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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