At the end of the VMware financial call on Tuesday, Paul Maritz (VMware’s new CEO) announced that ESXi 3.5 would now be available for free to download from vmware.com. Yesterday the blogosphere and press lit up with articles about the announcement and what it did or did not mean for VMware and the competition. As I sat here and parsed through the pile of emails inside the company on the implications for different market segments and what it means from a competitive perspective it got me back to the whole price argument that Microsoft has been using against VMware for some time – “Hyper-V is free”. Since VMware now has a free bare metal hypervisor on the market (or will on Monday) I thought I’d revisit some pricing arguments specifically for the SMB which is a good target market for both ESXi 3.5 as well as Hyper-V. After all, that’s the market that everyone out there says Microsoft will take away from VMware rather rapidly.
I try to travel the country and get to as many VMware user groups as I can each year. It’s always great to meet with so many customers, potential customers, and partners in these types of environments. You get people out of their natural environment and they’re much more wiling to talk freely and openly about what’s good and bad with the product and give people at VMware hints about what we should be doing.
I’ve been searching high and low for some real world consolidation ratio numbers for Hyper-V. The product is still a little new out there so I didn’t expect to find much. Probably the best reference case is Microsoft’s own deployment for www.microsoft.com. According to their blog, they’re getting a 2:1 consolidation ratio in production.
Given the VM performance on the new servers we’ll consolidate down from 80 physical servers to 64 VMs. Those VMs will initially be deployed onto a total of 40 new physical servers.
[From Windows Server Division WebLog : Microsoft.com Powered by Hyper-V]
Even for a very busy website that seems a little low on the consolidation front especially for the hardware they’re running on and how they have the VMs configured (details in their blog). I know of several large banking, financial, travel, and major news sites all running VMware for production facing sites and all get at least 6:1 consolidation in production with most getting north of 10:1. It’s a mix of 2-way and 4-way hosts but nothing more than what Microsoft is deploying on. This has me scratching my head and looking for more answers so I’m turning to cyberspace.
If there’s anyone out there running Hyper-V in production or even test/dev with real workloads let us know what you kind of consolidation ratio you’re getting. Thanks.
Tags: consolidation, hyper-v, Microsoft
It seems presidential candidates are getting into just about everything these days. First Sen. Barak Obama sponsors a race car in the NASCAR Sprint Cup and now he’s forcing your Microsoft Hyper-V host to reboot. Yes, you read that right. A new patch from Microsoft adds words to the dictionary such as “Obama”. This new patch (KB955020) is included in the most recent patch Tuesday and requires a reboot of your system. It impacts Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. This means it also impacts Hyper-V hosts. This is just another reason why it’s a very bad idea to have your virtualization solution tied to a general purpose operating system like Windows or Linux.
I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw Keith Ward’s take on Chris Wolf’s take on Microsoft’s new benchmark they published just before I left. I’m pretty sure it was done in response to a benchmark that VMware published showing the excellent throughput seen on the VMware ESX platform. Microsoft needed some good news to go along with their “early” release of Hyper-V and so they showed a very large throughput number (200,000 iops) and claimed victory. I do have to say the number was impressive but (a) it wasn’t anywhere close to a real world scenario as Chris points out and (b) it was a single VM case.
Tags: Performance
After a very busy Q2 and a 3 1/2 week vacation I’m back in the saddle here at VMware. A lot has changed since I last came up for air and plugged myself into the world. RedHat ditches Xen for KVM, Microsoft releases Hyper-V “early”, new benchmarks from our competitors have come out, and most recently we changed out our CEO. I thought I’d take some time over the next few days to reflect on what all of this means and my take on the impact to the industry at large and VMware.
