Aligning Your VMware Licensing Strategy With Your Broader Virtualization Plans

It's not easy for enterprises evaluating their licensing options with VMware. In addition to worrying about the mechanics of how an enterprise licensing agreement (ELA) fits with your internal deployment plans, you need to consider a shifting competitive landscape and an evolving marketplace that includes rapidly maturing cloud alternatives. There's also not a lot of readily available information out there about VMware's licensing policies to help. VMware has been offering several flavors of ELAs that require careful examination. The best path for your organization involves analyzing your spending and required functionality for desktop, server, and related management requirements and optimizing them against the available VMware ELAs.