Memory vendor Kingston Technology (check out the short interview we did at their VMWorld Europe 2008 booth) says memory in industry standard servers is causing virtualization projects to become unnecessarily expensive and that fears over warranties are holding back users from upgrading.
“Not having enough memory restricts the number of virtual machines, and also restricts the overall performance. Not having enough memory is either down to improper planning, or in most cases, the inability to purchase enough memory due to the higher cost of OEM memory,” the company said.
Hewlett-Packard does not seem to share their vision:
Rhys Austin, who runs the virtualization practice for industry standard servers at HP agreed that too little memory will affect virtualiszation performance but strongly rejected Kingston’s assertion that users were worried about price or warranties.
[Source: PC Advisor]
We are just about to re-deploy a four node VI cluster on HP’s blades. Cost for 32GB x4 with OEM memory? ~45K. 32GB of Kingston’s memory for those blades would be ~21K. Love to save the money but I don’t want an HP tech wasting my time with warranty hassles if there is a problem. So to HP’s comment, YOUR memory is creating worries. Kingston’s would be great if HP would stand up and support third party memory or preferably price it more in line with reality.