Isn't the current pricing model for VMware on AWS pretty terrible?

They need something where Amazon makes money on it, but also encourages the most popular use case...as a DR site for customer's on-prem VMs. At the moment, reserving that DR capacity is the same cost as using it. I would think Amazon's scale would allow for a better deal.

From what I remember, you pay for the 4 ESXi hosts that form the base cluster, and then scale up if required. I guess the idea is that many large Enterprise organizations already have some kind of AWS/Azure presence, often unmanaged by IT, and this is a way to consolidate those workloads as well as provide a DR target.

I don't have exact quotes in hand, but the pricing we got was roughly competitive with Azure Site Recovery and Nutanixs' DR solution, which were our other two main options. In the end, we chose none of the above, and just built our own at triple the price with half the capabilities. C'est la vie.

Sounds better than what I was quoted, so perhaps something changed. I was looking for a model where I paid for the data sitting there in full, but paid only partially for the idle VM capacity.

I heard from Dell/Silver Lake that NSX was super hot and could be a major revenue earner for them. Is that true?

I've been told its a big deal for VMware, and from my personal experiences its been popping up everywhere lately.

I did recently just get my NSX VCIX, and handled several large scale implementations of NSX, so I might be a little too biased to tell if its really taking off, or if it's just a big deal in my little part of the pond.

Either way, it's a neat piece of technology, and I enjoy playing with it :)

NSX revenue was reported at $1B/year a year ago, so it's pretty big.