Cost comparison methodology and approach

The systems were configured and optimized for customers' use cases, where the quantitative hardware metrics could be considered and compared to reference architectures from different vendors for cost comparison analysis. Each 3-tier system was tuned to meet similar CPU, memory, and storage parameters so that comparative study was possible within the given reference architecture. This helped us to compare VM density in a fair way.

The following are the references used in this comparative approach:

• A single 42-U rack deployment as infrastructure
• Use of a vendor's reference architecture
• Configuration of a solution with the same compute, storage, and networking resources to make the comparison relevant
• Consideration of key CapEx components with three years of ongoing support costs
• Leverage of VMware OpEx savings study and model for three years OpEx cost

All traditional 3-tier setups were configured on the same line as the VMware Cloud Foundation setup. Since...