“Look, HyperV cand do 90% of what VMWare can do!”

This is the comment I heard out of my boss yesterday. Now having just got my VCP I know this isn’t true. HyperV is great and all, I use it all the time in this job, but it still has a way to go. My question however, does anyone have any whitepapers, articles, or just want to throw in their two cents on VMotion vs Live Migration? The last article I read seemd as if VMotion was still the clear winner, but I like to repost this question every so often to stay on top of things.

Anyone out there using Live Migration?
Have you also used VMotion?
Thoughts?

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powerfool

There was a webcast that discussed Hyper-V in Windows Server 8 a few months back. Obviously this doesn't cover what is available in the currently available release, but what is in beta. It would appear that they have caught up with many features, including their own version of Fault Tolerance, IIRC.

pwjohnston

Interesting. I'll have to go look that up. Thanks powerfool.

Everyone

Here's a good series of articles on it from an MS point of view:
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 1... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 2... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 3... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

I'm a big VMWare fan, but I've recently been trying to get caught up on Hyper-V since I've taken on a side project for a small business that uses Hyper-V. I've designed Hyper-V geo-cluster between there 2 sites located ~20 miles away from each other using Double-Take Availability. The design will allow them to fail VMs between the sites if 1 site should go down.

Zartanasaurus

90% of the functionality for 100% off the price is pretty compelling.

Zartanasaurus

Here's the thing about your manager's comments. Maybe Hyper-V doesn't have 90% of VMware's functionality. But it may fit 90% of your business requirements vs VMware and that's the important thing. The fact that VMware can do XYZ when your business doesn't need XYZ is irrelevant.

Zartanasaurus

Everyone wrote: »

Here's a good series of articles on it from an MS point of view:
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 1... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 2... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs
HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE LIVE MIGRATION PART 3... - Windows Virtualization Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

I'm a big VMWare fan, but I've recently been trying to get caught up on Hyper-V since I've taken on a side project for a small business that uses Hyper-V. I've designed Hyper-V geo-cluster between there 2 sites located ~20 miles away from each other using Double-Take Availability. The design will allow them to fail VMs between the sites if 1 site should go down.

What kind of connectivity between the two sites?

Everyone

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

What kind of connectivity between the two sites?

~6Mbps IIRC.

pwjohnston

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

Here's the thing about your manager's comments. Maybe Hyper-V doesn't have 90% of VMware's functionality. But it may fit 90% of your business requirements vs VMware and that's the important thing. The fact that VMware can do XYZ when your business doesn't need XYZ is irrelevant.

That may be true I've never been one for the whole ROI arguments, but the fact of the matter is they do end up charging an absurd amount of money and don't even bother to deploy hyper-v correctly. No shared storage, because well SANs are expensive, ok I can see that if you don't want to use Linux/Openfiler, but they set up these machines on single hosts with between 2 and 10 vms. If it goes down, tough luck. For what I keep hearing they charge, 5k for a server here 40 for a network rebuild there, 3500 for the essentials pack doesn't sound that pricey to me. They just had a big server crash less than a month ago when a tech was trying to put a pci card in a server and brought the whole thing down for almost a week. I just can't help but think that if it were VMotioned the downtime would have been much less.

You know I don't hate HyperV or I wouldn't have bothered to sit the 70-652 and I've built networks on Xen/Xenserver, but there's a reason VMWare is so expensive and it's because it's worth it. Those little things that companies don't want to pay for save the asses of the companies who choose to use them.

erpadmin

You have to weigh your needs for shared storage vs. cost. If you don't have a mission critical application (like MS exchange, SQL Server, for example), then you don't need shared storage/clustered environment. If you do need shared storage, you certainly don't need a SAN.; iSCSI has gotten very cheap for small-mid sized businesses that don't want to buy a SAN.

Personally, I'm actually in the camp of not needing vMware. What's going to happen when Windows Server 8 comes out will be this.....

MS is gonna throw in all of that vmWare functionality, like virtualizing a network infrastructure, in with the WS8. Most if not all of the stuff you can do on vmWare, you'll be able to do on MS Hyper-V.

It's not a matter of if it will happen, but when, just like when Novell died. vmWare is just too cost-prohibitive for a lot of shops to use. If MS can offer virtualization at no extra charge, I can't see vmWare going the way of Novell. I could be wrong though....but if history has taught me anything, it could be that I'm not too far off.

