Hyper-V or VMWare?

Having never used any virtualisation stuff until recently when somebody said "lets look at various virtualisation technologies", before we had even look at other ones MS Hyper-V was up and running and is now hosting 2 virtual servers. Bit disappointed in that we didn't give the other options a chance but having played with the SCVMM side of things I can't beleive how easy it was to do a P2V on one of our less important servers, up and running in less than an hour!
 
Yeah its dead easy huh, the only problem I've had with P2V's are finding old raid card drivers and sometimes virtual NICs dont work properly and you have to create new ones.

I've done P2V's of everything now, I even did my XP desktop so I can run it as a sandbox when looking at dodgy stuff. The P2V's also work in Microsoft Virtual Machine 2007, so that's handy too.
 
We've used VMWare for years and would never look elsewhere. They are the most cutting edge and have all the latest tricks and features built in. Trust me, Hyper-V will be a mistake.
 
Ace T said:
We've used VMWare for years and would never look elsewhere. They are the most cutting edge and have all the latest tricks and features built in. Trust me, Hyper-V will be a mistake.
Click to expand...

So you've extensively tested it despite the fact you'd never look elsewhere, or are you making sweeping statements criticising something you've not spent any time using?
 
You currently have 3 main server virtualisation options:

VMware VSphere 4
Microsoft Hyper-V R2
Citrix XenServer 5.5

All three are workable solutions but I think which one you pick will depend on the scale of the solution you are implementing. I think Xen is a good offering for a small business due it's cost, built in management tools and Xenmotion migration. Hyper-V is actually now worth looking at since R2 and the introduction of live migration, however it still feels like a 1.0 product. It certainly doesn't currently have any proven track record. It's getting better with each iteration though. VMware is the market leader and at the enterprise level is effectively the only viable option.

In short, how much money does downtime/management cost you. If you have 30 employees and no one notices if the e-mail server is down for a couple of hours then all 3 will offer something. I'd be tempted by XenServer or ESXi free, perhaps with a cheap iSCSI SAN backend if you need it. If you have 10,000 employees and 1 minute of downtime costs £20,000+ then I wouldn't settle for anything other than VMware on a fibre channel/infiniband SAN with synchronous replication to your DR site.
 
Last edited:
ESX certainly is good but it's very expensive, we're running around 250 VMs on a HyperV cluster currently though and it's as good as VMware for it's purpose. The main losses are lack of resource pools (but not many use them) and currently the missing memory over-subscription feature which will be fixed by sp1.

Uptime is as good as our VMware platforms, downsides are it doesn't play so nicely with Linux (lack of integration tools in the kernel until recently) and performance is slightly behind VMware and Xen, though that may be due to a lower spec SAN, it's difficult to control for that...

The principle advantage is, as we're a Microsoft gold partner, a ludicrously low cost per VM (particularly per windows VM due to the licensing terms).

It's problem as a low end offering is that you really need SCVMM as well and unless you're a partner that starts to get expensive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom