My name is Elliott Morris, manager of what's known within Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business as the "War on Cost team." The team’s role is to collect operational data from business and public sector customers to understand their costs for deploying, operating and managing Microsoft server and desktop software. We use this information to improve our products, and we also use the opportunity to share our findings, as appropriate, with our customers and partners, such as this whitepaper on optimizing desktops and this whitepaper on managing servers. Why do I tell you this? To help you understand our role within Microsoft and to demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to help our customers operate Microsoft software as efficiently as possible. One of our recent studies was to understand the recurring labor costs in managing and operating Microsoft Hyper-V versus VMware’s competing platforms. The licensing costs of these products are an important consideration for customers, as are the benefits of physical-to-virtual server consolidations. Both items are often discussed to some length in the industry. However, I’ve seen no significant published research that compared the more important recurring operational costs of managing production virtual servers. Our study was originally intended to be used internally within Microsoft to feed into our product planning process, but the results were so eye-opening that they have been made public, which you can download here. I would recommend reviewing the methodology of the study as the findings will be more meaningful. Here are some key points: · The respondents were located in the U.S. and were surveyed by an outside market research firm using a double-blind survey. · We focused on Hyper-V and ESX/vSphere only. · Respondents represent organizations having 500 PCs or more. · The one-time costs were either assumed to be well known (e.g., licensing) or similar enough (e.g., planning, setup) that these costs were out of scope. · The statistical “confidence interval” is 7.76% with a confidence level of 95%. Here are a few summary points from the study: · The IT labor costs varied widely based on the customer’s IT process maturity, but the average costs were $10,357 per guest when hosted on Hyper-V versus $13,629 per guest when hosted on VMware, a 24% savings for Hyper-V versus VMware, and Hyper-V customers at every maturity level showed lower costs · The average density of Windows Server guests per server was 30% greater for Hyper-V (7.9) than VMware (6.1) · Customers using Microsoft system management products to manage their hosts had 15.6% lower annual IT labor costs ($9,486) per virtual machine than customers using VMware vCenter ($11,238) and 36.7% lower costs than customers using management products from a mix of vendors ($14,988) So what should you make of these results? First, don’t ignore the cost to operate, manage and support the products you are using or are considering to use. The acquisition costs are usually just a piece of the overall total cost of ownership. Second, be careful when reviewing claims, such as VM guest densities, from vendors. Our study used a statistically significant sample size of 154 companies, yet we have seen vendors make bold claims (example, see this whitepaper from VMware) when using a sample size of only 3 companies. You should also know that we don’t have all the answers to where the cost savings originate. Microsoft focuses on building products that are well integrated and easy to use, and thus reduce recurring operational costs. I'm confident that this explains much of what the study found. However, I'm in the process of studying, at a detailed level, how Hyper-V and System Center save customers time and thus money. Stay tuned. Feel free to leave questions in the comments section below, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions. Elliott Team's blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/itbizval/
My name is Elliott Morris, manager of what's known within Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business as the "War on Cost team." The team’s role is to collect operational data from business and public sector customers to understand their costs for deploying, operating and managing Microsoft server and desktop software. We use this information to improve our products, and we also use the opportunity to share our findings, as appropriate, with our customers and partners, such as this whitepaper on optimizing desktops and this whitepaper on managing servers. Why do I tell you this? To help you understand our role within Microsoft and to demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to help our customers operate Microsoft software as efficiently as possible.
One of our recent studies was to understand the recurring labor costs in managing and operating Microsoft Hyper-V versus VMware’s competing platforms. The licensing costs of these products are an important consideration for customers, as are the benefits of physical-to-virtual server consolidations. Both items are often discussed to some length in the industry. However, I’ve seen no significant published research that compared the more important recurring operational costs of managing production virtual servers. Our study was originally intended to be used internally within Microsoft to feed into our product planning process, but the results were so eye-opening that they have been made public, which you can download here.
I would recommend reviewing the methodology of the study as the findings will be more meaningful. Here are some key points:
· The respondents were located in the U.S. and were surveyed by an outside market research firm using a double-blind survey.
· We focused on Hyper-V and ESX/vSphere only.
· Respondents represent organizations having 500 PCs or more.
· The one-time costs were either assumed to be well known (e.g., licensing) or similar enough (e.g., planning, setup) that these costs were out of scope.
· The statistical “confidence interval” is 7.76% with a confidence level of 95%.
Here are a few summary points from the study:
· The IT labor costs varied widely based on the customer’s IT process maturity, but the average costs were $10,357 per guest when hosted on Hyper-V versus $13,629 per guest when hosted on VMware, a 24% savings for Hyper-V versus VMware, and Hyper-V customers at every maturity level showed lower costs
· The average density of Windows Server guests per server was 30% greater for Hyper-V (7.9) than VMware (6.1)
· Customers using Microsoft system management products to manage their hosts had 15.6% lower annual IT labor costs ($9,486) per virtual machine than customers using VMware vCenter ($11,238) and 36.7% lower costs than customers using management products from a mix of vendors ($14,988)
So what should you make of these results? First, don’t ignore the cost to operate, manage and support the products you are using or are considering to use. The acquisition costs are usually just a piece of the overall total cost of ownership. Second, be careful when reviewing claims, such as VM guest densities, from vendors. Our study used a statistically significant sample size of 154 companies, yet we have seen vendors make bold claims (example, see this whitepaper from VMware) when using a sample size of only 3 companies.
You should also know that we don’t have all the answers to where the cost savings originate. Microsoft focuses on building products that are well integrated and easy to use, and thus reduce recurring operational costs. I'm confident that this explains much of what the study found. However, I'm in the process of studying, at a detailed level, how Hyper-V and System Center save customers time and thus money. Stay tuned.
