Alex Bakman, founder and CEO of VKernel writes an excellent paper on evaluating costs of virtual machines titled, “Virtual Machines Are Not Free”. You can read the report at Vkernel’s site.
I never fail to be amazed at the notion some business owners ferverently hold to, that one copy of software entitles one to install it as many times one wants to, totally in violation of the software’s licensing. I’ve witnesed multiple server instances as well as multiple desktops installed under one license within a business that I would normally think would have a high level of integrity.
The trick to virtualization lies in ones ability to “fit more VMs per physical server, fit more VMs per physical server, correctly size storage and memory and CPU for each VM”. VKernel sells the tools to get the job done.
That’s right, the tools are not free
No evaluation of virtualization gains any validity without truthfully considering software’s real licensing costs, correct sizing for the composite number of virtual machines initially deployed within a high performance metric and projected scaling of the virtual environment within a selected time frame.
Yes, it takes more math than just figuring out how big a hard drive you might need in five years and whether or not you can get away with using one Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 license for twenty virtual servers.