Hello,
I have been searching high and low for something that can help summarize how licensing costs can compare across the various hypervisor platforms. Needless to say I have not been successful in finding a good ( and non-bias ) comparison even just between vmware and microsoft that is within the past year. Does anyone have any links or information where something like this may exist? Reason being my company is looking to spin up a public facing cloud but of course cost is an issue. When you do the research here is what I came up with at a glance per hypervisor and considerations and hoping someone can confirm/correct these assumptions or again have some detailed comparison between as many of these as possible. (Note: We are aware of the VSPP program but the minimums per month cost are too high for a starting cloud...down the road if our cloud grows we could switch over but right now it is not an option.) I found this article but it comes from microsoft so of course it's bias VMware or Microsoft? Comparing vSphere 5.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V At-A-Glance - KeithMayer.com - Site Home …
VMware- (vCloud Suite Enterprise licensing) Compare VMware vCloud Suite Editions: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) | United States
Required on a per physical socket basis ( Enterprise license costs about $11,495 as per vCloud Suite Pricing for Cloud Computing Infrastructure )
Requires separate vcenter 5.5 Standard license (not included and costs)
Requires minimum 1 year support contract (not included and costs about $2,414 as per vCloud Suite Pricing for Cloud Computing Infrastructure )
Vendor Lock in when using vcloud director, VCAC seems to have ability to manage multiple clouds but I have not used it so not positive)
No operating system licenses of running VM's included on any platform ( specific to the vendors licensing agreements)
Unlimited number of VM's deployed as licensing is processor based ( unlimited meaning as many as you can reasonably fit on the hosts)
Includes components and management tools to deploy self serving portal for customer use out of the box
vcloud suite STD seems to be best option getting started to get licensing for vcloud director/vshield components as well as access to vcac which seems to be the way of the future for vmware. What is unclear to me is if there are hidden costs to the number of VM's running in vcloud director where you need to provide vshield components etc...
Hyper-V 2012-R2- ( Windows server 2012 R2 Datacenter + System Center 2012 R2 Datacenter)
Required on 2 physical socket basis ( Datacenter license costs about $6155 Windows Server 2012 R2 | Microsoft )
Requires separate system center 2012-R2 license ( it may be included in server 2012 datacenter license but dont think so...about $3607 Microsoft Volume Licensing - System Center 2012 R2 )
Requires 2 year support contract ( included in system center cost)
Vendor lock in?? Not sure as it sounds like you can manage other platforms using System Center
All Windows OS licensing included for VM's ( other platforms specific to vendors)
Includes components and management tools to deploy self serving portal for customer use out of the box
Unlimited number of VM's deployed as licensing is processor based ( unlimited meaning as many as you can reasonably fit on the hosts)
Do not appear to be any other hidden costs to getting a public type cloud up and running that I could find ( but I am a heavy vmware user to hyper-v is new to me)
Citrix Cloud platform using Cloudstack( Xen server with orchestration CloudPlatform - Cloud Orchestration and Cloud Provisioning - Citrix )
Cloud platform is licenses on a per physical socket basis far as I can tell. Can't seem to locate prices without contacting their sales team( Xenserver is free I believe but no built in orchestration )
No separate cost for the management piece when you use cloud platform
Perpetual license costs once deployed ( again my understanding)
No vendor lock in...Hypervisor agnostic ( cloudplatform has support for Xen, vmware, kvm, etc... makes it really flexible )
No operating system licenses of running VM's included on any platform ( specific to the vendors licensing agreements)
KVM and OpenStack
Free licensing of hypervisor and openstack is opensource
No actual support contracts with specific vendors
Requires your own custom development for cloud portal and design ( although many 3rd party folks willing to provide you with development like mirantis)
Seems to be what many large scale companies are starting to adopt due to cost effectiveness and non vendor lock in
So there you have it...I tried to summarize as best I could of some of the options but of course I am certain I have made some mistakes ( please dont beat me up about them...lol) and please feel free to correct any inaccuracies so that perhaps anyone in the future could use this as a reference for themselves. Again if there is a much better ( and up to date) version of something similar they are aware of or have gone through this headache themselves I would greatly appreciate your feedback and assistance or point me to a link with a great summary. Thanks all in advance and have a great day