When customers do cost comparisons for themselves, they’ll have to decide what is important to their deployment. Can they risk looking only at the initial licensing costs or is it important to plan for ongoing support and maintenance as well. VMware’s Cost-Per-Application calculator aids customers in comparing the total acquisition costs of a virtual infrastructure and not just the software cost.

VMware’s calculator takes a conservative approach by not including the support cost for Microsoft as Microsoft Premier Support is billed by the hour and the usage varies from customer to customer. Once the incremental support cost is added for Microsoft, the acquisition cost with VMware is at parity or less in all scenarios.

In addition, vSphere Enterprise Plus has far better functionality than Hyper-V as shown by the feature comparison table in the Cost-Per-Application calculator detailed results.

Following are the discrepancies in Microsoft’s claims. A fair cost comparison for virtualization and private cloud platform is also outlined below.

The incremental cost of Microsoft Premier Support  needs to be added to Microsoft’s total cost. VMware’s Support and Subscription Services (SNS) entitles a customer to not only all software releases and updates but also VMware’s Technical Support. Microsoft “Software Assurance” (SA) does not provide similar technical support access. Customers must either purchase “Premier Support” separately from Microsoft (at >$200 per hour) or use third party services.

The claim that Dynamic Memory improvements in Hyper-V 2012 will reduce the 20% VM density advantage VMware calculator assumes is unsupported. The improvement in “Dynamic Memory” that the blog refers to, is only a feature that allows host-level memory swapping during VM startup. VMware’s published third party tests that showed the 20% VM density advantage were based on running steady-state VM workloads and not VMs that were booting up. The steady state scenario is more representative of a production datacenter.

The VMware vSphere VM density advantage derives from its use of five levels of memory management technology.  Hyper-V 2012, like previous versions, continues to employ just “memory ballooning” and that limitation handicaps its VM density.

Once the incremental cost of Microsoft Premier Support is considered, Microsoft’s total costs are at parity even with VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition. Following comparison shows the cost of deploying 12 VMs/host for Microsoft and 14 VM/host for VMware for a 100 VM virtualization deployment using dual socket, 6-core servers with 128GB RAM.

Virtualization Platform: Acquisition cost comparison using VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Hyper-V 2012

Next, let’s take a look at the private cloud solution stack comparison suggested by Microsoft to point out the flaws in their analysis.

vFabric APM and Service Manager costs need to be excluded for VMware. It seems Microsoft wasn’t paying attention when VMware announced the “Extension of Cloud Management Capabilities with vCloud Suite Updates” in October 2012. Monitoring of operating systems, web servers, application servers, mail servers, database, messaging middleware, network, virtualization platform and application platform is now included in VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise. In addition, vCloud Suite Enterprise also includes vCloud Automation Center that automates several cloud delivery services across private and public clouds.

The additional costs a customer has to incur with 3rd party solutions given the lack of various critical features in the Microsoft stack needed to be added. In addition, the total acquisition cost, beyond the cost of software licenses only, needs to be considered. Following is an estimation of the additional cost to acquire missing functionalities from 3rdparties.

(The3rd party products are examples of equivalent technology only and do not imply support for Window Hyper-V.)

Following is a cost comparison for a private cloud deployment for 100 VMs using dual socket, 6-core servers with 128GB RAM.

Private Cloud: Acquisition cost comparison using VMware vCloud Suite vs. Windows-based Private Cloud

Finally, VMware vCloud Suite is designed and built for virtual and cloud infrastructures and is far more efficient, reliable and robust compared to Microsoft Windows based private cloud solution.

1. Resize partition with Gparted Live CDROM 

Using GParted Live CDROM to extend a partition

i. Download Gparted Live CDROM from here ii. Upload the cdrom iso to the vSphere ESX/ESXi datastore. iii. Mount the cdrom or iso on the virtual machine. iv. Shutdown and restart the virtual machine booting from the cdrom.  v. Select Resize partition. Here is a Tutorial Walkthorugh of how to resize a partition with a GParted Live CDROM http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/using-gparted-to-resize-your-windows-vista-partition/ 2. Using DISKPART.exe

Using Diskpart to Extend a Partition

(the system disk cannot be re-sized within the virtual machine, but other disks can be resized, eg. D: E: etc) i. Shutdown the virtual machine. ii. Remove disks from virtual machine (but do not delete them). iii. Add the disks to another virtual machine. iv. Start up virtual machine. v. Use Diskpart in the OS to extend disks. see here for details on Diskpart usage 3. V2V using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.

