Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

pmunro — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:42:02 GMT

So I take it that Microsoft won't be adding this feature :)

Windows Deployment

Musings of an IT Pro Evangelist — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:24:57 GMT

Today's post on Edge is an interview I did recently with Michael Niehaus and Jeremy Chapman regarding

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

S Bevans — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:25:00 GMT

With due respect. You might be missing the bigger picture here. I have not had very good luck with my early access of 2008... Production ready??? Insane thought at best.

We have many production VM's with high level of uptime and great performance DRS, HA and Vmotion work as advertised.

Live migration is better termed planned outage while VMotion is flawless.

and BTW my Vista migration is really going well, thanks for asking...

can't wait for 2008 migrations. What else can we freaking break.

Interesting that some people think that VMware is the 'only' vendor that puts marketing spin on things. Perhaps the only vendor I have seen that delivers on what they promise.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

VMware customer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 07:18:45 GMT

Wake up James. Just ask some Windows customers and they will tell you that they are doing more than 2:1 overcommit using ESX. Don't bitch about your competitor's product just because you don't have a shipping hypervisor yet (and it will have features when it ships, like "shipping is a feature too")

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

George — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:55:57 GMT

>Over $5000 of VMWare software is a good

>investment because it saves $500 on RAM ?

It actually is a good investment.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:46:52 GMT

@ Pmunro. We had it in the Alphas and if the market demands it we'll put it back in. It's a really, really bad idea to use it (VMwares own documents say as much).

@ S Bevans. The Beta of Hyper-V is a beta, and not production ready. Actually the beta works pretty well until you put under stress like you would in production :-) Where did I say VMWare was unique in putting a marketing spin on things. When we say things that don't stack up people take us to task on it. I think it's perfectly reasonable hold other people to the same standard.

@ "VM Ware customer". Drop me a mail with a customer name who's doing this, where $5000 of RAM wouldn't solve the problem, and the name of your chosen charity. VMWare has a very strong market position, and with VMotion they have a feature we won't have until the next generation of hyper-V. There's a difference between bitching about a competitor because they have a lead on us, and shooting down illogical statements that they make. I try not to do the former and will do the latter as and when required.

@George. Do expand... for some customers VMWare is a good investment. But NOT because the ability to save a small about of money on RAM. The number of customers who think that it is a good investment will decline over time :-)

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

Dave — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:00:17 GMT

Are you running a virtual bullshit detector? I had mine running on VMware but it was a real memory hog...

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

Me — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 17:44:41 GMT

Is it true that Hyper-V only handles six running VMs?

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

pmunro — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:21:12 GMT

http://bink.nu/news/hyper-v-r2.aspx

Bob seems to think the feature is a good idea.

We talked about Vmware ESX and its features like shared memory between VMs, "we definitely need to put that in our product" later he said it will be in the next release. Like hot add memory, disk and nic's will be and Live migration of course, which didn't make it in this release.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 01:44:40 GMT

@ "Me" Hyper-V handles running as many VMs as you've got memory (disk/CPU/Network for).

That's why this test is completely bogus, artificially constrain one resource [memory] and show that a piece of software gets round that constraint. However the cost of removing the constraint via software is 10 times that of removing it by hardware.

I think the product group are aiming for better numbers than virtual server and we've shown that in public with *hundreds* of VMs on it.

@Pmunro.

Well, VMware's own perf guides say it's a bad idea.

Do you want to be in the support call with an app vendor who has taken steps to prevent critical bits of code being paged to disk by the OS only to have those self same bits paged out by the virtualization stack ?

(actually that should be another post in its own right).

Give some thought to what apps do when they see spare memory - they USE it. So you're reading stuff from disk to cache it, only to have the virtualization stack page it back out again.

There are exceptions - for example they only way to get a training lab going is to over commit a little.

If BobMu says we have to have it in the product is that because it's expected or because it would be a good idea for customers to use it ...

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

VMware Customer — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 02:09:47 GMT

I've got a wide variety of VM's running in ESX. They differ by OS, patch levels, applications running. I still see the benefit of memory overcommitment, despite these differences.

Also, with regards to having to purchase the Enterprise version to do all of this, if you aren't using the advanced features (which Microsoft doesn't have yet), then the cost does drop by $2000 to $3750. And now that the 8GB limit has been removed from the Foundation Edition (formerly Starter Edition), the price drops again to $1000. That being said, the $$$ that you say VMware will cost is very misleading.

I look forward to when Microsoft's offering is as capable.