Zartanasaurus

pwjohnston wrote: »

That may be true I've never been one for the whole ROI arguments, but the fact of the matter is they do end up charging an absurd amount of money and don't even bother to deploy hyper-v correctly. No shared storage, because well SANs are expensive, ok I can see that if you don't want to use Linux/Openfiler, but they set up these machines on single hosts with between 2 and 10 vms. If it goes down, tough luck. For what I keep hearing they charge, 5k for a server here 40 for a network rebuild there, 3500 for the essentials pack doesn't sound that pricey to me. They just had a big server crash less than a month ago when a tech was trying to put a pci card in a server and brought the whole thing down for almost a week. I just can't help but think that if it were VMotioned the downtime would have been much less.

You know I don't hate HyperV or I wouldn't have bothered to sit the 70-652 and I've built networks on Xen/Xenserver, but there's a reason VMWare is so expensive and it's because it's worth it. Those little things that companies don't want to pay for save the asses of the companies who choose to use them.

No experience with VMware, but I'm assuming you need shared storage for HA and Vmotion right? So you'd have the same problems because they don't want to spend the money to implement it correctly. Of course they spend more than that in downtime and repairs, but we all know how that goes.

Live Migration and clustered Hyper-V servers work just fine for this. You just have to sell them on the cost of some shared storage. It doesn't need to be the biggest, beefiest thing out there. Lower end, iSCSI business class storage would work.

Zartanasaurus

Everyone wrote: »

~6Mbps IIRC.

I hope you mean 10Gb or something.

It would take over an hour to fail over one 4GB RAM server on a 6 Mbps link. It'd be faster to drive 20miles and plug in a USB flash drive to recover all your machines. Have you actually tested the failover procedure?

Zartanasaurus

erpadmin wrote: »

You have to weigh your needs for shared storage vs. cost. If you don't have a mission critical application (like MS exchange, SQL Server, for example), then you don't need shared storage/clustered environment. If you do need shared storage, you certainly don't need a SAN.; iSCSI has gotten very cheap for small-mid sized businesses that don't want to buy a SAN.

Personally, I'm actually in the camp of not needing vMware. What's going to happen when Windows Server 8 comes out will be this.....

MS is gonna throw in all of that vmWare functionality, like virtualizing a network infrastructure, in with the WS8. Most if not all of the stuff you can do on vmWare, you'll be able to do on MS Hyper-V.

It's not a matter of if it will happen, but when, just like when Novell died. vmWare is just too cost-prohibitive for a lot of shops to use. If MS can offer virtualization at no extra charge, I can't see vmWare going the way of Novell. I could be wrong though....but if history has taught me anything, it could be that I'm not too far off.

As the saying goes, Microsoft comes late to the party but they always bring a keg.

Everyone

pwjohnston wrote: »

That may be true I've never been one for the whole ROI arguments, but the fact of the matter is they do end up charging an absurd amount of money and don't even bother to deploy hyper-v correctly. No shared storage, because well SANs are expensive, ok I can see that if you don't want to use Linux/Openfiler, but they set up these machines on single hosts with between 2 and 10 vms. If it goes down, tough luck. For what I keep hearing they charge, 5k for a server here 40 for a network rebuild there, 3500 for the essentials pack doesn't sound that pricey to me. They just had a big server crash less than a month ago when a tech was trying to put a pci card in a server and brought the whole thing down for almost a week. I just can't help but think that if it were VMotioned the downtime would have been much less.

You know I don't hate HyperV or I wouldn't have bothered to sit the 70-652 and I've built networks on Xen/Xenserver, but there's a reason VMWare is so expensive and it's because it's worth it. Those little things that companies don't want to pay for save the asses of the companies who choose to use them.

Your little rant here doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't matter who you go with, vSphere, Hyper-V, Xen, all require shared storage to do a "Live Migration" or use most any of the high availability features for that matter. They all work the same way, the VM is restarted on another host. You can get around the high shared storage with something like the Double-Take Availability software I linked to in my earlier post, or by creating a "Virtual SAN", which I think is where you were going with the "Linux/Openfiler". FreeNAS can do it, HP has a product that will do it, VMWare has there own product for that too.

Here's a little comparison chart of ESXi 4 and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2:
Microsoft Hyper-V Server | Virtualization | Virtual | Benefits

I'd like to compare SCVMM to vCenter more... According to VMWare, using SCVMM with vSphere really screws things up (see: VMware Virtualization Management: vCenter vs Microsoft System Center), but I'd like to see feature and cost comparison between using SCVMM with Hyper-V and vSphere with vCenter.

Everyone

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

I hope you mean 10Gb or something.

It would take over an hour to fail over one 4GB RAM server on a 6 Mbps link. It'd be faster to drive 20miles and plug in a USB flash drive to recover all your machines. Have you actually tested the failover procedure?

