Well, you still can have VMware ESXi for free as well. You only paying for management and advance features you get.
Mixing Intel & AMD is not a problem in any hypervisor as far the failover go, but it is still a problem for every hypervisor to when it come to live migration which I think you are totally mixing up in here.
With VMware you are really only paying for the extras you get over what other hypervisors could offer you at the moment.

Regards,
Eiad

I am not sure how are you building your price comparison. If you are going to get what only the standard vSphere edition with vCenter provide you, then you will have to pay for the full System Center Suite.

System Center Suite is actually sold by every Hyper-V R2 server connected to it, so your Hyper-V setup will not be free anymore although your initial cost with an ELA might look like it. Though MS will send you the bill at later stage. Further, the max Hyper-V can match today as features wise is VMware Standard edition which will put them both at the same pricing mark at the moment after the latest VMware schema pricing change.

Further, you are comparing the latest Hyper-V version with ESX 3.5 which at that time Hyper-V did not even have live migration & MS was still suffering to offer anything similar. Look at the many new functionalities vSphere has been leading with. I would leave you with one question to think off, what would happen if a virus or a malware was able to break through to your Windows 2008 base machine & spread as fire as happen with new viruses strikes every now and then. I would not want to be a part of a company running hyper-v at that time, would I?

Regards,
Eiad

I do not see why a company that virtualizes free<) and much less work to administrate and much easier to use.

Used both, never want to go back to ESX (3.5).

Sure ESX has it's strength (especially non windows virtualization) and dynamic memory allocation (which comes with SP1 for 2008 R2), but it's not the wonder product that some like to present it as.

PS: by the way, we are running a 30 node scientific cluster (Linux, GPFS) here too, so it's not like I can only handle a Windows GUI.

No problem. keep coming back & let me know how it goes & if you require any further help.

Regards,
Eiad

Thanks for everything … and the next opportunity.

I am sorry again to get in your business, but you are falling for the biggest mistake most of people falling for when looking at VMware. Who said VMware has to be expensive for SMBs. Actually most SMBs who went for Virtualization are using VMware not Hyper-V. I don’t want to pitch about our features as I am sure you already know of how much better hypervisor and feature we got over hyper-V. If your customers are small & got a little money to spend on Virtualization then VMware is the solution you should offer him as its much easier to administer which definitely a plus for your small customer, but our new acceleration packages for small business are very cheep. They can even beat Hyper-V on the price. Check out this page with our acceleration kit & look at the essential & essential plus kits at http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/buy/small_business_editions_comparison.html

Trust me these kits have been priced with small businesses in mind, but still give many more enterprise & reliability features than Hyper-V (specially the essential plus kit). Your SMB customer won’t like to find out that you have treated him differently from your larger customers, where he could got what the bigger guys are using. Let me know if you need any help in this regard.

Before I close up I love one of my colleagues signatures method in this regard. Below is a copy of that as that is exactly what you need to look at:

==================== Signature ======================
Myth Buster

Myth -1 : SMBs don’t need the same reliability and availability as enterprises, so any virtualization engine is good enough

Myth -2: SMBs can save money by going with a “free” hypervisor

Fact: Forrester reports that 74% of the virtualized environments in SMBs run on VMware technologies, find out why at: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/smb/resources.html

===================End of Signature ================

Regards,
Eiad

I was trying HyperV r2, because one of our customers, having the entire IT system with Microsoft,want to see how it works for virtualization.