Who says nothing new gets discussed at VMworld Europe that wasn't already said at the U.S. VMworld? That's been a common complaint ever since VMware decided to shorten the six-month separation between the two shows to a mere six weeks.
But this year at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen, there was a new discussion topic that has lately proven to be not so popular within the VMware virtualization community: licensing changes.
[ Also on InfoWorld.com: In an exclusive interview, Paul Maritz outlines VMware's plans for the post-PC era. | Dell outlines a transition to the cloud at Dell World 2011. | Keep up on virtualization by signing up for InfoWorld's Virtualization newsletter. ]
Last week during the event, VMware CEO Paul Maritz offered his own assessment of how he sees the pricing model for virtualization and cloud computing evolving over the next decade.
"We are going to have to move toward more of a consumption-based model. This is where we are going," Maritz said at a Q&A session during VMworld Europe. "We are trying to keep the licensing stable for as long as we can, but in 10 years from now, things will have changed quite radically."
With virtualization host servers getting beefier and beefier, customers are able to put more and more virtual machines on a single server. Today, it isn't uncommon for someone to get a VM to physical server density of 50:1 or even 100:1. Moore's Law is definitely on the customer's side as they are able to continuously increase the population size of VMs per host.
Because of that fact, Maritz believes the entire industry will have to take on the challenge of addressing the licensing of virtual machines with increasingly powerful hardware on the horizon. One way to address it is by moving further away from the more commonly practiced per-CPU-based pricing to a consumption-based model.
