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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.