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What it matters - cost per application, NOT just one piece of the software cost...

I found it interesting when people want to consolidate or virtualize their datacenter x86 servers, most peoples always question on the hypervisor licensing cost and NOT cost per application. What it really matters today is how much you will be paying based on one instance application (or VM which is refer by most peoples). What most of the technology vendors like Microsoft, Citrix and Redhat did not tell you is they somehow will still charge and mare money from selling management tools like Microsoft SCVMM, Citrix Enterprise and management tools, KVM annual licensing maintenance, etc... Well, think about it... if one company is giving free stuff all time, how much development funding they will get to continue to enhance and support the product? Frankly speaking, running your datacenter on technology not mature like HyperV, you probably are losing mind...


With VMware vSphere 5.0 today, it can supports monster VMs (32 vCPU and 1TB RAM) which make more sense to drive both consolidation ratio and monster VM like SAP, oracle, SQL, Exchange, etc... into the virtualized environment. Today, if you were to compare VMware vSphere 5.0 with any hypervisor in the market, you will found out that with the same spec of the hardware, you can easily drive much higher consolidation ratio (probably 4 times). How is this possible? Well, with v-Motion and DRS, and of course with Storage v-Motion and Storage DRS (available in vSphere 5.0), VMware will automatically relocate VMs for the best performance or to ensure you can maximize the resources availability without scarifying performance. With QoS on both storage and network, it guarantees performance on critical applications. At the end of the day, when we talk about cloud computing or Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas), it's all about resource sharing, isn't it? We need it, we use it. When we don't need it anymore, it will be returned to the pool. Without leveraging this concept, it will be better to stick with the physical box, which 80-90% of this computing resources are under utilized. 


Is VMware expensive? Well, VMware today can definitely drive higher consolidation ratio to provide the lowest cost per application. In that case, does it really means anything to you just comparing the licensing? Also, look into the total investment for virtualization, VMware license will normally be 10-15% of the total project cost. Storage will normally cost 50%, follow by server, which normally cost 30% of the total project cost, and lastly 10-15% to the services. 


VMware has offered a calculator to estimate the cost per application. You may find this useful - http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/calculator/ to relook on the TCO/ROI paper when going to virtualization journey.

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