comparison
Content
Hyper-V versus VMware - Pricing If you already have a Windows Server 2008 OS platform, you can download Hyper-V Server at no cost. The only cost is for the System Center management framework. Microsoft includes management of physical and virtual environments along with Hyper-V and VMware. Hyper-V provides you with migration capabilities: Live Migration is included in Windows Server 2008 R2 at no extra charge. We are using it and can attest to R2's robustness. With VMware, VMotion in both Foundation and Standard editions, there is an additional charge if you want to add migration capabilities. Take a look at the following table, you will see side-by-side the cost comparison of Hyper-V vs VMware. All of VMware feature comparisons use Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise and most of its pricing comparisons use Virtual Infrastructure Foundation. Costs are for five physical servers.
We've made the assumption that you've already paid for the host server OS in this comparison.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Existing OS Microsoft Hyper-V Server System Center Management Suite Enterprise + 2-year SA System Center Ops Mgr Server System Center Configuration Manager System Center Data Protection Manager Server Total VMware ESXi with Existing OS Existing operating system vCenter + 2-year SA 2 processer infrastructure Enterprise License + 2-year SA
5 Servers $0 7,520 581 580 581 $9,262 5 Servers $0 7,318 42,125
Total
$49,443
Hyper-V R2 versus VMware - Feature Comparison The following chart compares VMware Enterprise core features with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (r2) and System Center Management core features. VMware VI Enterprise ESX/ESXi Virtual Center None VCB (proxy only) Virtual Center VMotion Yes Yes None DRS None None Microsoft WS08 Hyper-V R2/SMSE Hyper-V SMSE (VMM) SMSE (VMM) SMSE (DPM) WS08 Clustering Live Migration Not yet SMSE (SCCM) SMSE (Ops Mgr) SMSE (PRO) SMSE (PRO) SMSE
Feature Bare-metal hypervisor Centralized hypervisor management VMware and Microsoft management VM backup VM High availability/failover VM migration Storage VMotion Guest OS patching/management End-to-end OS monitoring Host/VM level optimization Application/service monitoring Integrated physical and virtual management
VMI: VMware Infrastructure WS08: Windows Server 2008 R2 VCB: VMware Consolidated Backup SMSE: System Center Server Management Suite VMM: Virtual Machine Manager DPM: Data Protection Manager
Notes: With Microsoft, virtualization with Hyper-V was built into Windows Server 2008. For heavy Microsoft shops, this means tighter integration with your existing infrastructure and management tools. Since Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008, your IT staff will use it seamlessly because they are familiar with the Windows look-andfeel. Fewer virtual machines, in some situations, can be run on Hyper-V than you can on ESX Server, but Hyper-V is based on Windows Server 2008 and because of that you can run these machines on pretty well any hardware configuration, any hardware configuration that is designed to support Windows. You can only run VMware on maybe dozens or fewer number of server configurations than you can run Windows. That means that Hyper-V can be run on hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of configurations whereas because ESX Server, VMware is a more limited product because of that. One thing that Microsoft has done very well is that they have tried to add as many management tools for virtualization as possible and of course, the market leader in terms of virtualization management tools is VMware. Microsoft has almost as many tools as VMware in terms of virtualization management. Microsoft, by the way, just upgraded the number of cores that you can run with Hyper-V by releasing support for Intel¶s new 6-core processors, so that means you can now run up to 24 cores.
Microsoft supports a limited number of Linux distributions (today SUSE), so keep that in mind. If you have a wider number of platforms to support, VMware ESX is your choice. Hyper-V lets you manage virtual and physical environments and uses common deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and backup methodologies across both. VMware¶s answer to management is to use Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise and Virtual Center, but even these tools won't allow to manage multiple hypervisors, physical resources or applications. You may also want see how Hyper-V compares to Xen.
Pricing This can really be misleading as for Microsoft Windows Hyper-V you still have to pay for the host operating system (Windows 2008), which is for some versions almost the equivalent of what you would pay for VMware 3.5. So if your virtual machines are not running windows 2008 and if you don't benefit of the special licensing offered by Microsoft for running several Windows version in a virtualized environment then people should look at the cost of Windows 2008 as the cost of Microsoft Windows Hyper-V. Anyway, if your guest are not Windows then the cost of windows 2008 is obviously only for the hypervisor which does not seems to us being free!! MS Hyper-V Server 2008 has been released as a separate media which will provided a lightened version of Hyper-V which can be obtained totally free, though this is the equivalent of VMware ESXi which VMware started to distribute for free as well. This comparison is not covering these two products for that check out VMware ESXivs Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.. Another important side of the cost of Hyper-V Virtualization Solution & VMware virtualization which usually get ignored is the management application cost. VMware has Virtual Center for one fixed cost of $4000 and can manage unlimited hosts, where with MS to get the same functionality you will need to get System Center Management Suite Enterprise which cost about $1000 per host. So the management cost will depend on how many servers your virtualization infrastructure will have. It can go quite heavy with hyper-V. In addition, in VMware VI3 you can run more virtual machines on the same specs machine as VMware offer memory over commitment and waste less resource than Microsoft Hyper-V solution in most cases. In many cases that it self will make up for the cost differences. Don't let the initial price fool you. I have seen many scenarios where the cost per VM in VMware got to be lower than Hyper-V. If you are getting one thing of the cost comparison then let it be to do a TCO study of the solution you are going for instead of just the initial cost. Make sure you calculate the management tools & maintenance of the solutions you are deciding on as these are going to be your real cost
Production Environment MS Hyper-V has just been out of beta for less than a year, and its main management tool SCVMM has been released for just a bit more than a month now. So it is not yet running in many production environments, though many testing and development environment have already adopted it. Though that might change in the future if it proves stability.
