VMware

See how VMware meets all your essential requirements to virtualize your datacenter at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than our competitors. Some vendors claim that VMware is five to sixteen times more expensive than their offerings but they base these claims only on upfront licensing costs (an inaccurate measure of cost) and don't take into account virtual machine density and operational cost savings.

An accurate TCO analysis for virtualization must include the following:

  • Maximize Virtual Machine Density per Physical Server.
  • Save on Operational Costs.

Save on Operational Costs

Ongoing IT management and operational costs can be several times greater than hardware and software acquisition costs over the lifetime of a server. This must be factored into any TCO analysis.

Intelligent automation and storage management features built into vSphere with Operations Management and adjacent solutions like vCenter Site Recovery Manager boost efficiency by automating manual processes and simplifying administration tasks. This, in turn, reduces the time IT administrators spend maintaining the existing infrastructure and frees their resources for more important and valuable strategic projects.

One specific area of strength for VMware is in the management of storage. By integrating many storage operations that otherwise require manual storage management, customers can save money from increased efficiency and agility.

Per Forrester, the vSphere with Operations Management provides business value by -

  • Up to 70% operational expense reduction and productivity gains from reduced manual effort and fewer incidents
  • Up to 30% capital expense reduction from capacity optimization and deferred hardware purchases
  • Additional business benefits from increased availability and uptime, reduced risk of compliance violations and audits
KEY VIRTUALIZATION FEATURES VMWARE VSPHERE WITH OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER 2012 WITH HYPER-V CITRIX XENSERVER 6
Standardized host configurations

Host Profiles

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Automated host provisioning

Auto Deploy: Auto configure and reconfigure new physical servers with host images

Legacy bare-metal provisioning is not scalable and is incompatible with stateless servers

Nothing comparable
Automated provisioning of virtual networking

vSphere Distributed Switch and 3rd party extensible switch

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Only 3rd party extensible switch

~

Distributed Virtual Switch (DVS) consumes system resources
Automated server workload balancing

DRS and DPM

~

Dynamic Optimization does not adhere to affinity and anti-affinity rules

~

WLB is limited to one host pool and lacks affinity rules
Automated storage workload balancing

Storage DRS

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Intelligent storage selection

Profile-Driven Storage

Nothing comparable

Nothing comparable
Cluster-wide prioritization of storage I/O

Storage I/O Control

Nothing comparable

~

Very basic traffic shaping, but no reservations or shares
Storage APIs

Standards-based array offload capability requires no additional infrastructure or configuration

~

Requires proprietary API support and additional infrastructure dependencies

APIs exist, but adoption is low
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