Server 2012

it_consultant

Has anyone else labbed up the RC?

I am testing the new Hyper-V (we are a MS virtualization shop) and I can't help but get this warm satisfied feeling in the pit of my stomach. SCVMM 2012 is outrageously better than the old version as well. I break into a wide smile every time I hear a colleague of mine talk about VMWARE licensing costs.

Paperlantern

Its on my to-do list. i have an old 2003 Server still in my home and i kinda wanna play with 2012 as a VM to act as a stand in for it and see how it does. I use VMWare though not HyperV for my hypervisor but i dont pay for it anyway, i use the free ESXi license for servers with one processor, it's just a home environment. As for work, we are still transitioning to 2008, lol, i dont see 2012 in our very near future.

kriscamaro68

I am just waiting for it to hit technet then I will be putting it on every server I have at home. We will start deploying server 2012 in a hyper-v cluster here at my work at the end of the year or beggining of next year. Right now we are setting up and migrating from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2012.

dales

I must say I've been playing with 2012 for a few weeks and I'm absolutely loving it, its so much better than anything before it. I've got a citrix exam to do but once thats out of the way I'm going to go for the 2012 exams. There are a few study resources already for the exams that I'm compiling and adding to here Windows Server 2012 training material | vhorizon .

2012 is kind of metro-y but not in a windows 8 way and to me is just a great product to play with.

ptilsen

This got me really curious, so I went through the Hyper-V feature comparison PDF.

Is there anything MS is really missing at this point the VMware isn't?

dales

There is very little to choose between the 2 really, and I think it depends upon what size your company is. It is still a given that vmware gives you higher vm density and networking is still king within vmware so hyper-v is going to struggle with anyone who is sizable enough to be using or looking at vcloud director for instance. Small/Medium sized companies who already have datacenter licences now really need a good reason not to use hyper-v especially when the likes of veeam are rolling out their industry standard apps in hyper-v flavours. vmware have always had a very comfortable lead over the likes of microsoft and citrix in the hypervisor wars but with the recession and every penny counting and the shortening of the feature gap between the hypervisors who knows.

I love vmware and think its still the best but the next 2-3 years are going to be very interesting to watch indeed in regards to server virtualization.

jibbajabba

One BIG advantage on Server 2012 is the new networking stack. On "older" systems you required proper advanced services for network cards to do things like teaming / vlan tagging .. Now the stack is handled solely by the Windows system and things such as teaming and vlan tagging is now being setup using powershell in no time - you can even team up an Intel with a Broadcom NIC and it just ........ works ...

tpatt100

Is there a cost/license benefit with Microsoft over VMware? I remember back when I used to admin Citrix it got harder and harder to justify deploying software via Citrix due to license costs.

jibbajabba

It is .. well it depends what features you are after and if you are a Windows shop and therefore get licenses via SPLA rather than retail / OEM. With vSphere 5 VMware introduced licenses which are tied to RAM / CPU allocation

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_pricing.pdf

Hyper-V comes with Windows and your limit is basically OS based ... Same with the Hyper-V only edition - you are limited by the OS only (1TB of RAM etc.) - so as a free Type 1 Hypervisor Windows wins ... but then like I say - it depends on the features (ie. System Center Requirement / vCenter requirements / live migration and the sorts)...

With Windows / Hyper-V you have the AD requirement as well - so it really is a "how long is a string" question ....

Bottom line though - with vSphere 5 and the new introduced CPU / RAM limits - it is always worth sitting down with a calculator - with vSphere 4 - VMware would probably win hands down - now it has all changed ..

it_consultant

When I look to license my Hyper-V hosts I will end up paying about $2K a box (independent of Windows Server Licensing) whereas depending on what your licensing looks like in VMWARE it could be 5-6K a box. Remember, with MS' new scheme when you buy the licenses for SCVMM (which you need to mimic the vSphere features) you ALSO get every other System Center product Microsoft produces. If you are keen on MS' endpoint security or even their data protection manager - now featuring CDP for Hyper-V - using Hyper-V could be very well worth your time.

There are subtle differences that have also been changed which make Hyper-V 2012 much more competitive. Almost every VMWARE shop I know runs some of their VM stores on NFS mounts. Provided you have a compliant CIFS provider, Hyper-V now also supports this type of mount.

A limitation on both Hyper-V 2008R2 and vSphere 5 is the size of the VM disk. It can only grow to 2 TB. You can use pass through disks, but those are really hard to deal with and severely hamper VM portability. Hyper-V 2012 supports a new VHD format (VHDX) which can grow to 64 TB. NPIV support directly to the VMs is something out storage guy is salivating over. Though, VMWARE may already support that.

Most impressive, though, is the VM replication feature which is built in to Hyper-V. As far as I know, you still need to use third party software to achieve this with VMWARE.

DevilWAH

I have been playing with in for the DHCP and IPAM functions. DHCP looks to have taken big steps. no more 80/20 split, we now have full resilent scopes across multiply servers, as well as policy based DHCP functions. Allowing you to filter on mac address and return specific options or addresses range. Seems that finally Windows is matching Linux offerings.

And the IPAM option although not sure about the interface, gives a nice over view of the address space usage.