Currently, I'm looking at our virtualization platform and am wondering how to quantify some of the 'costs' of moving from VMware to a KVM based solution.

The question isn't limited to my specifics-it goes back (at least in my head) to the old 'No one ever got fired for buying IBM' maxim. The reasoning being that often, for business, going with a large, known entity can be better than going with the better technical product, that the only experts you can find for it are part time goatherders in Nepal, and can only do ICQ sessions at 2AM on Thursdays.

Anyways, licensing is usually easy to figure out and compare apples to apples (for the sake of argument, lets ignore those companies who have difficult licensing).

Now, support contracts are at least moderately easy to quantify. Here are the terms, and the rates.

But what about the actual quality of support one gets? For example, I know what I get when I call VMware-they blame the storage vendor, and once the storage vendor has verified that storage was OK they usually go ahead and solve the VMware issue. (Those were my last two VMware tickets, in any case). But, evaluating support for a new product is difficult, as all that is publicly available are anecdotes.

How about the cost of finding/training/retaining employees 'skilled' in that technology? I know that I can find a junior windows sysadmin easily and cheaply, and put them in front of a gui and they'll do moderately OK. If I need to find someone who knows KVM virtualization, then I'm fishing in a smaller, higher priced pool (or at least that's my experience). But what the price difference actually is I can't say.

I'm sure that in large companies, where you have teams that do each of these things the costs are fairly well known-as you're regularly hiring or training for the various roles. You also don't need to worry about the 'hit by a bus' scenario the same way a small company does. That is, almost any local MSP can step in to a basic windows/vmware setup and keep things running for a while should anything happen to key staff. Finding an MSP that can act as backup for a kvm setup is a bit more difficult, or at least has been in my initial searches.

So what are the rules or guidelines or resources to use to try and put more than a general feeling down when you're comparing some of these 'less tangible' costs?