No, I haven't even started building it yet. This is for DR, not for HA. I've seen demonstrations, it's pretty quick, you don't need a super fast link. The servers will be built at the same location for initial replication, and the link between the sites should be fast enough to keep it in sync. The whole point of the software and the way it works is to allow this to happen over any distance without requiring crazy bandwidth.

vCole

pwjohnston wrote: »

That may be true I've never been one for the whole ROI arguments, but the fact of the matter is they do end up charging an absurd amount of money and don't even bother to deploy hyper-v correctly. No shared storage, because well SANs are expensive, ok I can see that if you don't want to use Linux/Openfiler, but they set up these machines on single hosts with between 2 and 10 vms. If it goes down, tough luck. For what I keep hearing they charge, 5k for a server here 40 for a network rebuild there, 3500 for the essentials pack doesn't sound that pricey to me. They just had a big server crash less than a month ago when a tech was trying to put a pci card in a server and brought the whole thing down for almost a week. I just can't help but think that if it were VMotioned the downtime would have been much less.

You know I don't hate HyperV or I wouldn't have bothered to sit the 70-652 and I've built networks on Xen/Xenserver, but there's a reason VMWare is so expensive and it's because it's worth it. Those little things that companies don't want to pay for save the asses of the companies who choose to use them.

Like others have said, your rant doesn't make too much sense.

However, for any HA environment you MUST have shared storage. Doesn't matter if it's VMware/Hyper-V/Xen. However, with Hyper-V it's a cheaper route for small companies. $3500 may not sound a lot to you, but my total licensing budget for the year is $5000. Hyper-V is a viable option for small environments who are already purchasing Microsoft licensing. Now, I'm a huge VMware fan (and I'm all about shared storage) however no environment is equal. Like Zartanasaurus said - it's about meeting a business need, not only in the technical aspect - but the financial too.

vCole

Everyone wrote: »

No, I haven't even started building it yet. This is for DR, not for HA. I've seen demonstrations, it's pretty quick, you don't need a super fast link. The servers will be built at the same location for initial replication, and the link between the sites should be fast enough to keep it in sync. The whole point of the software and the way it works is to allow this to happen over any distance without requiring crazy bandwidth.

I've used Veeam Backup & Replication over small pipes and it works great. Initial rep. is very slow but after that the reps. are extremely quick.

Zartanasaurus

Everyone wrote: »

No, I haven't even started building it yet. This is for DR, not for HA. I've seen demonstrations, it's pretty quick, you don't need a super fast link. The servers will be built at the same location for initial replication, and the link between the sites should be fast enough to keep it in sync. The whole point of the software and the way it works is to allow this to happen over any distance without requiring crazy bandwidth.

I'll have to look into them more. Looks like something we could use where I work. Thanks.

pwjohnston

Well I'm looking for more independent articles like these. Of course MS and VMware are going to have graphs and tables that say their product is better.

vMotion vs Live Migration 10 11

VMware vs. Microsoft Virtualization: Is Hyper-V "Good Enough"? - Datamation

pwjohnston

vCole wrote: »

Like others have said, your rant doesn't make too much sense.

Keep in mind that there's probably some general job frustration coming out in that too. Sorry.

It's probably good that I post this here because I do forget the whole "business" side sometimes. It's just really annoying when you see what you believe to be a better way of doing something, but the whole dollar issue comes up.

Everyone

Ignoring performance and price, to me, vMotion seemed easier to setup than Live Migration.

To do Live Migration on Hyper-V, you have to setup a cluster. I have years and years of Windows Clustering experience, so it's not a big deal to me. However I've worked with a lot of people that just don't understand Windows Clustering at all. I've stepped in and fixed clusters where someone had screwed up the configuration of it so badly that failover took 30+ minutes or didn't work at all, and the servers were in the same rack! When I got done with it, less than a minute to failover.

I think Microsoft could easily fix this downside to Hyper-VA HA. With Exchange 2010, when you setup a DAG, Exchange setups the Windows Clustering for you. You have to try really hard to screw it up. If they made it so Hyper-V would configure that for you, it'd be super easy.

powerfool

LeftHand used to offer a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) back in the day where you could essentially load your hosts with tons of storage, allocate all of the storage to the VSA, and then share it back out via iSCSI. If you have multiple hosts and use the Network-RAID feature, you essentially have a built in SAN cluster for your VMs.

There is another company that is offering this now, as well, and yet another that sells the servers and does this without a VSA.

Someone could likely do this with OpenFiler, but I don't know if they have a Network-RAID sort of feature that would synchronously replicate your storage across your hosts.

