Michael Dolan Dot Com

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Thought for the Day: Economics of Xen+Distro

VMware Infrastructure 3 price for 2CPUs: $1,000 (Basic), $3,750 (Standard)

SLES10 price for a server: $349/yr

Now, to properly consolidate a virtual machine to consolidate say 8 Windows servers, you probably want 4CPUs. That puts VMware at $2,000 for Basic and $7,500 for Standard. I can’t tell from VMware’s paper, but it appears VMware has stated they will use per socket licensing and not per core.

That means that the cost to consolidate 8 Windows servers with VMware is roughly 5 years worth of SLES licenses (not counting any 3yr discounts). You can run Windows on Linux (SLES) cheaper than VMware…. weird when you think about all that you get with SLES.

The real value of this equation will surface once Xen+Linux (or should I say Xen+GNU/Linux) increase in functionality for workload management of VMs. Right now I doubt many would argue Xen is as capable as VMware – but I do believe we’re likely to see feature parity at some point to meet the majority of virtualization users’ needs.