technical solutions and commentary

InfoWorld published a new Server Virtualization Shootout Report on April 23rd with published lab reports and updated product performance and feature comparisons which show that Hyper-V is making great progress as a virtualization platform and IS and Enterprise Virtualization platform.

The article is fairly accurate but commenters do point out that the Pricing and Licensing comparison in the article is totally off base. The author compares Windows Server OS + System Center Management tools costs in the comparison table, but for the other three vendors only compares the Hypervisor cost + Management tools costs. This artificially inflates the cots of using a comparable Hyper-V solutions. Why do I say this?

• Microsoft Hyper-V Server is Free product and includes the same Enterprise capabilities (Live Migration Dynamic Memory) as Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V. It is not crippled like some other vendors ‘free” hypervisor products which remove features as Live Migration.
• The Windows Server OS guest licensing is the same model for any of the virtualization platforms whether it’s Hyper-V, ESX or vSphere, XenServer, Redhat RHVS. If you install Windows Server OS VM’s you can either purchase a Windows Server Standard license for every VM, a Windows Server Enterprise License and install 4 VMs, or license Windows Server Datacenter per physical CPU in the host for unlimited VMs on that host. If you want to be able to move Windows Sever guest VMs around as dynamic workloads you really need to license via Windows Server Datacenter. Microsoft even provides a calculator to help you figure the licensing.
• System Center Management Suite also comes more than one edition, but for a virtual environment it is typically best to license the Datacenter edition of the Suite. If you want to realize the maximum cost savings, you should purchase Windows Sever Datacenter + System Center Management Suite Datacenter + ForeFront EndPoint Protection as a Suite called Enrollment for Core Infrastructure (ECI) through Volume Licensing.

I agree that Microsoft licensing is not easy to understand. There are often multiple ways to license products and some methods bring even greater discounts. But really I would expect the author of the report to dig into this area a bit more than they did to provide an accurate cost comparison.

Microsoft also announced support for CentOS in Hyper-V, as a lot of the large hosting providers use this OS and had requested support for it in Hyper-V. This information was released a month after the InfoWold article, but chnages the OS support diagram.

Why is accurate reporting and basic licensing information so important? Take a look at this IDC press release on the state of Server Shipments as it related to virtualization.

With these items in mind, you can read the Virtualization Shootout report here: http://www.infoworld.com/d/virtualization/virtualization-shoot-out-citrix-microsoft-red-hat-and-vmware-666.