Virtualization and pricing: Price per VM wars

Microsoft's story

James goes on price/VM:

Who's cheapest now ?

Now if the customer is prepared to $5,750 (plus support, training, and extra management tools) on VI3 enterprise... what would they get if they spent that on RAM

	VMware VI3 enterprise	Free Hypervisor
Total Cost	$17,748	$17,748
Windows Licences	$5998	$5998
Virtualization licences	$5750	$0
2 way Server,	$6000	$6000
RAM	4GB	32GB
VMs	14 (with 2x overcommit)	63
Price per VM	$1268	$281

Who's cheapest now ? Oh look it's Microsoft again.

read rest here.

Citrix's response on what VDI is and what it is not

and

VMware's blog where Petrillo does some talking again.

Funny thing though here, Mike. I'd never push this client into some blog controversy. We too are doing big and small VDI deployments provided by several virtualization vendors. Bringing a customer's data into play would mean one very simple thing: what if your competitors get to them and show them that they can do it better (depending on the version of what is "better")

There has been a lot of talk on this blog and others about memory overcommit. Several of the blogs have tried to discredit the power of memory overcommit by saying it's never used by customers in the real world and can simply be overcome by adding more memory to the server (see the long discussions in previous posts on this blog). One VMware customer has already commented about how he architects his environment with memory overcommit in mind. I received a private response from another VMware customer who is getting ready to implement a very large VDI environment with some interesting numbers that I'll walk through below. The customer is a large US bank and to protect the security of their environment I did black out some of the names in the screenshots.

I'd be pissed off if I were the sales guy who managed to get that customer!