Jan 05
But VMware Costs More…Well Maybe Not!
Eric Inch
I enjoy learning, using and helping others through technology. This is my second year with C/D/H after many years of consulting for numerous small and mid-sized companies. I enjoy challenging projects and continual improvement in all areas. Most recently, I have been working to help grow the virtualization practice at C/D/H and hopefully add that area to the already impressive expertise in infrastructure consulting at C/D/H.
When I’m not working, I enjoy spending time with my family. I have two little girls who keep me extremely busy but are always the highlight of my day.
For a more in-depth bio and a list of my areas of expertise, please visit http://www.cdh.com.
More about Eric
Articles by Eric Inch
The battle of the virtualization platforms is heating up. Microsoft Hyper-V was released and has been exceeding expectations and will continue to try and take market share from the virtualization behemoth, VMware. The best part of this increasingly competitive area is the additional innovation and competitive pricing that is sure to follow. All of C/D/H’s clients will win in the end. While innovation and price reduction is great, the most entertaining part has to be the marketing efforts of these companies.
Microsoft has continually said, and can be heard saying, that their Hyper-V product is “good enough” and is less expensive than their VMware counterpart. If it is good enough, and can save you money, then it should be considered when evaluating solutions for your virtualization project(s). I think Hyper-V is a very good product, and is a huge improvement over Virtual Server. It does currently lack some of the advanced features that enterprise clients will likely require for their virtual datacenter such as live migration of virtual machines. However, Live Migration will be included in the next release (Windows Server 2008 R2), hopefully out sometime in 2009.
The one area that often gets portrayed incorrectly is the cost of the solutions as they don’t take into account consolidation ratios of virtual machines to physical machines and the cost benefit of this ratio. Let me explain through an example.
Due to memory sharing techniques (I discussed in two early blog postings – Part 1 & Part 2), VMware ESX allows for a better consolidation ratio for virtual machines. If three comparable servers with 16 GB of RAM are running VMware ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer, you will be able to run more virtual machines on the ESX Server. You will get approximately 8 VMs on the Microsoft and Citrix hosts (there is overhead for the host required, but I chose to keep the example simple); the VMware host could conceivably run 16 VMs (probably a little bit of a stretch but conceivable) on the same hardware. This means that the price per VM is lower for the VMware solution, offsetting some of the upfront expense for the licensing of Virtual Infrastructure.
The moral of the story is that there is more to calculating the TCO and ROI of virtualization solutions. Do your due diligence when researching your options and don’t rely completely on what the fancy marketing departments are putting out there.
