Thanks for the follow up. While I generally agree with your assessment of vSphere's superiority over Hyper-V, I am not (yet) sold on the cost/benefit ratio.
I would very much appreciate connecting with anyone else running Hyper-V in a HA configuration. Please, if you're running Hyper-V, contact me however it's convenient for you.
Regarding ATS's service offering: We had a sit down with the service sponsors, and they were very helpful and I think they have a solid offering. The problem is, given the current pricing structure, the tipping point where it's cheaper for us to roll our own is very close to the number of virtual machines we have now, let alone that which we wish to virtualize.
This is totally catch 22 because "central campus" offers the exact product/service that we need (and everyone else who chimed in with "we're running vSphere"), but at the local level it appears cheaper to reinvent the wheel. Maybe my previous calculations were wrong, and I will recalculate all of the options towards the end of this evaluation, but from my perspective it's stupefying that there's not a financial incentive to gravitate towards (as identical as you can get) centrally supported services.
Thoughts?
-Tony
-----Original Message-----
From: David Graff [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2010 9:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]; Tony Cooke
Subject: Re: vSphere v. Hyper-V
When we were initially making that decision about two years ago, both
products were just coming out. As you pointed out, Hyper-V has a clear price
advantage. However at the time, and I believe this is still true, Hyper-V
was a technically inferior product that could not come close to the
consolidation ratios that VMware could do. VMware's resource scheduler is
much more complex, with features like ram deduplication and the guest memory
balloon that allow me over-allocate twice as much virtual memory as I have
physical on the hosts without any negative performance impacts. ESXi also
doesn't carry that whole weight of a Windows install, and is easier to
maintain and has less security vulnerabilities being disclosed about it.
With 2008 and R2 guests, I can hot-add memory or entire processors without a
guest reboot. For our operation where we are shooting to consolidate 30+
servers down to 3, the ability to use these technologies and over-commit
resources made sense for the extra cost.
But depending on how large your operation it, it might be more
cost-effective to just lease resources from ATS's virtualization cluster and
let them manage it.
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