“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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Comments

undomiel

vCole wrote: »

Especially since not everyone's virtualizing just Windows.

I've found Hyper-V to work pretty well for RHEL/CentOS installations once you're using Integration Services v3+. Let's not talk about v2 and their oops you've updated your kernel everyone panic. We've got a number of nagios nodes around running on Hyper-V. If you've got an old Novell network though, you'll have much better luck with VMware.

NISMO1968

powerfool wrote: »

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.

If you mean joint venture between Microsoft and Marathon Technologies then it all ended with basically nothing... Resulting solution was DOA. If you happen to know about other FT expected to come with Hyper-V 3.0 please share

Very much appreciated! VMware's FT is still in its early days and is more of a toy (and expensive one) then a solution.

NISMO1968

Everyone wrote: »

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

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.

LeftHand VSA is a nice solution except it's a bit of a pricey... And they had basically poineered VSA concept AFAIK. Worth attention

VMware's VSA raise more questions then it answers... You may want to read this:

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance: Devil's in the details

and I would sign under every single word. Openfiler just sucks, with Hyper-V it still has PR issues and lockups on volume owner change and VMware directly warns to avoid it in their KB:

VMware KB: SCSI Reservation Conflicts when using OpenFiler iSCSI Storage Devices

FreeNAS is a clumsy kludge of FreeBSD and ZFS. I'd recommend to take a look at OpenIndiana and Illumos projects instead of it.

Double-Take (or VisionSoftware as they seems to change the owner once again after NSI) is nice except we've found using any modern SAN built-in deduplication + some kind of compression-based replication appliance (SilverPeak or NetEx does not matter) is times faster and more reliable as such a combination basically does not care what to deduplicate / replicate

Take a look just in case:

VX Comparison | Silver Peak Systems, Inc.

and

HyperIP | WAN Optimization of Replication and Backup Applications Over IP Networks

both are virtual appliances so deployment is trivial.

NISMO1968

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.

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.

There are numerous companies offering VSAs now. They are all Linux or Solaris based solutions and all suffer from the same drawbacks: poor performance as it's guest VM so access to hardware is passing thru VMbus and they all come too late - cluster should have access to shared storage as soon as possible.

Companies like VM6 and Virsto do it in the other way - they "mirror" not LUNs but VHD files

Resulting solution is pretty much reliable and fast as DAS storage is always faster then NAS / SAN. At least two companies can mirror LUNs they are DataCore with SANsymphony run inside parent partition and StarWind Software and their Native SAN for Hyper-V. Unlike with VSA they run Windows application so they are faster (direct hardware access and no guest VM overhead and it's still DAS mirrored) and easy to manage. And come up immediately with Hyper-V

You can build mirror with Openfiler with the help of DRBD. However for Windows it's still poor active-passive model as NTFS cannot be placed on two active-active nodes safely b/c it's not cluster capable file system (you can do it under Linux with say OCFS2 for example).

crypticgeek

erpadmin wrote: »

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.

Oh god, don't say that.

I just paid $1k and registered for a VMWare vSphere 5 ICM class. *runs around wondering if he should regret his decision*

instant000

crypticgeek wrote: »

Oh god, don't say that. I just paid $1k and registered for a VMWare vSphere 5 ICM class. *runs around wondering if he should regret his decision*

Hah.

The skills are transferable. Don't sweat it.

erpadmin

crypticgeek wrote: »

Oh god, don't say that. I just paid $1k and registered for a VMWare vSphere 5 ICM class. *runs around wondering if he should regret his decision*

No do not regret your decision.

I work for a pure Windows shop...a shop that is too cheap to invest in VMWare. Microsoft is years and years away from the Network Virtualization that Windows Server 8 promises. vmWare is still in play for you and Instant is right, those skills are very transferrable.

I'm not trying to backpedal from my statement...just saying your vmWare skills will prove useful IF Windows Server 8 does in fact become a virtualization powerhouse. Stay with that VMware class and pass that exam!

crypticgeek

True true. Still, it's good food for thought. No one can afford to pretend there aren't compelling solutions for different business cases from a competing product.

jmritenour

I work in an environment that actually sells/implements the big three - VMWare, Xen, and Hyper-V. They each have their ups and downs, but feature for feature, Xen & Hyper-V simply don't stack up to VMware. They have NOTHING that is even remotely close to DRS, they don't have HA at the depth vSphere does, and none of them have a true virtualized file system like VMFS. The ease of backing up VMs through pretty much any commercial backup software in vSphere is ridiculous.

That said, if you're doing a small scale implementation and only need 1 or 2 hosts and a handful of VMs, vSphere is a waste of money, as most of it's perks aren't seen until you've got several hosts and a few dozen VMs.

But the fact is, Microsoft is no longer the 800lb gorilla they once were. They can't simply walk into a market against a strong competitor and take it over like they used to, as seen by the Zune vs. iPod failure. That's not to say Hyper-V won't find a niche -the licensing costs are very beneficial to primarily Windows shops, and sometimes, that's all it takes. But at this point, Hyper-V can't do much of anything that VMWare can't do, and VMWare can do a whole hell of a lot Hyper-V can't do, or can't do very well.