With the release of vSphere 4 looming (21st of May) Cisco has made its Nexus 1000v virtual switch available to the general public in the form of a 60 day trial. Priced at $695 per CPU on top of the cost of a vSphere Enterprise Plus CPU licence some VMware customers might find Cisco’s vNetwork Distributed Switch a little too expensive, especially when you consider that Enterprise Plus is approximately $600 more expensive than Enterprise.
Whilst the $600 per socket is actually discounted by %50 if you upgrade before December 15, 2009 some VMware customers are arguing that the current pricing and licencing tiers may negatively impact sales, not only of Cisco’s Nexus 1000V but also vSphere itself. When you consider Citrix’s recent decision to give away XenServer for free VMware may have opened the door to the competition. I for one feel that the creation of the Enterprise Plus licencing tier, in fact all of the proposed licencing tiers makes little sense and hope, just like in the past, VMware realign/reduce/simply their licencing tiers in a manner that make sense. Starting May 21, we’ll see if customers will consider the Cisco virtual switch over the VMware distributed switch or even pay the price to replace the basic VMware virtual switch at all.
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