Microsoft’s marketing department is definitely the king when it comes to twisting the facts in such a way that the average reader doesn’t notice it. It’s nice to see that VMware pointed MS out to a couple of their screw ups. Funny thing is that I’ve been trying to find out what Hyper-V + management tools was gonna cost me and compare this to VMware, which was hard because you can’t find the right prices on their website that easily.
Anyway, I think the document definitely is a good read which clears up a lot of unanswered questions. Check it out.
I agree it’s a bit convoluted, but not overly impossible to figure out. Assuming you are going to be loading up 16+ VMs per host on a quad socket server, you could be looking at the following (pricing is guesstimated list, you would pay much less through a Select agreement):
Per Host
————
4 x $2,500 (MSFT Datacenter w/o SA per socket — unlimited guest Windows Server licenses. You need to do this anyway in a variety of cases to ensure guest OS licensing compliance)
1 x $ 850 (Management Suite Enterprise w/ SA, unlimited guest licenses for SCOM, SCCM, DPM, and VMM Agent)
One Time
————-
1 x $450 (System Center Operations Manager Server License)
1 x $335 (System Center Configuration Manager Server License)