PSA: Less Than 1 Month Until Free VMware vCloud Suite Offer Expires

A friendly public service announcement: VMware announced at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco that any customer with vSphere Enterprise Plus licensing under a current Support & Subscription (SnS) agreement as of August 27th would receive a free upgrade to the new vCloud Suite Standard Edition.  The free upgrade offer is only available through December 15, 2012.  The vCloud Suite Standard Edition includes vSphere Enterprise Plus, VMware vCloud Director, vCloud Connector and vCloud Networking & Security Standard (formerly known as vShield Edge and vShield App).  There’s some other great discounts to move from the vCloud Suite Standard edition to higher editions with even more functionality built in — I’ve detailed those here: https://blog.clearpathsg.com/blog/bid/222512/VMware-vCloud-Suite-Upgrade-Notes. VMware added products to the vCloud Suite at VMworld 2012 in Europe making the Enterprise Edition very attractive for customers building private clouds and moving towards hybrid clouds – more on that here: https://blog.clearpathsg.com/blog/bid/232283/VMworld-Europe-News-and-Announcements.  Another cool thing to consider is that when you license the vCloud Suite, the components within (vCenter Operations, vCloud Director, Site Recovery Manager, etc.) switch from a per-VM license model to an ESXi host socket license model meaning that you’ll be able to use these products cheaper and without a licensing headache for each new workload you stand up.

Here’s the important bit – the upgrade is not automatic (and not really free).  To claim the upgrade you need to go through a license purchase process, paying a whopping $1 per socket that you want to upgrade.  Because of this, you should not wait until the final hour to claim the upgrade – get it done early; financial transactions can take some time to clear.  If you need help getting the upgrade process completed, feel free to reach out to us at Clearpath – we try to make VMware Support Renewals and Upgrade licensing as simple as possible.  Contact us here if you need help: https://info.clearpathsg.com/vmware-support-renewals/.

I’ve done some licensing exercises for customers and we’ve found that if you have or were planning to purchase a couple components of the Suite a la carte, it may be cheaper to do it through the vCloud Suite with the added bonus of all of the other included products coming for ‘free’.