That's when it will really get interesting.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:47:26 GMT

I'm only quoting the numbers that were on the blog post. But even if you use $1000 for the cost of VMware that's still an 8GB upgrade for the Microsoft system, and the numbers in the post still don't hold water.

It's always dangerous to try to match two vendors products too closely, but with Hyper-V at $28 and having a better management story to offset the lack of a "v-motion" alike, the number of good reasons to buy VMware will shrink. They won't all vanish with the first version.

VMware - running hot enough to cook the figures

James O'Neill's blog — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:21:23 GMT

It's quite amusing to see the VMware blogger ( Citrix's blog names him as Eric Horschmann) has come back

Building dangerous things into products.

James O'Neill's blog — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 15:19:53 GMT

In the comments an earlier post , "PMunro" raised an interesting point, and I mentioned it

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

Joe — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:11:09 GMT

>Over $5000 of VMWare software is a good

>investment because it saves $500 on RAM ?

Your math is off. If your virtual machines are bound by memory and not by CPU, than you are saving much more. There is a good chance you can reduce the entire size of your farm based on memory over commitment. Now you are saving the fully burdened cost of one or more servers which is significantly more than 5k. Consider labor, real-estate, hardware, and hardware acquisitions costs. Add in incremental costs such as power and administration.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:13:55 GMT

Joe, you can just put $500 of RAM in the server and have 8GB instead of 4GB. Then free Microsoft software can run the same number of VMs as expensive VMware software.

What you say only holds water *If* the server is limited by the amount of RAM that can be fitted. But a $6000 2 way server which only takes 4GB ? That's daft. Dell can sell me a two-way server with 24GB for a shade over $2000

(and see my later post for the trade of between cost of RAM, cost of VMware and OverCommit ratio for when VMware can be cheaper)

Of course admin costs less on the Microsoft platform than the VMware one :-)

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

murph182 — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:14:49 GMT

jamesone, you're missing joes point. Yeah, the cost for an extra 4GB of memory is less than the cost of the hypervisor...in a single server. But over an entire farm, you're going to be able to reduce the number of servers required to do the job, along with the accompanying reduced costs in power, support, etc.

Most virtualization projects I've been a part of have utilized servers with 16GB+, 32GB is seeming to be the usual...Now we're talking about much larger discrepancies in the number of VM's that can be hosted, as well as much larger cost savings in hardware and service/support costs.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

Me — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:54:09 GMT

James: I cannot agree with VMware with a general over commitment ratio of 2, but the question here is not the 4GB RAM machine: take a server of whatever type and put in the maximum possible RAM (it is so cheap...).

In that case you don't have the option to put in cheap RAM to run more VMs: you have to buy a new server.

And a technical question: how much overhead does a 1GB, 1VCPU, 32bit VM has in Hyper-V?

(in case of ESX it is 97,35MB)

How much RAM does Windows Server 2008 need if used for virtualization?

(ESX Console needs ~272MB)

if the market demands it we'll put it back in

euroVMWuser — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:48:12 GMT

... "it's a really, really bad idea to use it". James, tell us please, how many users of your software have you met in the past 6 months? Memory is the number 1 resource constraint in virtualised production environments! And when you virtualise desktops, memory overcommit is a godsend. We can put 15-20 desktops per core comfortably under ESX. What do your tests suggest you can do with Hyper-V?

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:05:26 GMT

@Murph182. $5000 isn't the cost for the whole farm is it ? For every server where you add $5000 worth of VMWare add $5000 worth of RAM - that's about 48GB, so we're talking a Microsoft Model being on 64GB and the VMware on 16GB.

@"me", ah... an intelligent question - what if you can't add ram. Well read this one for how much memory you need to have the server for that to work.

http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/archive/2008/03/15/vmware-running-hot-enough-to-cook-the-figures.aspx

The memory over head per VM I've been seeing varies (depending on what hardware is emulated and what is Native VM bus) but from memory was well inside that, and the overhead for server core is ~ 256MB

@EuroVMUser, I meet typically a few thousand users per quarter. Desktop Virtualization lags server ... and I suspect 15-20 Desktops per core would be optimistic - we'd tend to steer those solutions towards a thin client and Terminal services - in any event check the link above and do the sums for when VMWare is a better investment than RAM.

That charity offer at the end of the main post is still open.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

Me — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 02:03:30 GMT

Thanks for your reply.

