Pricing difference between vCloud Air and Microsoft Azure

Now lately I’ve seen alot of blogpost talking about how cheaper one of them is compared to the other. Now most of the time I don’t read them as much, but this time I’ve decied to write a post about it to do a comparison.

Note I am not being prejudice even if I have a MVP logo, I’m trying to get a clear picture of what the pricing actually is. If anyone has any feedback to this post I would really appriciate getting feedback in the comment field below.

For the comparison I’m going to show difference between Virtual Private Cloud offering from Vmware and Virtual Machines from Microsoft Azure.

First of Virtual Private Cloud offering from Vmware is more of a cloud container you gain access to a set of resources and you define yourself what you want to do with those resources, while Microsoft Azure is based upon virtual machines, you have a predefined size based upon the template.

So let us define for this example that we have 5 virtual machines with 2 GHZ each and 4 GM RAM. (Note there are no sizes in Azure that are the equal size so I’m going with Medium based instances which have about 3,5 GB RAM and 2x 1,6 GHZ) and I’m only comparing with the information that I can find on the vendors websites.

SLA:

First of Virtual Private Cloud from VMware has an 99.9% SLA for virtual machines
Microsoft Azure has 99,9% SLA for single virtual machines and 99,95% for multiple role instances. (NOTE: f you deploy a single VM instance within an availability set, you will receive no advanced warning or notification of platform maintenance)

Other features:

The base configuration from Virtual Private Cloud from Vmware contains

10 GHz

vCPU 20 GB vRAM

2 TB of Standard Storage

10 Mbps of Bandwidth (this is official bandwidth for connections out of the data center)

2 Public IP Addresses + support

This is for the price of €727 a month. So for this I can configure 5 virtual machines with 2 GHZ and 4 GB of RAM each and with ~400 GB of disks each.

From Azure I can configure 5x Medium virtual machine instances (Linux based since I don’t want a licensing discussion here)

This will cost about €332.44 a month, and for 2 TB of storage for page blobs is about €74.47 a month. (Locally redundant) + Support which is €223.41 a month (Note that since the support is so different from the vendors, I will choose to exclude it from the price comparison) Public Ip addresses are given from a cloud service and can be one or more adresses. I also need to add storage transactions since all IO to the Blob storage is considered a transaction. So 200 million storage transactions each month equals to €7,45 a month

I also need to define bandwidth usage, for Azure I can define the bandwidth usage to for instance 100GB which costs about €8.49 a month(Note that this bandwidth cost is for US + Europe egress) (Vmware does not charge for data transfer). This sums up to €422,5 euro a month.

Performance: Principled Technologies did a test on virtual machine instaces on both Azure and Vmware and they concluded that the CPU performance is about 2x the performance in vCloud compared to Azure (Note that this is pr vCPU)

http://www.slideshare.net/PrincipledTechnologies/v-chs-cpuperformance0714

Which means that if we have 10 GHZ in vCloud (We would need atleast 20 GHZ in Azure to have the similiar performance CPU-wise)

vCloud Air	Azure
10 GHz vCPU 20 GB vRAM 2 TB of Standard Storage 10 Mbps of Bandwidth 2 Public IP Addresses	5x Medium Instances = 2 x 1.6GHz CPU * 5 = 16 GHZ 2x 3,5 GB RAM * 5 = 17,5 GB 2 TB Page blobs 200 Million storage transactions 100 GB Bandwidth usage Cloud services public adresses
€644 each month	€422,85 each month

Note that this price for Azure is if we use the virtual machines 24/7, we use all 2 TB of storage, we use all the 100 GB bandwidth. If we do not use this much the cost each month will be lower. NOTE: All medium instances have 200mbps bandwidth)

Now, both of them have other options for prepaid 12 months options since this is a cheaper option I going to add them to the option in the table.

Prepaid 12 Month Vmware	Prepaid 12 Month Azure
€8,203 (Where €8724 is normal) cost	€3805 (€5074 is the normal cost)

Its clear to see that Azure is cheaper over the long run, since it has a really good discount when buying for certain amounts prepaid. http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/commitment-plans/

But it does not perform as well as Vmware. If we were to compare performance/cost we would have another calculation. Since as I mentioned we would need atleast twice the amount of CPU power to be able to have the same amount of performance and in this case I would need to add another virtual machine instance.

vCloud Air	Azure
10 GHz vCPU 20 GB vRAM 2 TB of Standard Storage	6x Medium Instances = ~20 GHZ 21 GB RAM
€644 each month	€489.33 each month

This takes the CPU/memory calculation in the mix but it does not say anything about storage performance. Note that Azure Datadisks for medium instances have max 500 IOPS. (While a storage account can have up to 20.000 IOPS) and the maximum size of a blog disk is 1 TB. And Medium instance can have up to 4 Datadisks and therefore a max amount of 2000 IOPS.

Now as I see it, we can’t compare these two solutions equally. So it is not an apple vs apple comparison. vCloud has the flexibility that you “purchase” a bunch of resources and you can form and mold them as you want. It has better performance since it is mostly a IaaS platform, while on the other hand you have Azure which has different forms and shapes that you can purchase depending on what the customers needs.

Also important to note that vCloud Air (Is as I have read about) that it is priced upon recourses you buy, not what you use so If you have bought 10GHZ and only use 50% you still need to pay the same amount, while Azure is based upon what you use.

Also the options around the ecosystem is also completely different. So I appriciate any feedback here! If I have done a wrong calculation or if statements are wrong.