Virtualization Price War: VMware’s Little Bighorn

Corporate enterprises that are saving their precious fiscal 2008 and 2009 capital expenditure monies in search of new product bargains to help transition them to the more powerful Anywhere Applications environment need look no further than the red-hot virtualization market. Since last summer, intensifying competition among all the leading virtualization vendors and increased demand from end users has generated a price and performance war.

Since last fall and continuing to the present—July 2008—many of the server virtualization vendors have retooled their pricing and packaging in a bid to outdo one another and attract new customers. Not a single month has passed in the last three quarters when at least one vendor has not delivered a more economical packaged bundle as part of everyday fares. Vendors have also released limited time special promotions. In addition, since the fall of 2007 the major virtualization players have gone on a collective buying binge to fill the gaps in their portfolios and keep pace with one another in new and emerging arenas such as desktop, application, storage, and management virtualization. The result: Customers have a cornucopia of products and a bargain bonanza from which to choose as vendors vie for their business.

There is an enormous opportunity in the burgeoning virtualization market for vendors to sell advanced features, applications and management solutions. But the intensifying competition among hypervisor virtualization technology has most vendors battling for bucks. No one feels the pressure more than market leader VMware, which has 75%-plus of the server virtualization market, a best-of-breed product. However, its 2-year technology lead over rivals has shrunk to 6 to 9 months. Rivals now offer many of the same advanced features such as live migration, high availability (HA), distributed resource scheduling (DRS) and provisioning as VMware, which users interviewed by Yankee Group say are enterprise ready and extremely competitive with VMware.

This Yankee Group Report:

• Elucidates the pricing differences among the top virtualization offerings including Citrix, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Parallels, Red Hat, Virtual Iron and VMware, with apples-to-apples comparisons
• Highlights the performance and feature differences of the virtualization products
• Provides existing and prospective corporate virtualization customers with practical, tactical recommendations to assist with their purchasing decisions.