My point is that you are arguing the point of cost with VMWare when it is an argument that VMWare will never win on.

Sure System Center adds cost to a ‘free’ Hyper-V solution, which MS try to hide, but you forget that customers who take the SMSE licensing deal cover all guests for SCOM, SCCM, SCDPM etc so you are getting a lot of bang for your buck.

Virtual Centre is great for managing ESX/vSPhere but it is only good at this one thing, it lives in a virtual bubble neglecting the physical world which dominates our datacentres, e.g. why would you use Vcentre to patch virtual windows guests then use another mechism like WSUS/SCCM to patch physical servers? double admin for no gain.

The point MS are focusing on is the overall management package. Sure they have not got it right yet as its too expensive and quite disjointed but it will come with time and buying up smaller companies.

VMWare know this and this year you will start to see them acquire smaller service management companies to boost their reach outside the virtual bubble.

Whoever gets the whole dynamic datacentre package out to market end-to-end the quickest will win the next ‘management’ battle.

I am not favouring either solution over the other I find it quite exciting to debate these things instead of all the old intel/amd MS/Linux debates.

And oh, by the way, Microsoft just increased the price of SMSD by 75 percent.

The current list price for VMWare ENT Plus is $4,369 per cpu.

10 vSphere hosts with 2 cpus = $69,904

So with the $70k I’d have saved I could buy many SMSE licenses.

You also forget to mention that SMSE covers more than 1 product.

I’m a bit afraid for Vmware…….