With the release of Windows Server 2008 and the coming RTM of the Windows Hyper-V product, a VMWare employee created a blog post explaining how VMWare can ’save’ the organization money per VM over Windows Server by using their RAM over commitment feature which is not in Windows Hyper-V. What is interesting are the inflated server costs used in the post and the the perceived value of RAM in a server. The complete post is found here - http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2008/03/cheap-hyperviso.html

Now before you completely buy into what the writer from WMWare is saying, make sure you read the post from a Microsoft writer addressing the scenario. In the reply post more realistic server configurations, technical best practices, and more accurate hardware and software costs. Take a look at the reply post from James O’Neill at - http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2008/03/13/expensive-hypervisors-a-bad-idea-even-if-you-can-afford-them.aspx 

Log story short =

  • $270 per VM (hardware and software costs) for Microsoft with physical RAM assigned per host.
  • $1,268 for per VM for VMware (hardware and software costs) with RAM over committed by nearly 5 times. (This does not include support costs either at + $261 per VM for the server scenario they provide in their own post.)
  • Another way to look at it. Spend nearly $5000.00 per physical host to save $500.00 in RAM.

Read the posts your self and come up with your own conclusion.