It has started, the Virtualization TLA wars
Virtualization December 10th, 2007The TLA Wars have started. TLA is the dreaded Three Letter Acronym such as ROI, TCO, FUD and so on. Anyway, sooner or later it was inevitable that someone would post some sort of a matrix comparing Hyper-V with VI3.
Daniel Oxley (MSFT Infrastructure Consultant from Madrid) has shared some "interesting information" in his blog post "Virtualisation - Why would you not choose Microsoft Virtualization". I’ll let you read and digest the original post, but a snippet is below:
Personally I can’t see how Windows 2008 Hyper-V can be put forward [just yet], especially when the management solution (SCVMM vNext) hasn’t been released. Sure SCVMM can/will/does do some seriously funky stuff with Virtualization management. I’m just saying it’s not out there yet for 2008.
So it’s very interesting times ahead.
December 11th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Looks like this does not even take into account that you save $1000 (approx) per guest OS when running Server 2008 as you host OS….
December 12th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Alan,
The savings are the same if you are running ESX or any other product!
December 17th, 2007 at 5:07 am
dothingso
Actually… Windows Guest operating systems are free when you run Windows Enterprise or Windows Datacenter editions as you parent OS.
This is NOT the case when you run a non-windows parent OS such as ESX.
December 17th, 2007 at 6:56 am
Hi Alan and All,
Actually this is not the case - people can leverage the same Microsoft licensing policies irrelevant of the virtualisation platform - if you purchase Windows Data Centre you can run as many Windows guests as you want on ESX or Hyper-V or Virtual Server.
Also this slide does not take into account the fact that Memory Over subscription can be utilised on the VMware product to increase the number of virtual machines per physical host - reducing total numbers of physical hosts.
The slide is also misleading in that the Microsoft solution does not provide a Live Migration - merely a suspend and restart cold migration leveraging Microsoft Cluster Services. In addition the Dynamic Resource scheduling is limited to a host - if you change the amount of resource assigned to the Windows guest - there isn’t any re-evaluation of the placement and optimal location of that VM on the current physical host - whereas the VMWare product will re-evaluate and live migrate VM’s between hosts to ensure the resource usage is optimised.
Finally the management server does not take into account that for full management you will need to purchase the full System Centre suite not just VMM. So overall this slide is very misleading and attempts to show parity between a version 1 virtualisation solution and a version 3 solution.
December 20th, 2007 at 2:31 am
I guese the point why would you buy the Datacenter licence for the server and then not use it if Datacenter has the almost the same functionality as ESX then why buy ESX as well… Live migration is great but is it really worth the extra cost… to save you about 60 seconds of down time a year… if yes then use ESX… if not then use Hyper-V bearing in mind that live migration will be available in the next version…
You are right that the it does not include the full SC call for all products but it still comes no where close to adding $10 to the overall price.