At the end of June Microsoft published a new paper against VMware titled: Operational Efficiency – Hyper-V versus VMware ESX & vSphere Operations & Management Cost Analysis.
The 17-pages report, released by a new War on Cost team at Microsoft, includes a research conducted in late 2009 and early 2010 by HANSA/GCR, which delivered a web-based survey to enterprises with 500 PCs or greater and collected the results.
The goal was to determine which platform, between Hyper-V and ESX, is less expensive in IT labor to operate on an on-going basis, and try to understand if the systems management products used to manage the environment impact the cost of managing either or both platforms.
The claimed results are quite interesting:
- the average costs were $10,357 per guest when hosted on Hyper-V versus $13,629 per guest when hosted on VMware, a 24% savings for Hyper-V versus VMware (but Microsoft admits that the IT labor costs varied widely based on the customer maturity)
- the average customer would spend $6,828,142 in IT Labor to run 501 Windows Server guests on VMware versus $5,189,233 in IT labor to run the same 501 guests on Hyper-V, an annual labor savings of $1,638,909 when using Hyper-V
- The average VMware customer would require 83 servers, while the average Hyper-V customer would require only 64 servers to run an average of 501 Windows Server guest OSes
- VMware customers showed very little migration from Windows Server 2003 (75%) vs. Windows Server 2008 (9%) while Hyper-V customers ran Windows Server 2003 (34%) less than Windows Server 2008 (57%) as the guest server operating system
- Across workloads (App, DB, DR, Email, Test & VDI) the Hyper-V costs were less expensive for all workloads except Test
- Customers using Microsoft system management products to manage their hosts had 15.6% lower annual IT labor costs ($9,486) per VM than customers using vCenter ($11,238) and 36.7% lower costs than customers using management products from a mix of vendors ($14,988)
Thanks to HyperVoria for the news.