VMware releases vSphere Express for virtualization on up to 128 cores

After alienating many long-time small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers, Broadcom’s VMware is trying to appeal to its smaller customers.

Today, the virtualization company announced vSphere Express, a lower-end virtualization offering for organizations that require “cost-effective essential virtualization.”

vSphere Express comes after many customers reported that VMware was pushing them to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), the flagship private cloud bundle that has many features SMBs don’t need and is expensive. Some SMB users have reported that VMware sales representatives previously told them that vSphere Standard, VMware’s prior entry-level virtualization offering, wasn’t available anymore.

A VMware spokesperson told The Register that VMware will sell a per-core subscription license at a price that will be “significantly lower” than the VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundle and VCF but wouldn’t provide a price quote.

IT distributor TD Synnex lists vSphere Express as costing $9,600 a year for running on up to 128 cores. The price doesn’t get cheaper with fewer cores, which still presents a challenge to the smallest use cases.

vSphere Express includes basic capabilities, like vMotion, for “live migration of running virtual machines with improved migration speed and efficiency,” and high availability for the “automated restart of failed virtual machines,” VMware’s announcement said.

The product only supports discrete instances, and organizations won’t be able to manage them centrally, Prashanth Shenoy, VP 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.

Whereas vSphere Standard hasn’t seen a meaningful update in years, vSphere Express will be updated as frequently as VCF and VVF are, The Register reported.

Winning back SMBs

Returning focus to a streamlined low-end virtualization product is an about-face for VMware, which has largely focused on enterprise-size customers since Broadcom’s takeover. This focus shift has been evident as the tech giant has reduced the number of channel partners that it works with, bundled its product lineup into a small number of expensive SKUs, and canceled plans to take its biggest clients direct.

While VMware has been financially successful under Broadcom, vSphere Express suggests Broadcom may worry about losing business from smaller organizations and, more broadly, that its changes are pushing customers of various sizes to explore their options.

In September, while teasing what would become vSphere Express, Paul Turner, VCF’s chief product officer, told The Register that Broadcom issued sales incentives that pushed its sales team to sell VCF. He said that VMware had “too big a focus on VCF.”

Nick Watson, chief technologist at UK-based tech advisory firm C4C Group, told TechTarget today: “My reading is that Express exists because customers looked at VCF, did the sums, and started packing. This is Broadcom putting a door back on the building.”

Migrating off VMware can be very costly and time-consuming, making matters particularly complicated for SMBs. For organizations that can’t currently juggle a migration alongside other projects and/or have limited resources, vSphere Express can be a much simpler and more easily attainable solution than changing virtualization platforms.

Some SMBs, though, including the thousands of firms that have already migrated to VMware rivals and firms whose preferred resellers no longer work with VMware, will be much harder to sway, though.

“Broadcom has lost all credibility. No thanks. We have two more locations to migrate off VMware and we’re done with this nightmare. Not playing these games,” a Reddit user said last week in response to details shared about vSphere Express.

Speaking with Ars Technica in September, Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider and former VMware partner Members IT Group, noted that even though migrating to the new low-end virtualization offering may be easy, Broadcom has “already shown both customers and partners they can’t be trusted.”

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