red hat enterprise virtualization performance: specvirt ... - Zift Solutions

vSphere 5 cost is highest, more variable, pushes Enterprise Plus
With the addition of vRAM licensing, vSphere 5 pricing is now the highest, averaging
$17.38/SPECvirt_sc2010, which is 6.38 times the average cost per SPECvirt_sc2010 of RHEV,
and an increase of 2.8 times the cost of licensing the previous version vSphere 4. This
represents a substantial increase in the cost of the hypervisor. The costs for vSphere 5 are
also highly variable, with a low of $10.19/SPECvirt_sc2010 to a high of
$35.29/SPECvirt_sc2010.
The reason for this increased cost is that you must license the greater of the per-socket cost
or the per-vRAM cost. High performance and utilization of virtualization involves many
virtual machines with a large amount of vRAM; and in each of these cases the vRAM cost is
what needs to be used to determine the cost of the vSphere licensing.
In all of these cases, the cost was calculated using the Enterprise Plus Edition of VSphere 5.
Why? Although Enterprise Edition is less expensive per socket, it only comes with 64 GB
vRAM per license. Enterprise Plus comes with 96 GB of vRAM per license. In these cost
calculations, it was actually less expensive to upgrade to Enterprise Plus solely to license the
vRAM.
The range of costs for vSphere 5 is also more variable than with the socket-based licensing
of vSphere 4 and RHEV, because for each of the test systems, virtual machines were tuned
for performance, not for vRAM utilization. When only socket count needs to be considered,
one can be conservative and give the virtual machines more RAM and allow the hypervisor to
manage the memory.
Because VMware users now have to pay for vRAM, an additional optimization to minimize the
vRAM in each VM may be necessary to lower costs. Time and effort spent on optimizing
vRAM may add a hidden cost to your virtualization environment in addition to the higher
overall cost of licensing vRAM, and may require trade-offs in either performance or cost.
SUMMARY
In conclusion, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization not only offers great performance on the
only independent virtualization benchmark, it does so at a great cost/performance ratio
especially when you take the vRAM licensing of vSphere 5 into account.
WHAT’S NEXT
For more information, please go to www.redhat.com/rhev or contact your Red Hat
authorized reseller or local Red Hat sales office.
www.redhat.com