One more question: why have you omitted VI3 Foundation from the last comparison table...? :-)

Buy only 16GB RAM and VI3 Foundation for the same number of VMs as Hyper-V and you still have some free capacity in your server (e.g. if you need to run more VMs, you won't have to buy a new server, you only have to buy some cheap RAM).

Now let's look at some more practical approaches/numbers.

At first let's stick at VI3 Enterprise and the standard "VM blogger prices" ($5998 Windows cost/server, $6000/server) and 2:1 ratio.

You need half the number of servers to run a given number of VMs on ESX than on Hyper-V.

Let's say you need 2 ESX Servers, thus you need 4 Hyper-V servers:

ESX cost: 2 *(5998 + 6000 + 5750) = $35,496

Hyper-V cost: 4 * (5998 + 6000) = $47,992

That is you save about $12,000 (25%) with ESX and you have:

- more functionality

- a proven technology

Now you can say that 2:1 over commitment ratio is not real in general. Ok, I agree. But if that ratio is let's say 1.2:1 compared to Hyper-V and you buy five $10,000 price ESX server:

VI3 Enterprise cost: 5 * (5998 + 10000 + 5750) = $108,740

VI3 Foundation cost: 5 * (5998 + 10000 + 995) = $84,965

Hyper-V cost: 6 * (5998 + 10000) = $95,988

Thus you pay

- 10% less for a proven technology or

- 10% more for more functionality and proven technology.

You can choose.

If you buy more expensive servers (or add related infrastructure costs such as UPS, networking, space, ...) the difference between VI3 Enterprise and Hyper-V will be even less.

Memory Overcommitment in the Real World

Mike DiPetrillo — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:21:31 GMT

James,

You asked for a customer that was using memory overcommit in the real world. We just posted such an example. Go here for the details: http://blogs.vmware.com/virtualreality/2008/03/memory-overcomm.html.

And thank you for the kind donation to the less fortunate in our world.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 12:46:47 GMT

@"ME"

Not sure which table you're refering to.

"You need half the number of servers to run a given number of VMs on ESX than on Hyper-V."

No you don't. You need half the amount of RAM. You don't need half the amount of CPU, you don't need half the disk I/Os (in fact you need more disk I/Os)

If you were going to double the memory on the Microsoft system by doubling the number of servers the servers could

(a) Run Windows Server Enterprise instead of Data-center

(b) Use one Processor instead of 2

but they would produce more than half the heat / power so the running cost for two severs would be more than one, but less than 2 consolidated servers.

Once you to take that into account the rest of your numbers just unravel.

@ Mike, I've replied on your blog. Assuming they're in production I'll pay and post something here.

Think about CALs before you speak!

mslicensing — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 23:02:25 GMT

It would be great if Microsoft would adopt this "free" model to their CALs for all of their backoffice/server products. Maybe if that happened they could have a valid platform upon which to stand and chastise VMware! Until then, you (MS) are making your buck your way, and VMware is making their's their way.

re: Expensive Hypervisors - a bad idea even if you can afford them

jamesone — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:29:42 GMT

Your point would be what ?

As far as I'm concerned when people develop any kind of intellectual property (from Music and Photos to software). They should at liberty to give it away, bundle it, or charge a kings ransom for it AS THEY SEE FIT. (Courts and Governments modify that in ways I don't agree with ....)

If other people want that intellectual property they take it on the terms offered.

We went into Release candidate for Hyper-V today. VMware already has some features which we won't have until (at least) the next version, and (rightly) can charge a premium for those features. Customers decide if the features justify the premium - for example to one set of customers, Vmotion is of no value whatsoever and to another set its worth many times the cost of VMware. I'm not going to criticize anyone's reading of the demand curve - so Let them "make their buck, their way"

What I do object to, and will do my best to shoot down is spurious arguments being advanced for the premium priced features.

Everyone chimes in on VMware memory overcommitment and ROI

Virtualization Report | David Marshall — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:31:08 GMT

These past few days, we've seen some back and forth postings taking place on various corporate blogs around the topics of virtualization ROI and a unique feature found in VMware ESX Server called memory overcommitment. VMware's Eric Horschman posted an

Microsoft and VMware and approaches

James O'Neill's blog — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:49:14 GMT

We're two dates into our roadshow and I've twice been asked to do a comparison of VMware and Microsoft

SCVMM 2008 and VMware management - we must be doing something right...

rakeshm's VM Management Blog — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:24:53 GMT

It has come to my attention that some of our competitors are making various claims about SCVMM 2008 and