Beware The VMware Core Tax & More

Please take with caution, but facts are here...

A prendre avec des pincettes, mais les chiffres et les faits sont la...

Virtualization Nation,

We'd like to again offer congratulations to AMD on the release of their new 6-core Opteron ("Istanbul") processors. As Bryon mentioned, Hyper-V R2 goes hand in hand with these new processors with support for AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing, advanced power savings with Core Parking and, of course, more cores means compute resources to run more virtual machines. In fact, two factors that have fueled virtualization have been the rise of 64-bit (x64) computing and the rapid growth of multi-core processors.

Bring On The Cores

Even an entry level laptop these days is dual-core. On desktops, the news is even better. I saw an ad in the paper a few days ago for a very powerful HP desktop system with an AMD quad-core processor and 8 GB of memory that runs Hyper-V like a champ for $600. Well, the news is only getting better. Our partners at AMD and Intel are continuing to ratchet up the core counts and if you've been reading any of the popular tech sites around the web you may have read that we'll soon be seeing processors with 8+ cores per processor. That's a tremendous amount of compute power. In fact, with all this compute power, you're going to be more inclined to virtualize than ever. This is great news for our customers who are trying to lower cost.

However, one question that has hit our inboxes recently has been, "Does Hyper-V have a core tax?"

Huh?

Core Tax? What's that?

At Microsoft, we don't license per core, generally, we license per server or per processor. In this case of Windows Server:

• Windows Server 2008 Standard is licensed per physical server and supports up to 4 physical processors whether there are 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8+ cores per processor
• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition is licensed per physical server up to 8 physical processors whether there are 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8+ cores per processor
• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition is licensed per processor whether there are 1, 2, 4, 6 or 8+ cores per processor

This is great for our customers. As they invest in newer hardware with greater capabilities, performance, scalability there's no penalty for moving to the latest cutting edge systems with ever increasing core counts. After being questioned about a "core tax," I looked into why this was being asked.

Now I know.

VMware & The Core Tax

With VSphere, VMware only supports 6 cores per processor for most of their versions. If you want support for more than 6 cores per processor you have to upgrade from:

• Standard ($795 per processor) to Advanced ($2245 per processor) a 282% increase (no, that's not a typo) OR
• Enterprise ($2875 per processor) to Enterprise Plus ($3495 per processor) a 22% increase

Ouch.

The rest of explanations / la suite des explications :

http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/06/28/Beware-the-VMware-Core-Tax-and-More.aspx