VMware announced plans in July to license and price its virtualization technology based on the amount of virtual RAM assigned to a virtual machine (VM) with vSphere 5.0. In early August, VMware announced it would bend a bit ; though the new licensing scheme basically would remain the same, it dropped the pricing in certain cases. "Even after modifying the vSphere 5.0 memory entitlements (on August 3), the fundamental tax on memory still exists, which is an anathema to customers, and VMware is still receiving colorful feedback from their customers," said Jeff Woolsey, Principal Program Manager Lead for Windows Server Virtualization, in Microsoft's latest post. Woolsey reiterated that Microsoft isn't planning to make similar licensing or pricing changes around VM memory, cores or replication. "Per VM taxes are what virtualization vendors do, not strategic cloud providers," Woolsey blogged. He also noted that the amount of memory in a Hypver-V VM in Windows 8 Server "is going to go up. Way up."