Toys and Tasks

After completing my VCP at the end of January this year I decided that I had enough technical knowledge to be dangerous but I didn’t really know how the licensing worked or even the basic costs. So I set out to try and get a handle on it. I found that it wasn’t the easiest task in the world as there isn’t a single page that sets it all out and some information is hidden away in long training videos as a single insignificant page in a slide deck. A couple of months ago after helping a few friends with their VMware infrastructure and general virtualisation questions I refined my VMware licensing knowledge a little more and in doing so stumbled across a small discrepancy on the vSphere License Pricing page.

I mentally filed this anomaly away as a possible blog topic in addition to some other licensing brain dumps I had in mind until I could get my blog setup which happened on the weekend. In fact the licensing information I was providing to my friends was one of the reasons they encouraged me to start a blog since the info wasn’t really out there in an easy format. So I hope this will mark the first of a series of four or five blog posts on VMware vSphere licensing which will set it out a bit better. Ironically VMware licensing turned out to be my first task at my new job at Telstra by pure chance.

Anyway, the vSphere License Pricing page allows you, independent of the localisation setting for the site, to select which currency you’d like to view the pricing in. By default the prices are listed in $US and you need to switch it to $AU to view how much you are stung locally. After I did this there seemed to be a fair discrepancy between the $US and $AU with didn’t match up to the current exchange rate ($AU1 converts to $US1.06 as of last night when I checked).

In fact the pricing deference between $US and $AU seems to be at about an exchange rate of $AU1 to $US0.68 when comparing the two listed prices. $AU1 to $US0.68 hasn’t been the exchange rate since between October 2008 and May 2009 and as it happens vSphere 4 was launched on 21^st April 2009. So it looks like the Listed $AU prices haven’t been updated since vSphere 4 was released when the exchange rate was at the lower ebb for the last 5 years (lowest was $AU1 to $US0.61 on 27^th Oct 2008) verses the current exchange rate which is at the higher end, $AU1 to $US1.06 as of last night.

For example the cheapest license listed on the page, VMware vSphere Essentials Kit, is listed as $US495 and $AU726.45, if you convert the listed $US price to $AU against the current rate (as of last night) $AU1:$US1.06247 as per www.xe.com you end up with $AU465.90 which means between the listed price and the converted price in $AU you are looking at an Angels’ Share of $AU260.55. Similar results appear for all the other Licenses listing on that same page.

So at the moment Aussies are better off buying their licenses from the USA although I’d be checking the fine print in the support to see if that was viable.