- Saturday, 7 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
I quote others in order to better express my own self - Montaigne
Dell set to absorb price of ESX3i hypervisor
IT APPEARS as if Dell will not be charging a premium for the inclusion of VMware’s ESX3i hypervisor with its PowerEdge servers.
Martin Niemer, senior product marketing manager at Vmware, said that Dell has said it won’t charge for inclusion of the 32MB integrated hypervisor on its server range.
When Vmware announced it had lined up HP, IBM, Fujitsu and Dell to integrate its basic hypervisor it said that it was up to the server makers to decide what, if any, premium they would charge for including ESX3i.
Pricing is a very sensitive area for VMware as it has been seen as expensive with some analysts saying it will be forced to slash prices once Microsoft‘s Hyper V arrives, whenever that is. VMware defends itself stoutly by saying that it offers a range of virtualisation options and charges for functionality accordingly.
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
This phrase always makes me laugh...

"Once Microsoft's [insert product name here] arrives"

They need to pull their socks up as an organisation for people like us to start taking them seriously again...
Is Dell absorbing the cost of the 32mb usb flash memory card or the licensing cost of the software?

Sounds fishy! to me.
The fact that Dell might not charge for the ESX 3i hypervisor is interesting. 

One has to consider that the ESX 3i is only a small subset of functions that you find in the 'VI3 Enterprise' (ESX 3i doesn't have DRS, HA, VMotion etc..). Any large client that wants to add the ESX 3i machines to their enterprise class ESX farm, will need to upgrade the license anyway... 

ESX 3i cost = 495$
ESX VI3 Enterprise = 5750$
ESX 3i to Enterprise upgrade = 5650$

So client will not be interested in paying first 495$, then having to upgrade it for 5650$. Dell and other first tier hardware supplier might as well sell ESX 3i for 100$ or give it for free...
According to their web site:

Both ESX Server and ESX Server 3i support the entire suite of VMware Infrastructure 3 products, features and solutions, and you can use ESX Server 3 and ESX Server 3i side-by-side in your virtual infrastructure. Both provide industry-leading performance and scalability; the difference resides in the architecture and the operational management of ESX Server 3i.

The URL is: http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html

Keep in mind, that HA, DRS, vMotion, and other features are licensed at the License Server level, and not the ESX 3.x/3i level.
3i does not support HA
From VMware's own announcement at http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/esx3i.html:

VMware ESX Server 3i is the new architectural foundation for VMware Infrastructure 3, the most widely deployed virtualization software suite for optimizing and managing industry-standard IT environments. VMware customers will be able to easily implement the entire suite of VMware Infrastructure 3 products on top of this foundation, including VirtualCenter, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), High Availability (HA) and VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB).