We announced a new calculator today, one that helps you start to look at the “cost per application” view of virtualization. This particular application isn’t designed to measure total cost of ownership or total ROI, just what it costs you to spin up enough servers to consolidate all your existing applications. It’s interesting and it’s designed to be simple enough to just try, so go check it out.
What drives that calculation is VM density. And I think that’s one of the more interesting take-aways from this exercise. You can simply get more virtual machines running on the same kit with ESX than with other hypervisors. And before you start jumping to conclusions, it’s about more than “just” memory overcommit. It’s a synergistic effect of a lot of performance technologies that have been baked into our hypervisor over the past 10 years. So take a look at the blog post below to get the gist, but do make sure you read the study, The True Cost of Virtual Server Solutions from Taneja Group, which explores what went into their measurement of VM density.
As you might have already heard from our press release earlier today (see today’s announcement), we have announced the availability of the VMware Cost Per Application Calculator
– an easy-to-use web tool that aims at helping companies accurately
estimate and compare the acquisition cost of virtualization.
Understanding the true acquisition cost of a virtualization solution
can be quite confusing these days, so in an effort to shed some light
on this subject and get to reliable conclusions we have built a simple
tool (the Cost Per Application Calculator) with the support of customers and industry analysts . The
Calculator compares the acquisition costs of VMware Infrastructure 3
with the one of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V plus System
Center .Calculating acquisition costs by only looking at
software licenses may be an easy thing to do, but it provides a
simplistic and incomplete picture of reality because:
- It
does not account for VM density (i.e. number of applications that can
be run on a virtualization host) – higher VM density means less
servers, storage, networking, guest operating system licenses, etc.- It does not account for virtualization management cost (both
software and hardware) – hypervisors are free (or almost), but
management solutions are not. …
