Is Hyper-V really on par with VMWare?

I was at an interview for a SMB consulting agency the other day where I was told that they don't use VMWare because HyperV has pretty much caught up to and is on par with VMWare feature wise and for the cost difference it didn't make sense to use VMWare.

That seems a bit far fetched to me, but I haven't been keeping up with Hyper-V. Thoughts?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

RTmarc

The only category where Hyper-V is superior or on par with VMware is price.

erpadmin

RTmarc wrote: »

The only category where Hyper-V is superior or on par with VMware is price.

I will have to second that...that's the only reason why my shop hasn't embraced vmWare. Hence, why I haven't bothered learning vmWare

(however Hyper-V will be learned and in spades.

)

certhelp

From whatever limited knowledge I have of both platforms/tools, I can says:
1) Hyper-V has made significant progress starting with Hyper-V server versions.
2) Hyper-V also integrates well if you're using Windows OSs.

gateway

SP1 has also brought dynamic memory to hyper-v which was much needed.

CChilderhose

They have also added Live Migration (vMotion is the VMware equivalent) to the latest edition.

You can check things here on what has been added - Windows Server 2008 R2: Enabling Server and Desktop Virtualization

Michael.J.Palmer

In a sense from what you can gather is that Hyper-V is catching up to a point where those who like to penny pinch are seriously considering it over VMWare.

astorrs

I was at an interview for a SMB consulting agency ...

The upfront cost of any solution is a big factor for small businesses, so I can see why they would see things that way. Larger enterprises are more concerned about TCO and indirect costs.

Starke

VMware ESXi>Citrix XenServer>Hyper-V

If you plan on using virtualization in a highly available manner I can't see why you wouldn't purchase a licensed version of ESXi or XenServer. You can get HA with VMware with their Essentials Plus edition for $3500 which covers three hosts. You can HA with XenServer with their Advanced edition for $1000 a host. This is MSRP we sell both of these for less than that. From a consultants perspective managing Hyper-V is terrible. We occassionally use Hyper-V if we put in an SBS Premium server. If you're going to run more than a couple of VMs please at least get inexpensive shared storage and get the basic hypervisor license to get HA.

pwjohnston

RTmarc wrote: »

The only category where Hyper-V is superior or on par with VMware is price.

I like RTMarc's answer the best. Yes they are an SMB consulting agency so I understand the cost issue. They did say that upfront, but then tried to play it off like “Oh ya, Hyper-V is on par with VMWare now” and hey I'm not going to argue with them on the interview, ha!

@Starke;
One of their objections was that you have to have a 4th server running the vCenter. Though I'm not sure how that applies to Essentials. We've been using the free version of Xenserver 5.5 for over a year now at my old job and I'm really happy with it. As long as you have identical hardware you can cluster, migrate live vm's, and connect to a backend SAN over iSCSI.

Forsaken_GA

pwjohnston wrote: »

One of their objections was that you have to have a 4th server running the vCenter.

vCenter runs just fine as a VM on one of the hosts

pwjohnston

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

vCenter runs just fine as a VM on one of the hosts

Ya, that would seem to be a logical place for it. Though for the paranoid I suppose you would want to put it on a physical machine.

Starke

No it's fully supported as a VM and recommended by VMware in most scenarios.

pwjohnston wrote: »

Ya, that would seem to be a logical place for it. Though for the paranoid I suppose you would want to put it on a physical machine.

SteveO86

pwjohnston wrote: »

Ya, that would seem to be a logical place for it. Though for the paranoid I suppose you would want to put it on a physical machine.

Also if the vCenter guest goes down for any reason or you lose the physical host vCenter is running on, the other hosts will continue to function like normal. You can also use vCenter to connect to individual hosts when the vCenter VM is down and you need to manage the environment.

Zaits

Starke wrote: »

VMware ESXi>Citrix XenServer>Hyper-V
.

Couldn't have said it better myself!! I'd choose XenServer over Hyper-v any day of the week. I'd even choose Xen source over Hyper-v just for the simple fact Hyper-v is a giant turd

and yes I am a bit biased towards Hyper-v...

Zaits

Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware | Virtualization - InfoWorld