Blade Watch

ZDnet

Fredrik Sjostedt, VMware’s EMEA director of product marketing, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that depending on the situation of the customer, Microsoft may be more expensive.

“The cost is around the management of the infrastructure,” said Sjostedt. “We are getting a kicking about being expensive, but go look at the cost of the management of Microsoft. It’s not black and white.”

He added that, on average, VMware was more efficient than Microsoft in terms of cost per application.

An interesting article, I remember a conversation I had with a CIO a few months ago, his comments about virtualization:

“We’re getting rinsed on licensing, but we’re at data center capacity at the moment. There are too many ‘extras’ and my concern is that we’re now beginning to move the problems we have with physical servers into the virtual server estate. Everyone seems to be offering me the solution to all my problems with new per seat tools, but no one seems to be talking about the billing/support issues, the fundamentals, and I dislike the whole virtual/physical split between tools, the sorry you need insert tool name to use that on the virtual machines.”

I wonder if the very nature of virtualization isn’t being undermined by arguments over cost. Let us not forget that just because I use hyper-v doesn’t mean that I can’t use VMware, Xen or anything else, as a community of end users, service providers and users, we need to establish what it is we need, how to get it working for our business. Is cost an issue? For some it always will be, for others an annoyance, but consider that the higher the cost, the lower number of entrants to the market both in terms of users and innovators, my concern is that we’re moving virtualization on, we’re moving on the possibilities but forgetting a few basics:

What’s included – what do end users think should be included from a virtualization product – is monitoring/performance/high availability extra – would it be extra in the physical world?

What are the fundamentals users need to know – cross charging, ownerships and best practice – make them freely available when you download the product for trial/buy

What are the barriers to end users with the technologies?

What free end user tools are there available already in the physical/virtual world? WMI/Perfmon/PStools etc – we have that in the physical world, what’s the virtual world equivalent?

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