My experience with VMWare is that they do a very good job estimating the TCO of N physical servers and then they charge you such that it's ~90% of that cost to

My experience with VMWare is that they do a very good job estimating the TCO of N physical servers and then they charge you such that it's ~90% of that cost to virtualize them. I.e., VMWare is usually a better deal, but just barely. Drives me insane.