If you buy from a third party reseller, like Dell or HP, it may be different than what the list price. Second, you almost have to plan out your virtual environment before, or as, you think about what you're doing. Since the license price is based on a CPU socket you would need to know how many CPU's you intend to use, whether you need HA/DRS and/or Virtual Center Server and whether you need more than one year support. How are you going to back all your VM's up? What other software are you going to require for your specific business needs? It isn't just buying a SAN, two servers and the software then slapping it all together.
Calling a sales rep can help you better plan for your deployment and give you, usually, better discounts. We purchased ours with our servers a little over 2 years ago and Dell saved us a bunch of money plus threw in training credits for two of us in our IT department to get VPC certs.
If you are just looking to put together a high level budget, than you can use
this guide from VMWare but remember those are based on single CPU 9 (up to 6 cores) and one year of support.
Here is a link to the VCenter Server cost. again based on the support you need.
I would recommend getting at least 2 or 3 years support on everything, even two years out I have to call them maybe once a month and have had the occasional serious problem.
I'd recommend calling Dell, get a small-medium business sales guy and work with them. Also, a secret for buying with Dell (and probably other vendors) is to wait until the end of the quarter or even better end of the year. They have some great deals!
Last but not least, check to see if you have a local
VMWare User Group in your area, they're all over the world. They'd be a HUGE resource for vendors, pricing and help for deployment.
I only suggest Dell because that's who we used and we've been pretty happy with the price and support we've been given. Choose whomever you want, but you'll probably get better deals from the larger companies like Dell or HP.
Good luck!
Cheers
Rob
The answer is always "PEBKAC!