Using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to create a V2V

Using  VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, create a new virtual machine, e.g. V2V, and specify new virtual disk size, this will increase the size of the virtual disk and partition in one process. I would recommend and use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 and if you do use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0, and you want to make your transfers 60% faster checkout my EE article here HOW TO: Improve the transfer rate of a Physical to Virtual (P2V), Virtual to Virtual Conversion (V2V) using VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 Download VMware vCenter Converter 5.0 here VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 Documentation VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 User Guide If you have issues, you may want to consult the following articles and guides Read fellow Expert Bestway's article. Best Practice Video Guide here Some videos I've develeoped for Experts Exchange members showing VMware vCenter Converter Standalone in use A Tutorial video by me:- Restore a Virtual Machine using the FREE VMware vCenter Converter to VMware vSphere 4.x, 5.0 ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.0, ESX 4.0 A Tutorial video by me:- Backup VMware vSphere 4.x, 5.0 ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.0, ESX 4.0 forFREE using VMware vCenter Converter A Tutorial Vid:- VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Process at work A Tutorial Vid:- VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.0 Convert monolithic sparse to monolithic flat for use with VMware vSphere 4.x 5.0 ESXi 4.x 5.0 4. Using Dell Extpart.exe

Using Dell ExtPart to extend a partition

Download Dell Extpart.exe from here The Dell Extpart utility will expand boot drives on WindowsXP/2000/2003 without downtime.  Dell Extpart is not compatible with 64 bit operating systems, so I would suggest an alternative option Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7, the Extend partition option in Disk Management can be used, otherwise use an alternate method listed in this article. 5. Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 and later

Using Disk Management to Extend a Partition

Using Disk Management, you can select the partition, right click and select Extend. These are just a few free options to extend a partition in a virtual or physical machine. Many other third party applications exist to extend a partition. Examples of third-party utilities, I've also tested and use to increase partitions. 7tools Partition Manager DFSee EASEUS Partition Manager Partition Logic       Paragon Partition Manager       Ranish Partition Manager System Rescue CD Again, please ensure you have a valid backup before attempting any virtual disk or partition changes. This does not include a snapshot. A snapshot is not a backup. Thank you for reading the article, please leave valuable feedback. (In the disqus below.)

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This whitepaper is courtesy of our friends at Oracle.

Available here as a Quick Link

Our lucky dip is: "SPARC T4 Servers—Optimized for End-to-End Data Center Computing" (Oracle Propaganda for buy our Oracle Virtualization Fool!)

What Peter has to Say about VMs per Core

Eric Siebert has written an excellent article on SearchNetworking.com called “Sizing server hardware” which goes into “nuts and bolts” details for sizing virtual host server hardware.

My opinion is to “Always! Always!” think of the users experience when considering your best practices. Sure 100 VMs on a host sounds good but what kind of performance will users have? I’ve had my share of complaints over slow virtual servers and believe me you don’t want users to start complaining that your (that’s right, your!) virtual servers are slow.

Rule of Thumb on VMs Per Core

Rule of thumb: Keep it simple, 4 VMs per CPU core. Don’t use more than one vCPU per VM unless the application running on the virtual server requires two or unless the developer demands two and calls your boss. VMs with one vCPU run more efficient and from my experience nobody seems to notice, except for – maybe, over-clockers!

A wise man once told me:

“The measurement of a successful virtual infrastructure deployment is not how many VMs can be hosted per host, it’s how many users can be satisfactorily serviced without them knowing they are using virtual technology. Virtualization should be invisible. Once users startnoticing foot prints in the snow, it’s over…”

We have an answer, that without a shadow of a doubt reinforce these best practices... CPU Ready Time.

VMguru.com has quite a few posting on every subject relating to VMware VI, such as platform, networking, storage, management and monitoring, VDI and scripting. Don’t just take my word for it go and visit www.VMGuru.com now then come back and finish reading my post.

OK, one site that I have really found useful over the years has been http://blog.scottlowe.org. I have watched this site grow in popularity and mature with every new version of ESX server. I think I might have run into Scott once at VMWorld 2007 in San Francisco, he was standing along the side where the computers for folks to check their email are and blogging away about what was going on at VMWorld. I think that was right after he got a new gig writing articles. If you can’t find what you are looking for on VMware support site, make sure you visit http://blog.scottlowe.org.

Scott keeps up with almost every trend and product VMware related, or you will find a link to where you can find help.

A relatively new website that I have found while searching VMware problems is VMETC.com. It has a green and white template and a big presence on the web because so many people are linking to the RSS feeds. Don’t get me wrong, the owner of this site, Rich Brambley, whom I’ve never met, really knows his stuff.

Too bad the Cards had to take them out in the play-offs, maybe next season, eh? VMETC.com is packed with posts with command line examples and solutions for all kinds of technical stuff, take this link title for instance: http://vmetc.com/2009/01/19/esxiesx-35-update-3-iscsi-and-fc-alert-queue-for-device-has-been-blocked/. Didn’t I tell you Rich knows his stuff?  

