Quest vs Citrix vs VMware Desktop Virtualization Cost Analysis

This article will attempt to use numbers based on reports provided by independent analysts to highlight the underlying costs of different flavors of desktop virtualization, and show how Quest achieves a lower price point. Everyone's users, applications and requirements are different, they will get different pricing terms and their hardware choices will vary enormously.

Conclusions

I'm putting this at the top so you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the conclusions of my analysis.

1. Use Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Session Host whenever you can. There are some situations where VDI is the only possibility - see my blog here.
2. The Quest vWorkspace product family delivers the lowest cost for each flavor of desktop virtualization. Even just looking at CapEx costs the difference is clear. There are other capital and operational cost savings that were not included in this analysis which further increase Quest's advantage.
3. "Offline VDI" is a waste of resources. If you have a device capable of delivering a quality experience with a local VM then use it all the time and avoid the need for additional costly datacenter hardware running hosted VDI for each user.

Sources

The numbers used to conduct this analysis come directly from research reports recently published by several highly respected industry analyst firms. In order to maintain neutrality, those analyst firms have requested that we not refer to them or to their reports by name. Therefore, none of the specific numbers used in the charts and analysis below are directly attributed to a specific firm or report but please rest assured that as far as possible they are entirely independent.

A final note is that I ommitted some costs which are often considered in TCO studies, but don't help with the comparison:

1. Application software – the app licensing costs are the same no matter what virtualization technology or vendor you choose
2. End user costs – I was trying to only include costs that are borne by the IT department, since it is their budget used for deploying desktop virtualization. There are actually significant reductions in end user costs through productivity increases from desktop virtualization.
3. Administration costs – these are quite small and might not be part of the IT budget. The only one I included was “storage allocation” for network storage in the VDI use case. Note that these are not IT helpdesk costs (such as management and training). Virtualization affects them beneficially, but since these numbers are a small part of TCO it wasn’t worth further complicating the model.

The Big Picture

Figure 1: CapEx Cost Comparison

Reminder! These are just the basic CapEx expenses: end user and server hardware, Microsoft and Quest/Citrix/VMware licensing.

The key points here are:

1. VMware's VDI-only approach for task workers is much more expensive than Terminal Server/RDSH
2. The combination of Quest vWorkspace and Hyper-V gives the lowest cost VDI solution
3. Quest's "local VDI" approach for mobile desktop users is significantly cheaper than "offline VDI" which continually syncs a local and hosted VM. Incidentally, it also allows for baremetal and type 2 hypervisors, and access from a wide range of devices: PC and Mac
4. Contrary to what many in this industry have claimed, it is possible to get the CapEx price of a virtual desktop below that of a physical PC!

Source: http://communities.quest.com/community/vworkspace/blog/2011/06/01/quest-vs-citrix-vs-vmware-view-cost-analysis

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