The Great Virtualisation Secret

Having over a year’s lead in the marketplace, Red Hat Inc with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system currently has a number of advantages over Microsoft’s Hyper-V in that they support both Windows and versions of Linux in either fully virtualised mode or paravirtualised depending on the guest OS running.

Subscription Based Support Model vs Licencing for Virtualisation

Even without their current lead in the marketplace, Red Hat still has the advantage of being based on the open source model. 

I.e. you can have it for free and use it on as many servers as you like for free with no licence costs rather than the licensed model used by Microsoft for their virtualised operating systems.

However these companies still have to make some revenue in order to grow and develop their offerings. 

One model that is used by some of the open source vendors is to have a support based subscription model.

So for example in the case of Red Hat’s RHEL O/S, if you wanted to have support, you would pay for a year’s subscription for each host version of the virtual OS installed. 

So from a subscription based model perspective, you could simply purchase two support subscriptions for two physical servers running RHEL O/S and then run as many virtual servers as you like on top of these two physical boxes.

Remember when you virtualise a set of servers onto one host system you must must must always buy a backup host system or else you have a massive single point of failure.