Microsoft Windows Hyper-V VS VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

Ok, decided on riding the virtualization boat and confused on the right product for your company. Or you had already tried few virtualization products and trying to put a comparison between them. Our site definitely can help. In this post we are allowing you to discuss and comment on our Microsoft Windows Hyper-V Vs VMware VI3 comparison posted at our site.

Please share your opinion with us. Feel free to point out any mistake or point you disagree with & make sure you point out why you disagree or prove why its wrong for us to investigate it.

Enjoy & Share the Knowledge,

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6 Responses to Microsoft Windows Hyper-V VS VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5

  1. Mujeeb says:

    I thought that you were going to do an honest comparison but this sounds more like marketing for VM Ware. I have been in IT for 15 years and had worked on Novell and MS server and desktop OS. I have also worked with VM ware desktops for 8 years and played with esx for several years. I can say that vm ware was much better than virtual desktop and server but haven’t yet used hyper-v. Your praise for esx management console reflects your bias. It is not so great. I have had the console for guests blanking out and than unable to reboot the vm many times.
    And your cost analysis does not show at what point it is cheaper to get hyper v and at what point it gets more expensive. For instance MS allows using multiple virtuals on a single licensed host and VM licenses per CPU core. You can do the maths.
    Hyper V is based on Windows 2008 and so certainly vulnerable to hacks and viruses and would have to be updated. But ESX is also based on Linux although stripped version and so to an extent susceptible to security vulnerabilities.
    I certainly like the the memory over commitment technique used in ESX but do not get over zealous with it. If you happen to boot several guests with over commit at the same time, you will see the slowness in performance.
    Lastly, I heard that Hypervisor had a built in GUI based management console, so I can switch between several VM’s at the system’s console. That is great. s
    I am going to install vista ultimate to test some extreme graphic and sound functions with full driver support with hyper v. I think that is something that cannot be done on ESX. Virtualization is not for server consolidation but is fast becoming a disaster recovery solution for desktops also.

  2. Tom says:

    Hi Mujeeb,

    I had been in the IT industry for 12 years now. I am working as a team lead for the System team at an international logistics company, I wish to dispose the real name of the company, but I would loose my job specially with the current situation.

    I hate to say this, actually I would laughed at any one said that to me few months back. Though viruses & spyware are a real threat in Windows 2008 Hyper-V. We had 10 Windows 2008 Server core servers running Hyper-V. They had been running around 100 production virtual machines for the past 2 and half months beautifully. We were very happy with it as we did not have to pay for it due to the fact plenty of the virtual machines are running Windows 2008 & we had Microsoft Premium support in place. The problem that came up 10 days ago, one virus were able to hit our Windows 2008 Server core servers & render them useless with automatic restart every few minutes. We had antigen in place, but somehow the virus were able to render that useless as well. Though after a hard work for 12 hours with MS Support engineers online we were able to bring our infrastructure back from backup. Though that was 12 hours unplanned downtime (not too long for bringing 100 machines back if compared to physical machines, but still a full setup is down for that long is madness), which our management is not accepting and to be honest it risked our jobs for a moment. If it happen again, then you should expect to see my CV.

    I believe MS Hyper-V is a beautiful product, though a special kernel not running windows & not being affected by viruses will be great. I am sure VMware & Xen are still affected by some threats , but they are totally immune against viruses, spyware, & trojans. In addition, it seems VMware reduced size version is even had the smallest surface attack. To be honest our management at the moment is considering if VMware cost is reasonable for at least critical virtual machines to avoid further downtime.

    Please don’t get me wrong, I really like Hyper-V & agree being free for Microsoft Shops like us is great. Though the virus scenario we had, I can call it a disaster and would be scared of it being repeated. We are considering a change of anti-virus solution as well.

    If you are going the Hyper-V route, then get my 2 cents advice of securing your Domain 0 machine as much as possible. Don’t connect it to internet. Keep it updated. Ensure that your antivirus solution is the best that you can get. Maybe even put your critical virtual machines on VMware or Xen & the rest on Hyper-V if that is affordable.

    Good luck & I appreciate ITComparison pointing the security point into their comparison. Its good to have people warned before hand. Although I might still disagree with them on few other points, I will rather e-mail that to them directly.

  3. Luis-M. says:

    Hi Tom, could you please update on how your environment is doing. Did you switch to Vmware ESX or kept on running on Hyper-V ? Do you run your dev environment on Vmware or Hyper-V ?

    Regards

  4. Tom says:

    Hi Luis,

    Yes, we are in the process of switching to VMWare ESX for the full virtualization farm. Initially we had only critical machine on VMware infrastructure & the rest was on Hyper-V, but after few months fuzzing with problems & the business people got feed up of downtime they raised the budget and the flag :). So we have almost finished migrating most of the non-critical VMs to VMware. In regards of our developments VMs, we are planning to move them to VMware ESXi. Its quite stable & for free, not much of a fancy features come with it. Though its more than enough for development, and virus immune.

    I hope that help. If you have to try something cheaper than ESX, then maybe look into Xen. I would not waste my time on Hyper-V before three years more. If you got the budget, then VMware is your target. Very stable & easy to use.

  5. Greg Hay says:

    hi all,
    i think this article needs to be updated with hyper-v v2 and vsphere. i am a vmware customer and have looked at hyper-v v2 and found some significant changes listed below.

    1 live migration support. (vmotion)
    2 hyper v server is a free iso download from the ms website. no windows licenses on base even though it uses a windows enterprise core install on the cd. you only license guest vm’s.
    3 hyper v drivers released to open source community.
    4 self service portal built into scvvm which is significantly cheaper than vmware at $500 to manage 5 physical machine.
    5 scvvm can manage vmware hosts as well as hyper v hosts.
    6 vlan’s are supported.

    the only thing i could find not supported was drs and maybe storage migration. a note here is that in hyper v v2 all vm’s can sit on a single clustered storage unit which which gpt disks can go far over the 2tb limit of vmfs.

    my conclusion is that the free product which it is is extremly hard to ignore as it matches and in some cases exceeds vmware with functions you would need to purchase from vmware at additional cost.
    from our side we will begin moving some of our environment to hyper v. the cost benefits with an almost paralel feature set cannot be ignored.

  6. admin says:

    Hi Greg Hay,

    Sure the article is a bit old, but MS Hyper-V R2 or V2 as some people call it has not been released for long. We have got our blades ready in the lab & setup with both VMware vSphere & MS Hyper-V R2. Though it will take us some time to finalize the comparison and put it online. So please be patient as that will be coming.

    Though I have a small comment that MS Hyper-V 2008 R2 is still missing many more features than you had mentioned just to mention few Distributed switches, hosted profiles, FT. More details will come in the comparison as we finish testing all the features in both.

    One more thing to note with MS Hyper-V R2 you might want to forget about NTFS & GPT file system and start looking toward CSV if you are planning to make a use of MS Hyper-V 2008 R2 high availability features :).

    I hope the few notes above help, and we are working hard to get the new comparison online :).

    Thanks,
    ITComparison Team

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