VMWare’s Creative Marketing…

Someone just pointed me to the new VMWare vSphere 4.1 key features and comparison chart. They’ve put together a document that is supposed to compare vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus with Hyper-V R2, Citrix XenServer 5.5 and RHEV 2.2. I always find it amusing how VMWare compares their most expensive SKU suite to everyone else’s stand-alone hypervisors…but I digress…

Notice in this example how the Enterprise Plus get's the check mark as if this new ‘large scale management’ feature is included with that SKU. If you didn’t know, Virtual Center does not come with Enterprise Plus – far from it. This conveniently ‘included’ feature happens to cost $7,318.00 (w/ 2yr maintenance). That’s IN ADDITION to the vSphere Enterprise Plus license:

Which begs the question - Why doesn’t the VMWare box say “Requires vCenter Server” like the Hyper-V box says “Requires SCVMM”? Instead of doing that – they stick it in the key feature column and check the box for Enterprise Plus. Sneaky. 

I could go on, but my point of this diatribe really has little do with VMware or any other vendor for that matter – this just presented a good example for me to make my point - it’s not just about the features. Every vendor on this list has features and capabilities that the other vendors don’t have and frankly any vendor can and has ‘creatively marketed’ something like this to you. If you are involved in a virtualization project it’s imperative that you first understand the workloads that will be virtualized and what capabilities that you require prior to immersing yourself in the marketing and making decisions based on whose list has the most checkmarks.

If you are a partner or customer involved in a virtualization project make sure you reach out to someone at Microsoft – we can help you.