Virtualization Pricing trends
 

Hey Folks, I was wondering, in terms of pricing of various virtualization offering, have you seen any visible trends. I guess pricing may be coming down from every vendor including VMWare - any thoughts - Thanks for helping us

I would say price will go down since most of the big companies started to use Virtualization solution. I work for a bank and some of our production boxes are running on VMware.

VMware actually just raised their pricing - an odd response to Microsoft's release of the "free" Hyper-V. If you consider that Windows licenses are effectively free if you run them in Hyper-V VMs it's a compelling offering.

But... 3.5i is indeed free. I moved a bunch of physical servers to a 3.5i "free" and it works splendidly. Thankfully I have a hugely overkill server with a lot of memory and SAS drives.

VMware will stay in the driver's seat for another 2-3 years at most - MS will be breathing down their neck by then once they have released Enterprise-friendly features similar to hot VM migration (i.e., VMotion), which is expected to happen in about a year. Until then Hyper-V will mostly be a smaller business tool but nothing that large enterprises use in earnest, except maybe lab configs, proof-of-concept that kind of stuff. I work for a large IT department with about 50 ESX servers around the world and Hyper-V is at best "interesting" but won't be taken seriously until VMotion/HA/DRS-like features are available and stable.

Rest assured MS will make it extremely challenging for VMware. We're like 99% of the Enterprise - 95-99% of our VMware VMs are Windows. So why not just use MS Virtualization products, once they're ready for the job? MS will completely kill VMware on pricing - just another line item on your annual software assurance, support bundled together on to your existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement. Right now even big companies choke when they see the licensing and SnS costs for VI3. Yikes. Microsoft will be extremely compelling for 99% of the enterprises out there.

In short: Long-term VMware will find it hard to compete against the Microsoft "free" juggernaut, just as Netscape did. Technologically they have a HUGE advantage over Microsoft but if Microsoft is anything it is persistent. It keeps plugging its usually inferior solutions (though my understanding is Hyper-V actually performs quite comparably to ESX) until it eats away the market share of its competitors.

Hey dude, you have said that you have worked with 3.5i. How was your experience and i wish to try it for my company. Actually we have adopted and i could say that they were totally down.