VMware has published a new license model that makes it easier for hosting companies to offer utility computing services based on the company’s virtualisation software.

 

The per month/per virtual machine tariff in VMware’s Service Provider Program (VSPP) is a departure from the company’s established per socket model that forces service providers to pay the same rate for virtual servers, regardless of how many are operating at any one time.

 

“Lots of [service] providers told us that that model didn’t match their business. ‘We want an on-demand model’, they told us” said Reza Malekzadeh, VMware’s European Director of Product marketing and Alliances Services.         .

 

Under the terms of the VSPP hosted service providers will be charged approximately £20 per month/per virtual machine for VMware’s VI3 virtual server infrastructure, which includes high availability, business continuity and application portability utilities, or £7 per Standard VM per month.

 

The VSPP highlights the growing importance of hosted service providers to VMware, and competing virtual machine providers such as SWsoft. In Europe, VMware already provides the platform for T-Systems hosted SAP service, which currently supports 500,000 SAP instances in Germany, and for other significant enterprise-class utility services from Telefonica in Spain.

 

So far, no UK operator has publicly announced utility services based on virtual machines, but Malekzadeh said VMware is talking to “a number of companies” at the high-end of the UK hosted service market. VMware already provides virtual machine software to several emerging virtual infrastructure service providers in the UK, including Attenda, Cobweb, ICM and Interoute.

 

SWsoft, VMware’s chief rival in the hosted service space immediately declared itself unimpressed by the VSPP announcement.

 

SWsoft’s Virtuozzo software, which supports operating system level virtualisation, rather than discrete virtual machines based on a hyper-visor, has proved a popular choice among providers of hosted services for smaller companies, or for the consumer mass market. According to Serguei Beloussov, SWsoft’s CEO, the VSPP will not allow VMware to be a significant competitor in these markets, because the company’s hyper-visor technology does not support the virtual machine density that hosted service operators can achieve with Virtuosso.

 

“For the enterprise level, we can provide two to three times the density [of VM’s per physical server] and 10 times as much in the mass market,” said Beloussov. With this advantage “even if they paid their channel to use their software they [VMware] would still be more expensive because the customer would have to buy more servers,” he said.

 

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