vSphere 5's licensing opens the door for open source

"The new pricing model further increases the price gap between VMware and the two open source competitors, Red Hat Virtualization and Citrix Xen.

"For example, Red Hat offers a one-year subscription for as any as six managed sockets, regardless of cores per socket, for $4,495 per year. Red Hat's virtualization offering also doesn't have any restrictions on RAM entitled for use with a licensed socket. Over a five-year period, Red Hat's product would cost $26,970.

"By comparison, a VMware customer would buy at least six processor licenses of VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus with product support and subscription over five years for $3,495 per processor license and five years of support and subscription at $874 per year per processor. Over a five-year period, VMware's product would cost at least $47,190, or 74 percent more than Red Hat."

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