@msimanyi said in Confused re: pricing (XOA vs. Vates Essentials):
@olivierlambert I don’t want to sound rude with this comment, so please know that I have deep respect for your product, your efforts and your support here.
I work in a very small business. We have a VMware license for two hosts, solely to support HA. We have five guest OS installations. A single host – other than HA – would be more than sufficient for us.
For VMware, under the “new” packages from Broadcom, a five year license will cost about $1,200 per year, at least at the current prices. (I have a perpetual license with support through August 2026.)
If I want to run XCP-ng and XOA, it sounds like the likely best option is Essentials+, which is $4,000 per year if I recall correctly.
For such a small business as mine, what are the relative merits of your system vs VMware’s “standard” package? I’m trying to understand what the extra $2800 per year buys, to assess if the value justifies the expense in my end-user case.
I’ll add that we are very, very tight for budget given current industry and economic conditions. Yes, the $2,800 extra per year is material for us.
For one thing you’ll be supporting the development of future updates to XCP-ng and XOA from a human size company. With both XCP-ng and XOA being open source, also the Vates company is willing to work with and collaborate on fixes and new features if required.
By the way that perpetual license you have currently is the last one you’ll be able to get for VMware’s software stack as Broadcom has terminated this form of licensing on its product lines. This happened following Broadcom taking over and acquiring VMWare. Broadcom’s changed VMware’s licensing terms to a subscription.
This means you’ll need to keep paying the subscription fee in order to keep using the software. As well we all know subscription fees tend to go up and rarely stay the same or even more so rarely go down. Other user’s on this forum have had their licensing cost’s of the VMware virtualisation stack increase significantly following the Broadcom acquisition (hey guys chime in here)!
With the Broadcom subscription of the new vSphere Standard the fee is per core, so for each core in each socket of each virtualisation host per year you will be paying likely much higher fees, while with Vates’s fee it’s per year (on Essential and Essential+), with none of this ridiculous per core or per socket pricing. Then with the higher plans it becomes per host per year still without this ridiculous per core or per socket pricing.
So the price of $4000 dollars per year for Vates’s Essential+ given Broadcom’s. Also if you pay for 3 or 5 years of Vate’s support plans the amount per year will go down. Also the Essential and Essential+ support plans are for up to 3 hosts, so your paying one fee which covers up to 3 hosts.
This is especially true when you consider the high number of cores which servers have now (can reach as many as 21-22 cores per CPU) and up to 4 sockets (CPUs) per server.
Check out the user stories and try a trial of Vate’s software (XCP-ng and XOA) if you need convincing. Plus on the pricing page of Vates there’s further down a feature comparison of their support plans. In addition to Vates you also have the community here to aid you with help (Technical Support), Tom of Lawrance Systems is regularly posting here and video content on Youtube.
By paying for Technical Support from Vates you’ll be able to open support tickets, they are pretty responsive (especially during normal business hours – weekdays) and you’ll have an SLA for a response time to those tickets based on the plan chosen.
https://vates.tech/user-stories/ https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2024/01/22/vmware-end-of-availability-of-perpetual-licensing-and-saas-services/ https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/docs/vmw-datasheet-vsphere-product-line-comparison.pdf
