This post is part of the 7-part series Seven Top Benefits of Virtualizing Business Critical Applications.
Much like owning a car, there is more to the cost of ownership than the sticker price. The car’s fuel efficiency, maintenance costs, and overall reliability can have a large impact on the owner’s wallet. A better way to assess the economic value of various virtualization platforms is to look at the total cost of ownership (TCO).
Referencing a third-party study by Principled Technologies. Figure 15 compares the time to perform common datacenter jobs using vSphere vs. Hyper-V. To test this scenario, Principled Technologies placed six VMs, each with 10GB of RAM, in a three-server cluster, and then ran a medium database workload on each of the 18 VMs. The study measured the time it took one server in the cluster to enter maintenance mode, evacuate all its VMs to the two remaining servers, and then migrate the VMs back to the original server. The study found the solution running vSphere 5 reduced the time to complete the shifting of VM workloads by 79 percent over the Microsoft solution.
IT architects can run similar comparisons with their own numbers using the VMware Cost-Per-Application Calculator.
Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]
