VMware vSphere pricing - Meet the new price; same as the old price, only more

Hi, I'm Edwin Yuen, a Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft's Integrated Virtualization team.  This past week, there were two key announcements made, one by Microsoft and one by VMware, that have an impact on how we compare Microsoft and VMware pricing. 

The first announcement was actually off this blog, made by Zane Adam, announcing that with the upcoming release of our free, standalone hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, features like clustering, high availability (HA), and live migration would be included.  This was a very important announcement, as many customers are currently paying a significant amount of money for those features, and as we'll see below, will potentially continue to pay for them.  With Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, you can now implement HA and live migration without having to buy a premium management SKU, which could save you thousands of dollars.

The rest of the comparaison is on the Microsoft Virtualization site :

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/05/04/vmware-vsphere-pricing-meet-the-new-price-same-as-the-old-price-only-more.aspx

Take it for what it takes, pick information in it, but now war is going on...