I just read a comment about how Microsoft ripped people off to get virtualisation with clustering. That’s a great bit of VMware marketing FUD so let’s look at the real costs.
For a moment, we’ll ignore the fact that the soon-to-be-released and FREE Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 includes failover clustering and Live Migration. That’ 100% kills the argument.
Let’s just look at the current release of Hyper-V. To get failover clustering you need either Windows Server Enterprise 2008 or Windows Server Datacenter 2008.
- If you run a virtual machine with Windows Server then you must license that virtual machine for the edition of Windows Server.
- If you assign one Enterprise Edition license to a host server you are entitled to run 4 free licenses for Enterprise or Standard on virtual machines running on that host.
- If you assign two Enterprise Edition license to a host server you are entitled to run 8 free licenses for Enterprise or Standard on virtual machines running on that host.
- If you assign Datacenter (per CPU) licenses to a host then you are entitled to run unlimited (depending on hardware and support) free Windows Server licenses on your virtual machines, Datacenter, Enterprise or Standard.
OK. Now lets do some comparisons:
I’m using rounded prices. VMware ESX is actually over €5000 per host. I sourced MS pricing from Elara.ie. Windows Standard = €1,000 and Windows Enterprise = €4,200.
VMware ESX
- Host OS license: €5,000
- 4 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard: €4400
Total Cost? €9,400
Citrix Xen
- Host OS license: Free
- 4 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard: €4400
Total Cost? €4,400
Microsoft Hyper-V with Failover Clustering
- Host OS license: €4,200
- 4 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard or Enterprise: Free
Total Cost? €4,200
How exactly has Microsoft ripped anyone off here? Yes, currently Hyper-V doesn’t have Live Migration or Cluster Shared Volume but the RTM of R2 includes those. Expect the RTM in July and GA in October.
Let’s push this up some. Few of us run 4 VM’s on a host. Let’s run 28 VM’s.
VMware ESX
- Host OS license: €5,000
- 28 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard: €30,800
Total Cost? €35,800
Citrix Xen
- Host OS license: Free
- 28 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard: €30,800
Total Cost? €30,800
Microsoft Hyper-V with Failover Clustering
- Host OS license (over licensed): €4,200 * 7 = €29,400
- 28 Virtual Machines running Windows Standard or Enterprise: Free
Total Cost? €29,400
Whoops, why don’t we just use Datacenter edition? This host server might only have 2 CPU’s but let’s assume it has 4 6-core CPU’s. Using HP pricing at €2,820 per CPU, we’ll see how pricey MS is.
Microsoft Hyper-V with Failover Clustering
- Host OS license (over licensed): €2,820 * 4 = €11,280
- Unlimited Virtual Machines running Windows Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter: Free
Total Cost? €11,280
I guess I’m still struggling to see how Microsoft is ripping people off here. And I think that’s totally crushed the argument that MS virtualisation is too expensive.
Oh but I’m not finished!
- System Center Enterprise CAL: Normally we buy a license per machine for things like DPM, ConfigMgr and OpsMgr. You can assign one enterprise CAL for System Center to the host and it’ll cover all the System Center products for all VM’s on the host.
- SQL Enterprise: Yes this is a pricey product. But if you assign a SQL Enterprise license to the host then you can install it as many times as you like for free on the VM’s on that host.
I think I’ve said enough on that one. It’s pretty clear that MS virtualisation is economic. My experience is that it performs superbly, it’s stable and the management provided by OpsMgr and VMM 2008 is superior to what I experienced with Virtual Center for ESX.
I should also note, these are MS off-the-shelf prices for Ireland. Local prices will probably be cheaper (this is an expensive place to shop) and volume licenses will definitely be cheaper.
EDIT #1:
Anthony Crotty contact me with this link. System Center CAL’s will be changing on July 1st. The Enterprise CAL will only cover 4 VM’s and a new Datacenter per processor CAL will cover unlimited VM’s.
Other point to consider:
System Center is extremely useful for the physical servers (less the VMM, of course), and the R2 version of SCOM makes the monitoring of Linux servers too.
The administration and management of the environment will be made with the same tools.
A few comments on the licenses you’re using:
In the first part you assign 4x standard edition to ESX, why not use the Enterprise edition as well? I know its just $200 cheaper then and your point still holds. But it is always better to be precise otherwise people "attack" you on this and take away the real discussion 🙂
In the second comparison with 28 VMs you again charge ESX with 28x Standard, but you are allowed to run Enterprise edition on ESX. For 28 VMs you would need 7x Enterprise. You license the host but you don’t install the host software. Just use the 4 free licenses. With 30 VMs you would then license 8x enterprise and have 2 free left you can’t use on other hosts.
Actually, the pricing comparisson you make would not make a difference for Xen, VMware or Hyper-V. The real comparisson would be…. can ESX virtualize more VMs on one host and be cheaper then Hyper-V.
Pure hypothatical !!!
Lets say you need 2 ESX hosts to run 100 VMs, but need 4 Hyper-V hosts to run those same VMs. Apart from the slight difference in Windows licenses, will the extra hardware you need, be more or less expensive then those 2 ESX licenses.
Its hard to say, because there are still no good performance reports available to show the differences.
Gabrie
http://www.GabesVirtualWorld.com
Oops… spell check missed something.
I meant: Pure hyperthetical !!!
@Gabrie:
The only independent report comparing performance is here: http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2009/03/02/lab-experiment-hypervisors.aspx
”Hyper-V was the first product compared, and it performed quite differently from expectations. Hyper-V has been a focus of Microsoft dev efforts, and it shows. Overall, Hyper-V did well in this comparison and proved itself a worthy product.”
“In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it’s a real, viable competitor for the competition. Table 2 shows Hyper-V’s comparative performance.”
“After doing these comparisons of ESX to Hyper-V and XenServer, it’s clear that at the hypervisor level, ESX is optimized for a large number of less-intensive workload VMs. For intensive workloads that may not be optimized for memory overcommit apps, Hyper-V and XenServer should definitely be considered-even if that means adding another hypervisor into the data center.”
They go on to say it’s horses for courses:
“For CPU- and memory-intensive applications, XenServer and Hyper-V are attractive and have proven their mettle. For a large number of light to moderate workloads-or if you decide that memory overcommit, for example, is important-ESX may be the answer”.
On the scalability front, VMware loses again.
According to VMware, "A total of 128 virtual processors in all virtual machines per ESX Server host". The current release of Hyper-V supports 24 logical processors with 8 virtual processors per core giving 192 virtual processors. R2 pushes that up to 284 virtual processors per host.
On the memory front, Hyper-V currently supports up to 1TB RAM per host and ESX supports up to 64GB per host. But of course, ESX does allow for RAM oversubscription which is fine if not abused.