Happy new year to all and thank you for your patience. WELCOME to final round of the war to understand where both stand as per TCO/ROI justification
You would have about Part 1 & Part 2 and would have realized by now which hypervisor suits you considering technical & licensing parameters into account.
Assumptions
- All pricing are list price for respective vendors as per URL below. The prices may not be actual. You need to contact the respective vendors to get the pricing.
- Refer VMware prices at http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing.html & I have considered, Enterprise Plus Edition with 3 Yrs SnS
- Refer Oracle DB prices at https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=Database&p2=OracleDatabase&p3=&p4=&intcmp=ocom_databas.... Though oracle licenses are a bit confusing to understand we will use perpetual Enterprise Edition for license consideration.
- In general, oracle does not allow 3rd parties to publish benchmark results against their products without their consent & approval. Since OVM is Xen based, we will use benchmarks of Xen vs. VMware to identify the density of VM’s which implies the number of VM’s that can be hosted on any server at same point of time without any performance pinch on the applications. Please refer the URL http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmware-maximize-workload-density-tg.pdf (though old) will clearly indicate that vSphere performs better than other hypervisors. So number of VM’s packed on one server using VMware would be more compared to other’s and thus less hardware is required. (Pg 1 says and in our view gives ESXi as much as a 2:1 density advantage over XenServer, once we consider the ability of the hypervisor to access the full performance of the underlying hardware) For simplicity I take consolidation ratio as 1.5:1, If I need 4 servers for VMware solution, I will need 6 servers for Xen based solution.
- All calculations are based on 4 servers using vSphere vs. 6 servers using XEN based solution.
- Other components are been ignored like storage, network, OS cost etc
Final analysis
Cost for | vSphere | OVM | |
Servers ($6500 per server for 2 CPU, Hex Core, 64 GB RAM) | $26,000 | $39,000 | |
Energy cost to power on the servers (0.0893$ per KW) (300 W per server ) (3 yrs) | $2,838 | $4,257 | |
Cooling (1.5 times of energy to power on servers)(3 yrs) | $4,257 | $6,386 | |
VMware cost (6 sockets) | $46,419 | $0 | 3 yrs 24 X 7 production support |
OVM cost ( I say they give it for free) | $0 | $0 | No support , you have to buy it separately. They don’t give support for free. |
Total | $79,514 | $49,643 | |
| | | |
Oracle DB cost for Enterprise Edition | $285,000 | $380,000 | |
| | | |
Final Total | $364,514 | $429,643 | $65,129 |
If we see above, this is how you’ll find many comparison against hypervisors to show how cost effective they are. They simply compare the license prices and show fancy graphs. But if you consider the actual costs like DB cost etc, you will know where you stand. The TCO using VMware vSphere is much smaller compared to OVM thereby giving more ROI
Don’t forget to consider the technical advantages and disadvantages before shelling out $$ from your pockets. Don’t buy a car because types comes for free, do look at the total cost of the car before you buy one along with its features.
This concludes my 3 part series of VMware vSphere vs. Oracle VM OR popularly called as VMware vs. Oracle War.
Decide the winner for yourself.
