Just after the release of VSAN a couple weeks back, I wrote this post talking about the need for VSAN to appear on the VSPP pricelist. At the time there only a little info on dates and more importantly pricing. A few days later it was confirmed that VSPP pricing would appear in Q2 of this year. Fast forward a couple weeks and I received word through @g_mulholland and @Euge_IT from VMware Australia that VSAN pricing had dropped on the VSPP Pricelist.

For those not familiar with VSPP pricing…based on Reserved vRAM, there are a number of different points levels which makes the overall value of a point decrease as reportable volume grows. That is to say that as you step up points level, you pay less per point for vRAM and other products listed on the VSPP pricelist.

As I predicted, for VSAN pricing is based on points per GB per month, and as you can see below (taken from the latest VSPP Product Usage Guide – not yet released online)

So in a nutshell you pay for as much VMDK storage you allocate to VMs living on a VSAN datastore…not the total size of your VSAN datastore, which is great news. From a Service Providers perspective it would have been nice to have this as provisioned/consumed storage so that we could take advantage of Thin Provisioning and Overcommiting Policies that gives SP economy’s of scale.

I read with interest that in describing VSAN, VMware is still suggesting that its ideally suited for several use cases in VDI, test/development, and disaster recovery…is there confidence to run critical workloads such are line of business application or VMware management stacks?

Finishing off this post, Depending what region you are in and who you get your VSPP through, point value can differ, but the pricing when compared to outright per socket pricing seems extremely competitive…especially when VSPP participants are on the higher Points Levels which reduces the overall cost per point. In my initial calculations over a 36 month period we would reduce the VSAN license cost per month by almost 50%. Exactly how much $$ wise you ask…I will write up another post over the next couple of days with actual pricing examples and comparisons to buying VSAN through non VSPP channels.