VMware Rips ROI of Citrix, Microsoft Hyper-V

a lengthy item on his company blog

He then presents what he says is a quick look by VMware at, essentially, how much horsepower is provided by his company's ESX server 3 against Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer v4:

VMware VI3 Enterprise can run as many as 14 VMs in a 2-way server with 4 GB of RAM, at a cost of $1,268 per VM, compared to $1,714 per VM in the same box that can run 7 "free" hypervisor VMs, he contends.

There's much more to Horschman's post following that discussion, too.

A quick note: 4 GB of RAM appears to be the very low end of the memory scale when deploying anything having to do with Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. In fact, in one recent conversation with a solution provider who has been migrating customers to Server 2008, the solution provider said it's simply the best practice to load up any box that will run Server 2008 with as much memory as it can take - - in many cases as much as 32 GB. In that scenario, it's not clear how the ROI comparison scales up.