is very high. We want to rescale it, however, it's expensive to do so.

We do not currently pay a license fee. I cannot speak to any costs related to having this product in the company.

The pricing vSAN is very expensive. Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget.

I would like to use more advanced models of the solution but the price needs to be reduced. There are some extra costs for this solution including a license.

It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses.

We have a deal with them so we don't pay for individual licenses, it's a complete solution with an overall license.

N/A

The price is okay.

It is expensive, but you get what you pay for.

The price of vSAN could be lower. The licensing fees are paid quarterly.

It is too expensive.

The license is perpetual and there is an additional payment for technical support which is an annual subscription fee. I think it could be cheaper, especially for smaller companies. It's okay for big deployments with a lot of servers and high level of input-output IOPS.

It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features. They should have a reduced license fee for a certain amount of memory and nodes, or some kind of restriction like this, that would allow smaller businesses a reduced price. We have had a hard time to afford the solution. There are a lot of other companies that offer similar solutions and they are becoming more and more competitive with VMware at a fraction of the price. For example, Red Hat.

The price is quite expensive for us.

The price is expensive. This solution is not an option for SBM customers because of the price. There are limitations because of nodes. There is a minimum purchase requirement of three or four nodes along with two processors, which also increases the price. The price will go from a small storage box to a higher storage box.

I was not directly involved from a pricing perspective. I suppose it was competitive and that's why the company went ahead and with vSAN, therefore I assume the pricing is okay.

It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components.

If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of $600K per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall, we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack.

Setup cost, pricing and licensing should be a secondary factor. We talk about primary system storage, which if not performing well or storing reliable can have massive business impact.