Virtualization tips total-cost scales for Linux
Virtualization may offer a significant advantage to Linux in the decade-old debate over Linux vs. Windows total cost of ownership (TCO). A new Gabriel Consulting Group survey (PDF) of mostly mixed-environment (that is, Windows and Linux) enterprises reveals significantly higher adoption of virtualization technology, with all the cost savings that go with it: less money spent on hardware and licensing fees.
It's an interesting conclusion, but leads to an even more interesting question: why don't Windows administrators take advantage of virtualization to the same extent as Linux administrators? The answer--licensing cost and complexity--is something that Microsoft has the ability, but not the interest, to change.
According to the survey, enterprises that predominantly use Linux virtualize roughly 30 percent more than those that prefer Windows, and heavier virtualization users do so much more aggressively on Linux systems than on Windows:
Linux vs. Windows: Virtualization Trends
(Credit: Gabriel Consulting Group)The survey's author reports that "Linux users have clearly both adopted virtualization at a greater rate and embraced it to a greater extent than customers who have standardized on Microsoft operating systems," but why?
Perhaps the primary reason is that Microsoft didn't really start to promote virtualization until long after the Linux crowd. This isn't surprising: Microsoft has much to lose from virtualization. The fewer Windows server licenses an enterprise has to buy, the worse it is for Microsoft.
Microsoft has now jumped into the virtualization market with both feet, giving its Hyper-V product away for free...but not really. Indeed, it is the pricing strategy Microsoft has for its servers that may go furthest in explaining its lack of appeal to Windows users, as noted in Gabriel Consulting Group's report:
There are also licensing differences that bear directly on comparative costs. With Microsoft, users who don't have volume agreements or who haven't purchased the more expensive Enterprise or Datacenter editions will have to purchase licenses for every system and each of the virtual machines running on those systems. Linux, on the other hand, can be essentially free, meaning that companies can deploy it on multiple systems or in virtual machines at no cost.
While the survey also lists the benefits of source code access to Linux administrators, I suspect that this is of minimal value to the big majority of Linux adopters. Very few will care to "get intimate with the code," to use the report's language, preferring instead to stick to the more tangible (and easily accessed) cost savings from Linux virtualization.
There are other benefits to those who primarily adopt, or standardize on, Linux, as the report suggests:
- 77 percent of survey respondents reported greater hardware utilization rates through Linux virtualization, versus 56 percent of Windows users.
- Those who standardize on Linux find Linux virtualization much more manageable (62 percent) than Windows administrators who standardize on Windows virtualization (48 percent). More telling, four times as many Windows standardizers (23 percent) find Windows virtualization hard to manage than the Linux standardizers, only 6 percent of whom find Linux virtualization hard to manage.
- Linux translates into higher server utilization and, hence, less power consumption and more physical space: 59 percent of Linux administrators disagreed with the "We are rapidly running out of data center electrical capacity" statement, compared to 38 percent of Windows administrators. When presented with the statement "We are rapidly running out of data center floor space", 60 percent of Linux administrators disagreed versus 45 percent of Windows administrators.
While enterprises could realize even bigger cost savings by simply using free Linux versus paid Windows, most enterprises will buy commercial support for Linux through Red Hat, Novell, or Canonical. Even factoring in this cost, however, Linux seems to lend itself more readily to virtualization and, hence, to cost savings that result therefrom.
Microsoft has it in its power to turn the tide relative to Linux's superior virtualization TCO, and it probably has little to do with the cost of Windows Server, and certainly not with the cost of its Hyper-V virtualization technology, which is now $0.00.
Rather, it's likely a matter of simplifying its famously Byzantine pricing, and making Windows Server licensing friendlier to virtualization. For example, Microsoft doesn't allow migration of its products to a new physical server more than once every 90 days. This may ensure customers buy licenses with fewer restrictions, but it also appears to mean they simply buy fewer Microsoft licenses, period.
Given that commercial Linux isn't free, Microsoft doesn't need to make Windows free to make its Hyper-V virtualization more competitive with Linux virtualization. Simplification, it seems, would go quite far toward the goal of making Windows virtualization more palatable.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Virtualization seems great for Microsoft, as the licensing model does not exempt virtualized hardware from requiring normal licenses. Putting more licenses on the same piece of hardware means more possible sales. You even go on to contradict this paragraph later on, stating that MS sysadmins might be avoiding virtualization due to the cost of added MS licenses.
Now one aspect that seems left out is, you can see all the VMs together, and this start blaring the fact that yes, you are paying for a lot of licenses.
