According to Network World, “Red Hat on Tuesday announced new subscription offerings for Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are designed to make the company’s flagship product a better fit for a mix of cloud, physical and virtual environments.”

Socket pairs and virtual nodes are now treated as the same thing under Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux Server license.  This allows for various combinations of physical servers and virtualized machines.  “RHEL for Virtual Data Centers also got an update, with a purely per-socket option allowing for an unlimited number of VMs on Hyper-V, VMware, or Red Hat’s own Enterprise Virtualization.”

These types of pricing models will continue to rise up as we mix traditional on-premise systems with those that are public cloud-delivered.  Cost is one of the major drivers as we move toward cloud computing. Cloud technology providers, as well as cloud service providers, should change their pricing structures to take advantage of enterprise needs.  Else, they won’t sell cloud as quickly as they should.