Everyone

powerfool wrote: »

LeftHand used to offer a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) back in the day where you could essentially load your hosts with tons of storage, allocate all of the storage to the VSA, and then share it back out via iSCSI. If you have multiple hosts and use the Network-RAID feature, you essentially have a built in SAN cluster for your VMs.

HP bought them out and sells that now. HP LeftHand Virtual SAN Appliance Software - Overview & Features

VMWare has their own VSA too: vSphere Storage Appliance - Shared Storage for Everyone

powerfool wrote: »

Someone could likely do this with OpenFiler, but I don't know if they have a Network-RAID sort of feature that would synchronously replicate your storage across your hosts.

I haven't had time to go back and do this with OpenFiler yet, but I did it with FreeNAS: Budget Laboratory: Part 2 - iSCSI Virtual SAN with FreeNAS 8 | Fix the Exchange!
I haven't had the time to go back and configure replication between hosts on it either, but it can be done. It uses rsync though, so not quite real time replication, but close.

The nice thing about the HP/Lefthand VSA is you can get support from HP on it, and it supports both Hyper-V and VMWare.

VMWare's VSA is nice if you're already a VMware shop, 'cause you can get support from them on it.

Using FreeNAS to create a VSA was easy (and fun for me), it's OpenSource and free, which is nice, but also means you're on your own if it breaks.

I like the Double-Take products because they can do real-time block level replication.

vCole

pwjohnston wrote: »

Keep in mind that there's probably some general job frustration coming out in that too. Sorry.

It's probably good that I post this here because I do forget the whole "business" side sometimes. It's just really annoying when you see what you believe to be a better way of doing something, but the whole dollar issue comes up.

Trust me, I know. I went from work at NetApp to working at a small manufacturing firm that's part of the housing market with a total of 52 employees. I know ALL about the dollar issue.

Zartanasaurus

Everyone wrote: »

I haven't had time to go back and do this with OpenFiler yet, but I did it with FreeNAS: Budget Laboratory: Part 2 - iSCSI Virtual SAN with FreeNAS 8 | Fix the Exchange!

OpenFiler iSCSI doesn't play nice with Windows Clustering because of the SCSI-3 persistent reservations issue. In OF 2.99, they have the LIO-target tools installed, but they aren't accessible from the GUI. You have to configure iSCSI manually with tcm_node and lio_node to get it to work properly for Windows Clustering. Much easier to do with FreeNAS.

I believe you can purchase premium support from the OpenFiler folks to get them to set it up properly, or you can just read the documentation from RisingTide to get it working which is the path I took.

scott28tt

You've got to look beyond features and license costs too, I had a student on a course 9 months ago who had done side-by-side testing of Hyper-V 2 and ESXi 4, and they found that for the workloads they planned on running in VMs the performance on Hyper-V was only 80% of what they achieved on ESXi - and I was training the guy on a vSphere 4 course.

Scott.

Everyone

scott28tt wrote: »

You've got to look beyond features and license costs too, I had a student on a course 9 months ago who had done side-by-side testing of Hyper-V 2 and ESXi 4, and they found that for the workloads they planned on running in VMs the performance on Hyper-V was only 80% of what they achieved on ESXi - and I was training the guy on a vSphere 4 course.

Scott.

Hyper-V on top of Server 2008 R2 or Hyper-V Server 2008 R2? I would imagine performance of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 would be better than running Hyper-V on top of Server 2008 R2. There's a lot of overhead if you run Hyper-V on top of a 2008 R2 server install.

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is the free bare metal hypervisor, so the best performance comparison would be between it and ESXi.

powerfool

Everyone wrote: »

I like the Double-Take products because they can do real-time block level replication.

I need to revisit Double-Take. I interviewed with them for a web developer job about ten years ago back when it the company was called NSI, and then a couple of years ago before the VisionSoftware buyout to do evening support as a second job. I used it pre-virtualization and it was a resource hog. Using the products geared towards virtualization may be different. When I virtualized my tier 1 applications, we ditched Double-Take and relied on SAN replication (Equallogic) after doing application aware, quiesced snapshots.

scott28tt

I can't say for sure, but it was decision-making testing they were doing and they're a BIG Microsoft house for most things... It's just something worth considering in a discussion such as this...

ajs1976

I have worked with Citrix for about 10 years and every time a new version of Windows comes out, people say that you will not need Citrix anymore. Still around, still doing well. I think VMWare will be around for a while too.

vCole

ajs1976 wrote: »

I have worked with Citrix for about 10 years and every time a new version of Windows comes out, people say that you will not need Citrix anymore. Still around, still doing well. I think VMWare will be around for a while too.

Especially since not everyone's virtualizing just Windows.