VMware on Wednesday announced vSphere Express, a new entry-level virtualization product aimed at organizations looking for what the Broadcom-owned company described as cost-effective essential virtualization. The launch marks an effort to win back smaller customers after many long-time small and medium-sized business users felt alienated by the company's recent direction.
Numerous customers have reported that VMware was steering them toward VMware Cloud Foundation, its flagship private cloud bundle known as VCF. That package includes a wide range of features that smaller businesses often do not need, and it carries a high price tag. Some SMB users also said VMware sales representatives told them that vSphere Standard, the company's previous entry-level virtualization offering, was no longer available.
A VMware spokesperson told The Register that the company will offer vSphere Express through a per-core subscription license priced significantly lower than both the VMware vSphere Foundation bundle, or VVF, and VCF. The spokesperson declined to provide an official price quote.
Pricing information has surfaced elsewhere. IT distributor TD Synnex lists vSphere Express at $9,600 per year for deployments running on as many as 128 cores. Because the cost does not decrease for installations using fewer cores, the flat pricing structure may still pose difficulties for the very smallest use cases.
According to VMware's announcement, vSphere Express includes fundamental capabilities such as vMotion, which provides live migration of running virtual machines with improved migration speed and efficiency, along with high availability for the automated restart of failed virtual machines.
The product does come with notable limitations. It supports only discrete instances, and organizations will not be able to manage those instances centrally, Prashanth Shenoy, vice president of product marketing for VCF, said, according to The Register.
"We started listening to a lot of our lower-end customers who didn't really want the VVF but wanted the core virtualization capability, and [vSphere Express is] really meant for that market," Shenoy said, per SDxCentral.
One area where the new product differs from its predecessor is maintenance. While vSphere Standard has not received a meaningful update in years, vSphere Express will be updated as frequently as VCF and VVF, The Register reported.
