Hyper-V pricing? - Yellow Bricks

Can anyone help me out? At several blogs I’ve read that Hyper-V is available with clustering and quick migration for only a fraction of the costs compared to VMware. I was just browsing the internet and stumbled upon the following:

Windows 2008 Enterprise: $3,999 with 25 CALs

The System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise Edition’s price is $1,290.

Comprehensive solution for end-to-end management of physical and virtual server environments that includes the Enterprise Server management licenses for Operations Manager 2007, Configuration Manager 2007, and Data Protection Manager 2007; the license for Virtual Machine Manager 2007; and, rights to manage an unlimited number of operating system environments on a single server.

So Window 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V $3,999. VMware Enterprise which includes VMotion and HA will cost you $5,750.

System Center Enterprise will cost you $1,290. VMware VirtualCenter will cost you $4,995.

So do you need a System Center Enterprise license for every Hyper-V host you want to manage?

Matt McSpirit says:

Monday, April 28, 2008 at 14:17

Hi there,

What you need to remember is, the SC Enterprise License, also known as an E-SML, get’s you 4 products, which are/will be available separately, so it’s up to you . System Center Virtual Machine Manager, which is probably the closest to VirtualCenter, will be shortly available standalone. The other products in the E-SML have been available separately for a while. However, with the E-SML, It’s the most cost effective form of licensing the management products, as it comes with unlimited virtualisation rights, which means that you could have a big physical box, with 250 Windows VMs running on it, and all 250 of them can be patched/updated/deployed (SC Configuration Manager), Monitored and Analysed (SC Operations Manager), Intelligently Backed Up and Restored (SC DPM) and Managed from a Virtual/Physical perspective (SC Virtual Machine Manager), so you’re getting a lot for your money, and this can be used in conjunction with an ESX host. You can’t really use the technologies to manage the ESX host per se, but you can use it to manage all those VMs on top of ESX, so it gives you great insight into those actual Windows workloads, presuming most of the VMs are Windows. If not, there are still options for Linux VMs with the E-SML technologies too. For me, the E-SML is a great way to manage all your servers, both physical and virtual, from one place, not just the host machine.

Your pricings for WS2008 and VMware VI3 to my knowledge are correct, but just remember that you’d still need the Windows licenses on top of the VI3 cost, but I have to admit, VI3 has some great features, some of which can be matched using Hyper-V & System Center, some of which can’t be matched right now.

Remember though, the E-SML gives you the Agents (Apart from SC VMM which you get the agent, and the server bits) for the machines, not the actual Server bits themselves. So, you’d still need to purchase a SCCM Server Licence, SCOM Server Licence and an SCDPM Server Licence, to control all thye agents on the machines out in your environment.

Hope that helps,

Regards,
Matt