Feel free to leave questions in the comments section below, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions.
Elliott
Team's blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/itbizval/
Hi, I’m Alex Miroshnichenko, chief technology officer of Virsto Software. One of the most exciting events of my summer was the announcement of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1). Though still in beta, SP1’s stability has lived up to production standards in Virsto’s test labs.
SP1 brings Dynamic Memory to Microsoft Hyper-V. In practical terms, you should be able to run meaningfully more virtual machines on the same server hardware, since static memory limits are gone.
Dynamic Memory also eliminates a key argument that competitors have held against Hyper-V. We should not expect the competition to stop the FUD completely. However, it will become increasingly difficult to use the “memory overcommit” argument against Hyper-V being a true enterprise grade virtualization solution.
Why would a storage guy like me be so excited about dynamic memory? It is rather straightforward: now that memory is no longer an issue for increasing virtual machine (VM) density per physical host, the next major obstacle becomes the storage architecture. The technology we have developed at Virsto Software removes that obstacle.
Virtualized hosts drive storage traffic differently than physical servers because they run multiple instances of independent operating system (OS) images. We call this effect the “VM I/O Blender”. Each OS instance optimizes its I/O patterns on the assumption it owns the hardware; however, the virtual machine hardware itself is virtual. The I/O streams are “blended” in the virtualization layer, making the I/O pattern through the physical storage interconnect highly random. As we all know, storage devices are much worse at random I/O than sequential – as much as two orders of magnitude slower.
The more virtual machines per physical server, the more random the storage I/O stream becomes, and the more the VM I/O Blender will hinder server performance. Half, even 80%, of a server’s storage throughput can be lost.
How might you solve this problem? The simplest (and may I say the worst) way is to throw money at the problem: buy expensive storage. And when I say “expensive” I mean it. A smarter way is to install a storage software solution that is specifically designed to handle the unique storage I/O patterns and lifecycle of virtual machines. By removing storage bottlenecks, Virsto One software for Hyper-V can deliver three to four times the effective VM density while providing other features essential for VM storage management.
The VM I/O Blender is an artifact of all hypervisors, easily demonstrated on any virtualization platform. We’re pleased to be working with Microsoft to obliterate it on Hyper-V. We have performance comparisons using Hyper-V with Virsto One versus competitive hypervisors that spew about “memory overcommit advantages”: Hyper-V is several times faster. Try it for yourself.
Alex
Hi - by now you might have read there's 17,000 of us attending VMworld in San Francisco. Huge crowds, just as Rick Vanover predicted. Lots of energy and excitement as you can imagine. This post is designed to bring some of the show to you, assuming you're not attending and queuing up to a session 45 mins before the start.
The expo hall started Monday. The attendees who found us were entertained to see 'the biggest little booth' at VMworld. Here's a view. Mike Neil, our GM of Windows Server and Server Virtualization, filmed this 20-minute video from the VMworld blogger lounge (aka, The Cube). After the expo floor closed, we and Citrix hosted a Tweetup. Great conversations and crowd - not to mention the excellent vanilla bean beer made by Thirsty Bear. The discussions reflected the still maturing adoption of virtualization:
That evening, the Aug. 31 edition of USA Today starting hitting the streets starting in the East Coast. The front news section included this 'open letter' advertisement to VMware customers from Microsoft's Brad Anderson. It turned some heads so far. And, of course, VMware had an appropriate response.
Edwin Yuen published a blog worth reading, as it summarized our demos in the booth. Here's an excerpt:
So at this year's VMworld, we are demoing the cloud solution that Outback Steakhouse created using Windows Azure Platform. Working with a partner, Outback Steakhouse developed and deployed an online marketing campaign in less than eight weeks - the flexibility and scalability of the cloud allowed them to support overwhelming customer response. The marketing campaign met its goal of 500,000 fans in only 18 days. It's a great example of IT being able to satisfy business and marketing demands with a fast, cost-effective solution.
We will also demo how we're helping customers use the same tools to control and manage Windows Azure-based applications, as they would applications running on Windows Server. Customers can use System Center Operations Manager to monitor the health of applications, whether the apps are on-premises or on Windows Azure, and in return get a complete view of how well all their IT services are running. We showed this demo at Microsoft Management Summit 2010. This solution provides the critical capability to manage your applications regardless of the infrastructure they may run on, whether it be your datacenter or the public cloud with Windows Azure.
Yesterday's keynote was probably the best of the 7 VMworld conferences that I've attended. It was a combination of game day celebration, painting pictures of the future, and showing what here or coming. There were several holes in the presentation. Go here to watch/listen to Mike Neil, Simon Crosby (CTO at Citrix) and Harry Labana (CTO at Citrix) comment on the keynote.
One of the more entertaining lines, or at least the takeaway, is when CEO Paul Maritz said the OS is no longer the center of innovation. His point is that the OS isn't going away, but rather the future innovation will be in virtualization, app frameworks and end-user access. This statement supports his company's lofty P/E ratio and investments in future revenue streams such as SpringSource, vBlock, View 4.5. Thankfully, we offer all that and more today:
OS (Windows Server Hyper-V), app framework (.NET), cloud-scale OS (Windows Azure), common identify and mngt (AD, System Center), desktop optimization (App-V, RDS, RemoteFX).
The meetings yesterday convinced me that Windows Azure much different than EC2 (off-premises IaaS) and VMware's vCloud (private cloud, IaaS), but there's little understanding of what it can do for people today. Coca-Cola, The Tribune Company, RiskMetrics, and Outback Steakhouse are examples that help people understand.
I hope you found this recap useful.
Patrick