Cloud Computing: VMware Kills Off Its Loathed vRAM Pricing

Pat Gelsinger, the Intel honcho who went to EMC as president a few years ago, enters into office as CEO of VMware, replacing Paul Maritz, a hero to his customers. He’s dumping VMware’s hated vRAM pricing established a year ago when vSphere 5 rolled out. vSphere licenses were priced by how much virtual memory each virtual machine used. Licenses came with RAM “entitlements” and users would pay for how much RAM they used over that quota. It was complicated and expensive, more expensive than VMware used to be on the same machines because users had to buy more licenses. Rivals, which VMware thought would follow suit, were astonished and customers were ticked off. Microsoft called it a “vTax” and said it would keep charging by CPU.

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