Full story here http://www.itnews.com.au/News/85969,paclib-performs-vmware-analysis-but-chooses-microsoft.aspx The analysis involved monitoring PacLib’s servers for a month, according to IT manager David Furey. “They came back with a proposal of about $25,000 in installation costs and another $25,000 in software costs,” Furey told iTnews. “You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.” “To us, it looked like we weren’t losing any performance or benefits of virtualisation but we were saving a lot of money,” Furey explained. “It just didn’t make financial sense to spend all that money [on vmware], when if we want to add more Hyper-Vs, it’s $49 per server.” Hyper-V has let PacLib group consolidate its 16 physical servers to 4 Dell Poweredge 2950 Servers. There are still 16 servers running but the other 12 are virtual instances.
Perhaps at that price point they should have considered Citrix XenServer, allows for much greater flexibility and scalability.
I think its important to note that virtualisation is the new found TCO reduction mechanism for management/executives.
Virtualisation isn't as simple as most vendors are making it out to be, to often we are seeing server virtualisation gone wrong. Don't get me wrong its great to save a few bucks in a dev environment scenario. However for production environments consideration needs to be given to workload, utilisation etc before even thinking virtualisation.
Anyway thats my 2 cents worth :)