VMware’s licensing practices following Microsoft’s lead?


Today, I tried to organise some VMware licenses for a customer who was running the ESX Starter Pack. Both my customer and myself were never aware that

  • To upgrade from ESX 3.0 Starter to Standard or Enterprise, you have to be an ‘Enterprise Partner’
  • To become an Enterprise partner, you need to pay US$1000 and ALSO
  • You need to have a Vmware Certified Professional as an employee

Did I get that right? They won’t sell me their product unless I get a VMware Certified Employee? That can’t be right.. come to think of it, maybe the licensing team at Ingram Micro who told me this information must think that the client is onselling the license… I will double-check that tomorrow. That half makes sense.

Anyway, to become a VMware certified Professional you can’t just go in and sit the exam after reviewing the some book. You need to do one of their courses @ US$2200, then and only then can you book your exam. It just happens I am booked to do the course next week in Canberra.

Maybe, it would all seem a little less relevant if I had bought some VMware shares when they were released, I read they jumped 75% in 1day while the rest of the market was near-crashing. The problem that occurs when a company goes public is that less importance gets place on the end customer because they now have two customers.. the share holders and the end-users.

Now that VT Processors are in the marketplace, it seems there’s some pretty decent reasons to take XenSource much more seriously. Although, they seem to have jumped into bed with MS of late also.

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Published by salubrium

I am a Systems Administrator based in Sydney, Australia with some hugely varied interests: Topics covered are Virtualization, Web Hosting, Remote Desktop, Security and Backups, PHP, Python, MVC Frameworks, SEO

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