Last week VMware announced very positive business results for the first quarter 2010, beating analyst expectations by a considerable margin. Needless to say, we are thrilled to see how customers continue to turn to VMware to reduce complexity, dramatically lower costs, and increase business agility.
In the earnings call, our execs also described how we saw strong momentum in our vSphere bundles for small and medium businesses (vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essentials Plus and vSphere Acceleration Kits). For some people, hearing this may be a bit of a surprise as other virtualization vendors have been trying to create the misconception that VMware’s virtualization is too expensive for small businesses. Microsoft, for example, claims that Hyper-V and System Center are 3x to 12x less expensive than the VMware’s Essentials bundles. Ultimately, nothing better than positive business results demonstrates how such claims are a misrepresentation of reality, but just in case, here is some simple math that proves it.
In the table below we compare the cost of software licenses and support to deploy a virtualization solution with centralized management and the ability to quick recovery from hardware failures. The size of the deployment is 3 virtualization hosts (2 CPUs per host) running 15 VMs total.
As you can see from the table, VMware Essentials Plus is actually about $800 cheaper than a comparable offering from Microsoft even when only considering licensing cost and assuming equal consolidation ratios. While we believe that cost per application is a better approach to determine cost of acquisition for large and small/medium businesses, we wanted to debunk our competitor’s claim using their preferred methodology – upfront software license costs.
Price is certainly an important element of consideration for a small business; however it is not the only advantage that explains the momentum of the VMware Essentials bundles. Reliability, ease-of-use, unlimited technical support calls, and rapid recovery from unplanned hardware failure are also other very important ones. In the last couple of blogs (“VMware ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center – Check it Out!”, “Jumpstart a free virtual environment in a few clicks with VMware GO and ESXi”) we have talked about how and why VMware ESXi is a more reliable, robust and easy-to-use virtualization platform. VMware’s solutions for SMBs are based on the same core technology that the largest companies in the world use in their production environments — there just is not a more proven x86 virtualization platform out there. Why settle for less when you can afford to get the best? I guess many people have already figured this out.
In my next blog, I will discuss in greater detail the advantages that vSphere Essentials Plus offers for recovery and protection from hardware failures.