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on August 8 2008, 10:31 AM
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Fruit: Apples, Oranges
Fruitful: Current discussions on hypervisor price differences
Fruitless: Getting hypervisor vendors to agree on a fair pricing comparison
The Task
There’s been some interesting hypervisor pricing comparisons circulating the Internet over the past two weeks that have caught my interest:
After reading with interest, I set out to conduct my own pricing evaluation, thinking that it couldn’t be too hard to get vendors to agree on a fair pricing comparison (insert joke here). To keep it simple, I decided to use a small branch office consisting of six Windows Server 2003 servers in the evaluation. I consider high availability a requirement in all production virtualization deployments and added virtual infrastructure management to the mix as well. To summarize, the solution requirements consisted of:
- Virtualizing six Windows Server 2003 servers on two 2-way physical hosts
- High availability failover support
- Centralized management of the virtual infrastructure
With the criteria set, I moved to evaluating vendor solutions with each vendor’s bottom line list price.
The Proposed Solutions
Table 1 below compares what I see as comparable solutions from VMware, Microsoft, Virtual Iron, and Citrix.
| Vendor |
Hypervisor Package |
High Availability |
Management |
Total Price |
| Citrix (Stratus OEM) |
XenServer 4.1 (included in Stratus Avance) |
Stratus Avance (includes XenServer hypervisor) $2,495 per node x 2 nodes = $4,990 |
Included with Stratus Avance software |
$4,990 |
| Microsoft |
Hyper-V (included with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise license) $3,999 per node x 2 nodes = $7,998 |
Included with the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition license |
Essential management is provided by the Hyper-V Manager MMC (included with the OS). Advanced management included in System Center Virtual Machine Manger 2008. VMM 2007 Workgroup edition is priced at $499. |
$7,998
or
$8,497 (assumed price once VMM 2008 is available) |
| Virtual Iron |
Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Edition - $799 per socket x 4 sockets - $3,196 |
Included in Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Edition |
Included in Virtual Iron Extended Enterprise Edition |
$3,196 |
| VMware |
VI Standard High Availability Acceleration Kit for 4 processors $7,254 |
Included in VMware Standard High Availability Acceleration Kit |
Virtual Center Foundation Server license included in acceleration kit |
$7,524 |
Table 1: Hypervisor price comparison (assumes Windows guest OS licensing is not required)
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