Evolution of VM Total Cost Calculations and Methods
by David Merrill on Jun 20, 2012
Photo: Mauro Parra-Miranda
A little over a year ago, a colleague of mine here at HDS discussed the lack of information on VM total costs, and how to measure and reduce total costs. Michael Heffernan (also known as Heff) and I eventually created this white paper on an approach to measure and reduce VM total cost of ownership: Hypervisor Economics: A Framework to Identify, Measure and Reduce the Cost of Virtual Machines.
It is good to see that there is new material coming out on this topic. Initially, most of the economic and business case materials revolved around the rationale to move to a VM environment. Now that these have become much more established, people are interested in optimizing and reducing the costs of virtual machines.
A couple of interesting papers and models that you may want to look into:
- VMware TCO methodology
- VMware TCO calculator
- Dell announcement with HW configs set at $1,000 per VM (CAPEX costs only)
- Microsoft paper on VM total costs
- Blog Comparisons and Contrasts
I am sure there are more papers and models out there, please feel free to send me what you read and find useful. To me, much of these cost calculations revolve around CAPEX and the total purchase cost. In my work, the price to purchase a VM is about 25% of the TCO, so I am more intrigued with (and doing my own) research on VM total costs. The other 75% is very important to most IT budget owners over the long-haul.
