Feature Request - SureBackup

[downloadkid]

Afternoon
we have VMWare Essentials Plus - I can run 3 hosts. As it stands at the moment I have sufficient resources for a failover situation.

I am looking to implement the virtual lab for SureBackup etc but it occurs to me that if I leave the duplicate / backup VMs running for any period of time I may run out of resources.

As a school I have to watch the pennies........there is no upgrade path from the VMware Essentials Plus license that would allow me to add another host - as I understand it I would have to buy a whole new license suite to cover 4 hosts in vCenter.................this is prohibitively expansive.

Is there not a way you could code the software to be able to run on a free version of VMware?

Or as the MS Hyper-V is finally showing some signs maturity, is there a time scale as to when you will be able to provide similar features thereby helping us ( and no doubt others ) mitigate the extortionate upgrade costs VMware want to charge?

cheers

[foggy]

Is there not a way you could code the software to be able to run on a free version of VMware?

It's not about our software, but rather VMware API restrictions in free ESXi.

Or as the MS Hyper-V is finally showing some signs maturity, is there a time scale as to when you will be able to provide similar features thereby helping us ( and no doubt others ) mitigate the extortionate upgrade costs VMware want to charge?

Actually, we have already done this! We have added Virtual lab for Hyper-V functionality (including SureBackup, U-AIR and On-Demand Sandbox) in our 7.0 release last year.

[Gostev]

VMware is in quite tough position.They simply cannot make their free hypervisor actually useful for production use, as they do not have too many other things to sell besides the hypervisor... besides, since they are the leader at the moment, they might be thinking they do not really need to.

I do agree free Hyper-V 2012 R2 is 100% feature comparable to VMware, at least for those small business type of environments that might be looking to leverage free hypervisor, and I am sure VMware understands this too... but really, what can they do at this point?

[dellock6]

slightly off topic, but one of the advantages of Microsoft in this situation is they also have other business lines to gain revenues, so they can afford eventually to give around their hypervisor for free, and still getting revenues from other sources like Windows and most of all Office. This is a "luxury" VMware does not have, because all the large environment they have (vcops, vcloud, vcac, view, srm) is based on the hypervisor.
And for some small customer, the hypervisor is all they need, once it's free they are not going to buy anything else from VMware. Tough situation indeed, and it's probably why VMware is "selling up" on large customers, even if they could probably loose the small ones.