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The Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager list price is $499 for five physical servers, which seems to give Microsoft the edge. The question of whether it's cheaper to go with VMware or Microsoft isn't always cut-and-dry.

On the other hand, yeah, there are reasons to go with Hyper-V. 'If you have a lot of VMware installed and you love VMware, wow, the choice just got easier. 'It's a matter of personal preference,' DiDio says. 'If Virtual Machine Manager and Hyper-V together meet your needs, and the price is lower, why not?' Gillett says. If you're a big Microsoft shop, enjoy getting support from a single source and don’t need VMware's extra features, Hyper-V can be a good fit. Now that VMware and Microsoft both offer the hypervisor free, is there any reason to use Microsoft virtualization? 'This doesn't really address the typical enterprise's cost of VMware deployment – just the marketing threat of the low Hyper-V starting price,' Staten writes in a blog post.

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He notes that 'support is not included with the free ESXi if you want that, it starts at $495 per server per year.' If an enterprise can't get a more favorable licensing deal even now that VMware has made the hypervisor free, 'I would postulate that they don't have good negotiators in their organization,' DiDio says.įorrester analyst James Staten doesn't see much of a benefit to enterprises, though. The fact that ESXi is now free could make it easier for individual customers to argue that the premium products – which contain the hypervisor, after all – should cost less. While list prices haven't changed, the actual prices enterprises pay vary depending on the size of deployment and private negotiations between the customer and VMware. Only VMware Infrastructure Enterprise has VMotion, which moves virtual machines from one server to another with zero downtime, a key feature that differentiates VMware's technology from Microsoft's. All three of these versions contain the basic hypervisor and management tools that aren't available with the free edition. For the price of $2,995 you can get VMware Infrastructure Standard, a 'high-availability infrastructure virtualization suite for any workload.' And for $5,750, the most demanding customers can choose the top-of-the-line VMware Infrastructure Enterprise. The VMware Infrastructure Foundation, designed for small businesses and branch offices, has a list price of $995.

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The hypervisor license is free, but only if you don't get any extra management tools. 'Hypervisors by themselves aren't very interesting, bottom line,' Gillett says.ĭid VMware change the price of any other products?

But those management tools are what make virtualization worthwhile in a complicated IT environment. The management tools cost money – even Microsoft charges extra for hypervisor management tools.

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ESXi is perfect for a single server, Gilmartin says, but not when you are using multiple virtualized servers that need to be managed simultaneously with features like live migration of workloads, patch management, centralized backup and guarantees of high availability. (Compare server products.)īut if you're in a large enterprise with dozens or hundreds of virtual servers, and want the flexibility to quickly move workloads in response to changing needs, the free ESXi just isn't going to cut it. You might also use the free hypervisor on an aging server that you plan to upgrade, just to make it easier to move the workload from one box to another when you do replace that server. The free ESXi is good in limited-use cases, such as consolidating two physical servers into one, Gillett says. So calling VMware Server obsolete may be too strong a statement, but 'in terms of the pure hypervisor, clearly ESXi is more appealing,' Forrester analyst Frank Gillett says. VMware Server, since it's not running directly on the server hardware, will be compatible with a greater range of systems. New servers have support for virtualization built into the chip, but some older platforms may not work with ESXi. Some hardware devices might work with VMware Server but not ESXi, Gilmartin says. Not quite, but there are now fewer reasons to use it. The VMware Server, on the other hand, is installed as an application on top of the operating system. VMware is now giving away ESXi, the 'bare-metal' hypervisor that installs directly onto the server hardware. Yes, the VMware Server, which is basically a beginner's kit for VMware's virtualization technology, has been available at no charge for more than two years. Gilmartin points to February 2006, when VMware made a similar move, offering its first free hypervisor.

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