Virtualisation Licensing; VMware vs. Microsoft (Apples vs. Oranges)

If you’re a big fan of VMware, I apologise (but this really has to be shared – you’d be a fool not to look into these price comparisons).

 

Microsoft’s Private Cloud Licensing

 

• unlimited Windows
• unlimited VM
•  unlimited System Center 2012 Datacenter Edition which includes
  • Operations Manager
  • Configuration Manager
  • Data Protection Manager
  • Service Manager
  • Virtual Machine Manager
  • Endpoint Protection
  • Orchestrator
  • App Controller

…for $5,056 per processor.

 

VMware’s Private Cloud Licensing

>> $6617 per processor with an additional $4730 for each VM <<

 

Apples vs. Oranges

Details are here.

Enjoy explaining to your boss why you think VMware is better!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Joe H, I don't censor comments - everything gets published. Everyone else, I've said this is an apples vs oranges comparison - my objective was to get you just thinking about what you get for your VMware dollars.

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Totally agree - public benchmarks please! Hyper-V and VMware would get very similar consolidation ratios though - so the numbers are pretty accurate. There are some public reports that have Hyper-V out-performing VMware when running some Microsoft workloads Is the writing on the wall for VMware?

• Anonymous
  January 26, 2012
  the only thing that you have to worry about with these numbers is performance/$.  Does wmare really need 42 hosts to support 1200 vm's, the answer is it depends but more often then not no.  It would be nice if vmware would allow the publishing of benchmarks!

• Anonymous
  January 29, 2012
  Talk about the features and also why do we have to buy 25 licenses, if I dont need them. This is ECI pricing and the comparison is done with VMware's list pricing. I think thats unfair. Moreover, vSphere is around 2 years ahead in technology as compared to what Hyper-V is, says Gartner. MS has to do better in technology rather than just good marketing of publishing baseless cost comparisons. VMware has been humble and quiet all these years, but I guess its time they come out and demystify the Microsoft Cloud. :-)

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2012
  Dave, Are you not going to publish my previous comment? Also - how does this play with a hybrid cloud solution? Cheers Joe

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2012
  Sunny, ECI pricing shown here is the list price, typically customers would get 10-40% discount on top of $5056. Also, ECI has a limitation that you need to buy a minimum of 25 licenses. If you don't want it, use Windows Server datacenter and System Center 2012 datacenter. That way the price would be $4209 + $2111 = $6320. Still VMW will be 14X expensive.. Is this baseless comparison b/c VMW is 16 times more expensive?

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  @Rohit, I deem the comparison to be baseless due to the fact that the technology GAP between the 2 hyper-visors are vast. VMware is at Gen 5 while hyper-V is still at Gen 2 and the pricing and the features being marketed are still not available in the market. They are promised features and the prices are promised as well. Now, comparing the costs would make sense if you are doing it with the vSphere Standard edition, however you need to ensure that we showcase the cost of all the additional products which would be required to meet the feature set of vSphere... I wish MS comes out with what they have promised as this never happened with Hyper-v 1 and hyper-v 2....... It will make customers think and understand that what apart from vanilla virtulaization, a platform like vSphere can do for them. Somebody mentioned about the Cloud story as well.... I believe we all know what Azure has to offer.... I hope we all read about Microsoft's Windows Azure's meltdown.... Cheers Sunny

• Anonymous
  March 13, 2012
  The Azure outage that Gartner are praising our handling of? “Azure Root Cause Analysis: Transparency Wins!” blogs.gartner.com/.../azure-root-cause-analysis-transparency-wins Some highlights: • “I want to share that I was very pleased with the level of detail in Microsoft’s RCA.” • “Microsoft decidedly suspended service management in order to stop or slow the spread of the issue. Microsoft made this decision with very good reason.” • “The actual leap day bug issue and resolution was identified, tested, and rolled out within 12 hours. That is pretty fast.” • “Microsoft took steps to prevent the outage from worsening. Had these steps not been taken, we might have seen a much bigger issue.” • “Microsoft understands that real-time communication must improve during an outage and are taking steps to improve.”