There are plenty more good websites, but two final sites I want to mention are www.wmware-land.com andwww.VMtoday.com. VMware-Land is the place to go to find out who the “who’s” are in VMware blogging, plus there also hundreds of links to help you find what you’re looking for. Unfortunately, VMinstall.com hasn’t made it to his top ten list yet but that’s okay, just do a search on Google for “VM install”. Here’s the list borrowed from VMware-Land:

 (1)   Yellow Bricks (Duncan Epping) – 9

(2)   Blog.scottlowe.org (Scott Lowe) – 2

(3) Mike D’s Virtualization Blog (Mike DePetrillo) – New

(4) NTPro.nl (Eric Sloof) – 6

(5) SearchServerVirtualization Blog (Various) – 3

(6) Virtualization Pro (Various) – 4

(7) VM /ETC (Rich Brambley) – 5

(8) RTFM Education (Mike Laverick) – 1

(9) Rational Survivability (Christofer Hoff) – 8

(10) Virtual Geek (Chad Sakac) – New

  Note: Find more top ten list at http://vmware-land.com/Top_10_Lists.html

 The other site is www.VMToday.com. VMtoday is a clean VMware News, Views, and How-To’s website, which for a moment I thought I was looking at my own site because the site has so much in-common with VMinstall.com. Jashua Townsend the site owner has good taste and you will find VMtoday informative. 

Summing up this blog post about some of the fantastic websites and blogs for VMware support and virtualization, I just want to ask all the webmasters mentioned above to keep up the great work. I’m just one of thousands who visit your site regularly for help and I don’t know what I’d do without you.

Typically the stack looks like this (right)

Oracle has many licensing options, but the ones that make sense or we are most worried about in VMware is "Processor based" and "Named User Plus" 

As you can see (above) it gets expensive quickly. Typically per enterprise we can have tens of processors per cluster - and as time goes by, VMware supports more and more expansion, better technology, supporting more sockets and generally, we could make an assumption.

Moore's Law and the Data Explosion

This is a law, that has been trialed and tested time and time again. And infact, latest research indicates that, it is relatively a good guess to go by.

In 2012, we exploit on average 12 cores - but what about in 2 years time? Assuming Moore's Law is in place, and working as it should, can we expect 24 cores?

What of in 8 years time? 64 cores? Right now, 12 Cores is costing the average enterprise (without agreement.) around 300K to license.

Can you see the economy of scale here? As time goes on, and cores per host keep expanding (and they will) where will the price of licensing go?

Answer: through the roof.

Now presumably, Oracle will have to fix this at some point. But looking at its history we can't safely assume anything. For example:

As servers became multi-processor per socket in the late 1990's IBM, Oracle and others introduces "Processor" licensing. As processors became hyper-threaded and multi-core, IBM introduced PVU licenses and Oracle introduced Core Factors.

They do not care about empowering the user, they look to find 'better' solutions around how they could possibly model their pricing that best yields.  This of course is just speculative and only the tip of the iceberg.

Lets look at the core cost further. A typical host pricing will look something like this:

I'm no bean counter, but it is easy to distinguish what equipment I would purchase when considering a solution. Now we have to consider core factors and balancing workload requirement vs. licensing requirements.

Now licensing have always been something to consider when creating design solutions, but when did they become level or even a mandatory requirement when considering your design solution.

E.g. Core factors CPU that easy x86/x64 Intel or AMD, Power, RISC, Itanium etc. lets purchase our host! Wait! Wait, wait. NUP License, damn whats the processor minimums, we must now consider.

Now understanding the nature of virtualization, a homogeneous environment, which separates software and hardware with an abstraction layer known as a Hyper-visor , does it make any sense to tie a software requirement of CPU affinity to a single host?

This destroys what we have worked so hard to build. And by we, I mean VMware.

Hard and Soft Partitioning, whereby we hard partition or isolate a "Server" to a specific piece of hardware. Soft is practically the latter, and VMware has always considered as soft partitioning.

What does Oracle do? When running on a server which is "soft partitioned" Oracle requires that all underlying processors which the server may run on, be licensed...

That means VMware cluster of 4 ESX servers with 4x 6 core Xeon processors = 96 cores.

If you have 1 VM with Oracle running, with 1 core assigned to it;

And vMotion is enabled. (An amazing technology we leverage with VMware.)

All 96 cores must be licensed.

If vMotion is not enabled. (The VM must be affinity tied to a host, DRS rules created)

The 24 cores in the host (now a physical server) must be licensed.

Ridiculous, absolutely ludicrous - licensing for Oracle now costs more that the actual cluster of host and combined licensing of VMware.