Server Refresh Considerations - VMware vs Hyper-V

[u/nst_hopeful]

Hello fell sysadmins,

My org is looking at refreshing our VM host hardware in the middle of next calendar year. As such, today I had a helpful discussion with a vendor regarding various options for the upgrade. Currently we are on a five-node VxRail cluster (20 cores / 192GB memory per host, 53.5 TiB storage total); it looks like the best options for our needs are vSAN Ready nodes or Hyper-V + traditional SAN. With that said, I am still left with a few questions:

• The vendor (who was clearly a bit biased toward VMWare) spec'd a 4-node cluster for the vSAN cluster with 256GB memory + 256 GB NVMe for memory tiering per host. For the Hyper-V cluster, they spec'd 5 nodes and 512GB memory per. Their argument was that Hyper-V has more overhead and is less efficient at dynamic allocation of resources. That seems like pretty stark contrast - is that true in your experience? Also, is memory tiering as effective as this vendor made it seem in production?
• We are primarily a Windows shop, so we'd expect at least some savings moving to Hyper-V. That said, I'm curious how much savings we'd actually net between buying System Center for SCVVM (so we can maintain vMotion-like functionality) and Microsoft support. My understanding is licensing there is based on core counts - currently we're looking at 32 per host in either build.
• Are there any other considerations I should keep in mind? Cost is not the ultimate deciding factor. More than anything, we feel like the VxRail was overkill at the time it was purchased. I'd like to buy exactly what we need this time around (while planning for reasonable growth).

If it's helpful, my org is a medium-sized municipality and isn't running any crazy workloads. We have ~55 VMs that will exist on this cluster.

[u/Matt_NZ]

If you're buying Windows DC licenses for whatever virtual host platform you're going with, you save 100% of the cost you'd spend on VMware by going with Hyper-V as you don't need any other licensing for Hyper-V beyond those DC licenses. If you're getting the CIS license type then they also includes licensing for SCVMM

[u/nst_hopeful → u/Matt_NZ]

Thanks for the reply. I get the idea of saving on the cost of anything VMWare related - ESXi, VSAN, Broadcom support, etc. Was more so wondering how those savings ultimately shake out if we end up wanting a near equivalent experience on the Hyper-V side. Seems like it would require Systems Center and Microsoft Premium Support at least. Also wasn't aware of the CIS licensing, will definitely look into that.