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biokovo
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After one year with vmware, what now: vSphere or Hyper-V?!

We are using VI 3.5 on 3 blade servers during past year. Newly I passed VCP310 and now I am prepare to take VCP410 exam.

Now we need to upgrade VI3.5 to vSphere, and buy vSphere licence for 2-3 new servers (8-10 CPU).

I really like VI 3.5, we have not any problem in production with VI, but when I compare the prices and features with MS Hyper-V, I must ask does Vmware aim to take down the prices?

Also I am interesting what others think what will be during next 1-2 years?

Thanks a lot

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amvmware
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I understand your predicament - Both MS and VMware have their own take on how to model the cost of a virtual Infrastructure and right now organiations need good reasons to spend money when "free" is an option - my take on the scenario is.

1. There is no such thing as "free" in business - be it a hypervisor or anything else. MS are offering hyper-v as a loss leader to entice organisations to buy the system center suite of products - SCCM, SCOM, SCDPM, SCVMM .. etc.

2. When sizing a hyper-v solution i have found you will run out of memory before other limitations such as cpu - MS counteract this by saying RAM is cheap and you can put as much RAM as you need into a hyper-v server - anyone who has tried purchasing 8Gb DIMMs recently will tell you memory is definately not cheap if you want to ramp up the memory in a server.

3. My take on Hyper-V is, it is a good fit for organisations with limited budgets and limited requirements from their virtual infrastructure. It may also be a good fit for organisations with a strong MS bias.

4. A lot of the 3rd party backup and replication offerings do not currently provide capabilities for hyper-v - so you could find yourself being locked in to a pure MS world - be that good or bad. This is changing slowly and more products will be hyper-v compatible as the year rolls on.

5. I still find customers are prepared to pay for vSphere as customers looking to deploy DR or BC have more options with VMware than Xenserver or Hyper-v.

So the answer is unique for each business - but your IT and business requirements should decide your future strategy rather than the underlying technology.

As some one once said to me -" if you think technology is the answer to your problem, then you don't understand your problem".

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weinstein5
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The real question is not what is the cost of the software but what is the cost per virtual workload - right now with vmware you can maintain a higher density of virtual machines per physical server - the major reason for this is Hyper-V difficulty with overprovisioning memory - so for the same numbe for virtual workloads you will need less hardware - thus reducing the overall price of your installation - in addition you have the maturity of vmware vs hyper-v

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biokovo
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Thanks David.

I don't know what is that difference in density of VMs and I don't like to discuss about price here, but I think that Vmware must do something becouse things are going to change. And I am interesting when it will be becouse we need to give a lot of money Smiley Happy

Another fact (problem) is that in our company 70% servers and 100% PCs are on Windows OS

Regards

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weinstein5
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Chek this white paper out - http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware-evaluating-hypervisor-density.pdf it explains why when you start comparing the number of workloads you will need to virtualize you will find you will need less hardware with VM - the main purpose to virtualize is to reduce hardware and vmware does that better than the competition.

In terms of the Operating Systems you will still need to license the Microsoft O/Ses with Hyper-V as well and need to find a solution for 30% of servers that are not microsoft -

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mreferre
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Biokovo,

There is no doubt that VMware has higher prices than Microsoft but it's also crystal clear there is (and there will be) a technology gap. You may argue that you are not interested in that delta of functionality / maturity.

As far as pricing is concerned, it really boils down to the scope / level you are looking at. If you compare VMware prices with MS "virtualization prices" there may be a big delta. However, if you pile up the servers, the storage, the OS and services (?) prices...you'll notice that that delta will narrow very quickly. I'll bet that you have spent between 20K and 40K for your current blade + storage implementation alone (not to mention OS licenses).

30% of none MS OS servers is a lot and you may (also) consider the value in a solution from a vendor without a Guest OS agenda.

Just a few additional thoughts.

Massimo.

Massimo Re Ferre' VMware vCloud Architect twitter.com/mreferre www.it20.info
amvmware
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I understand your predicament - Both MS and VMware have their own take on how to model the cost of a virtual Infrastructure and right now organiations need good reasons to spend money when "free" is an option - my take on the scenario is.

1. There is no such thing as "free" in business - be it a hypervisor or anything else. MS are offering hyper-v as a loss leader to entice organisations to buy the system center suite of products - SCCM, SCOM, SCDPM, SCVMM .. etc.

2. When sizing a hyper-v solution i have found you will run out of memory before other limitations such as cpu - MS counteract this by saying RAM is cheap and you can put as much RAM as you need into a hyper-v server - anyone who has tried purchasing 8Gb DIMMs recently will tell you memory is definately not cheap if you want to ramp up the memory in a server.

3. My take on Hyper-V is, it is a good fit for organisations with limited budgets and limited requirements from their virtual infrastructure. It may also be a good fit for organisations with a strong MS bias.

4. A lot of the 3rd party backup and replication offerings do not currently provide capabilities for hyper-v - so you could find yourself being locked in to a pure MS world - be that good or bad. This is changing slowly and more products will be hyper-v compatible as the year rolls on.

5. I still find customers are prepared to pay for vSphere as customers looking to deploy DR or BC have more options with VMware than Xenserver or Hyper-v.

So the answer is unique for each business - but your IT and business requirements should decide your future strategy rather than the underlying technology.

As some one once said to me -" if you think technology is the answer to your problem, then you don't understand your problem".

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biokovo
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Thanks on your consideration. 10 point for a lot of typewriting, too

If anyone else has some good advise please write it, although I have no more possibility to give awarding points Smiley Wink

Best regards

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msemon1
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Also if security is a consideration, VMware is more secure than Hyper-V. Hyper-V has an attack surface of a couple of GB's where as VMware is only about a few hundred MB's. Hyper-V still runs on top of Microsoft OS.

Mike

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