VMware Lowers Prices for SMB

VMware announce that with their new version of vSphere 4.1 they are lowering the price and adding the enhanced features live vMotion, which allows you to move a running server from one physical server to another.

What does this mean to the SMB market? It gives you more choice among hypervisor based virtualization. Now for those that have been around virtualization, that statement sounds curious since VMware is still by far the king and elder statesman of virtualization. However in the SMB space Microsoft and Citrix have taken large chunks of business and continue to take more based on price / performance. While VMware may have a better product, the feature set they were offering at the lower levels did not compete with the others. The product was watered down.

This could change the battle ground for SMB drastically. Even with the higher cost of VMware they were still winning their share of battles, now with the lower cost this could signal an new battle front.

Microsoft is bringing some nice new features in their next version of Hyper-V so we will see how this changes the field once again.

For more on the VMware coverage go HERE.