There's also the sudden instinct (and a very bad one IMHO) of CIOs and dumb admins having less reason to consolidate software (e.g. building a whole new VM for each MS SQL Server database, instead of using multiple MS SQL Server instances on one box - the latter means only one license, while the former means that you're gonna shell out some serious dough).
From here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/c/c/6ccc82b3-d254-4cb7-bada-62a720ae4598/Licensing_Microsoft_Server_Products_in_Virtual_Environments.doc
"Each software license allows you to run, at any one time, one instance of the server software in an OSE on one server. If the instance you run is in a virtual OSE, you may also run an instance in the physical OSE solely to run hardware virtualization software, provide hardware virtualization services, or run software to manage and service OSEs on the licensed server. We refer to this in shorthand as 1+1."
This is an interesting strategy, for it encourages the use of Hyper-V over VMware ESX, because you can use a single Windows Server 2008 Standard license to run 1 host and 1 guest ONLY IF YOU HOST VMs ON A WINDOWS PHYSICAL HOST.
What if I buy a single Windows Server 2008 Standard license, install it on (1) one VMware ESX virtual machine AND install it (2) on a physical install of Windows Server 2008 Standard that happens to have the VI Client installed for managing virtual machines? Would I be legit according to the above? No? Why?
Sure you get the server OS for "free" with Hyper-V, but you can also get and install VMWare ESXi for the same price ($0.00) - so what's the diff? That underlying windows "license" is for just a hypervisor (unless you're dumb enough to run a type 2 hypervisor in such a scenario). either way, you're only going to get any real use out of one license (and you'll currently be stuck with a far smaller feature set when going the Hyper-V route).
A smaller feature set? Windows 2008 R2 more than matches VMWare.
VMWare VI is a hypervisor and support tools.
You may want to stop and think about this one...
On that same box, I can park ESX and up to FORTY (or more!) VMs on that host, depending on hardware limitations alone. If any or all of those VMs are Linux-based, then I pay $0.00 for each Linux host if I choose to. Windows Server cannot hold up to those kind of loads (even Hyper-V cannot hold up to that kind of load at this time, since it literally runs out of drive letters at 24 VMs).
My original VM farm at work contains four (soon to be six) Dell R-900's, each with 8-16 cores and 64GB of RAM. I can run an average of 40 VMs per host under that configuration, and not see any performance degradation. On my VMWare VDI (virtual desktop) farm, I can run up to 200 VMs (more once I implement Thin Provisioning and ThinApp) across four servers (in my case, these are HP DL-360's w/ 8 cores and 128GB of RAM each, w/ dual 10gE networking). Hyper-V would have me stuck at (for HA reasons) less than 64 VMs MAX on that whole farm (again, the 24-VM limit for them plus HA considerations). Last I checked, 200 is far more than 64... ;)
Even better, I can get two or more hosts, and if the hardware starts to go splat on any one of them, the others will pick up the VMs immediately, allowing me to deliver VMs with zero downtime to the client. I can even load-balance my VMs across multiple hosts, with zero downtime. Windows Server and Hyper-V cannot do that.
Relseh, You've been listening to the Microsoft marketing guys again haven't you? Unfortunately hyper-v doesn't live up to it's hype. Microsoft claims that running a virtual machine in their hyper-v has only a 1-2% overhead. Guess what? It's actually 20-30% in real application workloads, unlike VMWare which runs between 10-15% overhead. It all has to do with the way the hypervisor has been designed and implemented.
Hyper-V R2 supports only 64 logical processors per host, VMWare's V-sphere supports 256. It doesn't really mean a lot right now especially if you can't find a Windows Server compatible hardware with that many processors anyway. Hyper-v only supports 32 vm's per host, VMWare can support more than 256 depending on the configuration.
My advice, get your facts and don't listen to the Microsoft marketing guys without validating what they are telling you. Microsoft knows that they have inferior technology so the only way they can compete is by giving hyper-v away for free (just like they did with Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, and everything else that they integrated into their operating system to squash their competitors).
What Microsoft needs to do here is a clean house sweep of their licensing model - Simplify the solution, we are a technical people not attorneys. The basic structure should be a package deal one (1) price per concurrent user, which includes everything you need to get that one user up; server, desktop, connectors, hypervisor - the whole shooting match.
Microsoft licensing schema is the reason we went with Linux - its easy.
- by richto October 2, 2009 6:01 AM PDT
- This is just utter rubbish. Linux costs about £270 a year including support (basic 2 CPU version). A Standard Windows server costs about £250. Then you have the costs of deploying all the extra security patches and updates that the Linux box requires.
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(13 Comments)nb - the person who talks about Windows running out of drives letters, clearly doesnt have a clue....and FYI Hyper V is totally free and doesnt require Windows at all.