I ran guest O/S benchmark tests on the same hardware for ESX3.5 and 2008 Hyper-V using CPU RightMark and several others.

It wasn't even close in most tests and for floating point Hyper-V was literally 40 times faster (due to native FPU support)

There is literally no overhead for each virtual machine in terms of RAM or CPU usage the functionality of Intel Virtualization Technology really made me sit up, I never expected it to be this good. You can cut your hardware costs in half (at least) by using Hyper-V.

VMare is still a viable product especially if you have already set it up but seriously some of their marketing FUD is absolutely riduculous.

Nothing is free.

If you want to use free software, expect the level of support you pay for.

 We run thousands on VMs in a data centre on ESX3.5 and would never consider Hyper-V or Xen

Well in our production cluster we have 140 production servers on 4 physical systems. This includes over 5 SQL systems with databases in the size of 200GB with 15000 users.

To acheive the same with a HyperV environment from testing, will require 16 servers to acheive the same performance.

 Oh the servers are 2 * quad processor dual core and 2 * quad processor quad core.

 What I find from experience is that most people don't understand VMWare fully. VMware is not a point and shoot system and requires people to understand a wide variety of concepts from networking, storage, systems administration (Linux) and a strong understanding of the nuances of virtualisation at a higher level than regular systems administration would require.

The reason people pay for VMWare is: Lower Risk (minimal attack surface, less code to cause issues in the underlying layer etc...), ease of mangement (SVMotion has prevented significant downtime, DRS ensures maximum performance of the cluster and HA ensures in a hardware failure, any critical virtual machines affected are restarted) and with new features such as the lockstep type technology and distributed switching, my life gets easier because I no longer have to deal with MSCS for the over zealous system owner and I can simplify my network management across the entire VM Farm.

 So whilst VMWare may not be for everyone. It works well for us and whils some people call it marketing hype, the cost comparisons hold true in our scenario.

It may be spin, and there is always an element of marketing, but there is also an element of truth in "you get what you pay for"

If you want featuresets, you normally have to pay for them.

Damian Murdoch - http://www.ozvms.com

I don't know why VMware insisted on tarnishing the best of vSphere's new capabilities by (mis)leading with the marketing FUD.  There's some outstanding stuff in vSphere that given time will enable IT to deliver services far more effectively than readily possible today.

But, come on, do they honestly expect us to believe that VMware offer lower costs than MS or Citrix?  The cost model only works if you assume that a 12:1 consolidation ratio is achieved across the board which while likely in non-production environments is far from assured in a well managed production environment (and in non-prod you don't really need the added functionality that VMware are selling). And they are still playing the 'small attack footprint' game by quoting  the hypervisor disk space requirement and not memory requirement.

I could go on, but I'll leave room for the professional FUD debunkers that Citrix and MS will no doubt be wheeling out to return the volley.

Citrix and Microsoft virtualization is free because it does not work, and is crap.

You can buy both for a dime at your local  Dollar Store. But would you use them in Production??

There's more to vSphere than VMotion... don't you think? There's more to virtualization than VMotion do you think?

How free is HA with Microsoft of Citrix currently? Indeed... it's not.

Duncan -Yellow-bricks.com

VMware isn't cheaper than either Microsoft or Citrix. They've been hammered on price for YEARS and they're still not lowering their prices. Microsoft and Citrix are both offering live migration for FREE as in ZERO cost. VMware looks to still be charging over 2000 per processor. 

This is marketing 101 spin.