After a frustrating weekend, today I was scouting the Internet for virtualization news and I ran into a very interesting post by Jason Boche.

This morning VMware released their Cost-Per-Application-Calculator. With this calculator you can accurately estimate and compare acquisition cost of a virtualization solution, by VMware labeled as Cost Per Application. This is a great tool which will come in handy in current discussions regarding ‘free’ hypervisors.

If you want to know more about this VMware Cost-Per-Application-Calculator visit Jason’s blog and read the original article.

Based on some numbers from my current client case here are some results from the calculator.

Based on your inputs, the cost-per-application to virtualize 350 applications using VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise Edition is $2,867 — 11% lower than with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (Hyper-V) and System Center.

VMware
Infrastructure 3
Enterprise Edition		 VMware
Infrastructure 3
Standard Edition		 VMware
Infrastructure 3
Foundation Edition		 Windows Server 2008
(Hyper-V)
+ System Center
Number of applications virtualized 350 350 350 350
Number of VMs per host 18 18 18 12
Number of hosts 20 20 20 30
Infrastructure Costs $645,008 $645,008 $645,008 $796,512
Software Costs $358,525 $277,794 $233,926 $327,972
Total Costs $1,003,533 $922,802 $878,934 $1,124,484
Cost-per-application $2,867 $2,637 $2,511 $3,213
Cost-per-application Savings 11% 18% 22% 0%

calc