In the other site VMware have been mature enough for production environment for a while. It has been used by most of the fortune 100 companies in production. That prove readiness of VMware Virtual Infrastructure. It will take time for MS to prove the same. Infra v3:bare metal Windows 2008 x64 Standard/Enterprise /Datacenter Editions VMware bare-metal & Small footprint installation harden the security of its product and make it independent of any operating system security risks and breaches unlike the Microsoft Hyper-V which unfortunately still affected by the (Domain 0) OS (Windows 2008) bugs, viruses, and security breaches even if only windows 2008 server core is running. In addition, not using underlying OS make it more resource efficient although Hyper-V is using hypervisor technology equivalent to Xen which make it a lot faster than its previous virtualization product Virtual Server 2005, still got lot more constrains when compared to VI3 Infrastructure specially when it come to Linux and Legacy windows systems. Virtual Center 2.5 Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been just released around a month ago, which put it right in the testing age. Though it offered a quite good manageability and being able to manage VMware VI3 & MS Virtual server is a plus if MS can keep up with that. As with our last test VMware VI3 3.5U3 was not supported yet & plenty of the features VMware VI3 gain from Virtual Centercan not be delivered by SCVMM 2008. The keep up is not going to be easy, but I have to give credit for trying. VMware Virtual Center 2.5 has been the leading virtualization management software for a while, and implemented in many environments which prove its stability. It enhances the VMware VI3 with advanced features that Microsoft still does not match, which are discussed further in this comparison. Though Virtual Center only can manage VMware VI3 & VMware is not trying to manage other virtualization products from their interface as they believe in their superiority & spread in the market. Support resources Microsoft might have more support resources than VMware, but not when it comes to virtualization, though they are investing into that direction. Its obvious that VMware has production support for many more OS than Microsoft. Actually supported guest operating systems in Microsoft Windows Hyper-V is very limited. In addition, not all supported OSs on Hyper-V will run with optimal speed on it. This is due to Hyper-V need for the virtualized OS to understand its running in a virtual environment to perform well on Hyper-V, which is not even the case with windows 2003. Its obvious at the moment that Hyper-V still lagging on Linux support, where VMware support running most version of Linux without the need to modify it, Hyper-V still only officially support SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 SP1/SP2 at the moment. Other Linux versions that have ParavirtualizedXenKernal should run at the moment, but still not officially supported. Even with the limited version of Linux being supported by MS Hyper-V it still not that easy to setup. To illustrate the required steps to setup Linux on Hyper-V read below:
Microsoft Hyper-V provides Integration Components for Linux OSes, It would been acceptable if the Integration Component for Linux OSes were straight forward to setup but it require many complicated steps and what worse you have to do the same steps over and over again for every Linux virtual machine including the following:
1- Manual installation of Xen Kernel.
2- Excute a seperate script that modifies the Linux bootloader configuration to allow the use of Microsoft Hypercall adapter.
3- Run a perl script to install the Integration tools and paravirtualizeddrivers.
Note: If you want to see a full step by step of how SUSE is install on Hyper-V look at SUSE Installation on Hyper V at Virtualization Team Blog Its clear that setting up Linux on VMware is way easier and cleaner than Hyper-V at the moment, but Microsoft might change that with future releases. Further More, Hyper-V still does not support the 2nd generation of Paravirtualization for Linux (paravirt_ops / VMI (Virtual Machine Interface)). Method used to support Paravirtualization with Linux in hyper-V increase the maintenance of Linux OS as the administrators will have to keep up with two kind of kernels for virtualized & Physical servers. In addition, they have to recompile their Linux kernel in order for it to work. In the other hand, VMware are already offering support for paravirt. Performance The performance advantage of VMware is related directly with its smaller foot print than Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V. This is an obvious advantage of MS Windows Hyper-v over MS Virtual server which did not support any 64-bit guest OS, but still lag behind VMware on this one as well. Dependant on the NIC manufacture. Its a great features that VMware came up with and Microsoft still can't match. Although many assume some of the Hyper-V features match these of VMware, you can see the differences illustrated below:
VMotionvs Quick Migration:
VMware VMotion is real Live migration where Quick Migration is nothing more than host based clustering. It has more requirements on the host side as it have to support windows 2008 clustering requirements and not as easy as VMotion to setup. In addition, Hyper-V Quick Migration require a downtime enough to get the machine to save state then shift the LUN group owner then bring back the machine to running state. This downtime may vary depending on the speed of the SAN, size and usage of the virtual machine a good sample of this downtime can be found at Hyper V Quick Migration Downtime. In the other side, VMware VMotion requires a zero downtime which can be a major advantage for environment which does not tolerate downtime. Even Microsoft clearly know the differences and announced that they have delayed theLive migration feature to a future release.
For Quick Migration to do the job you will need to have a separate LUN per Virtual Machine which can be a burden on the storage & more work for the SAN administrators. This is not required by VMware VMotion as VMware is using a cluster file system called VMFS.
HA vs Host Clustering:
Windows host clustering is harder & had more requirements to setup than VMware HA, but it can do the job.
Windows host clustering will failover all virtual machines installed on the same LUN in case of a failover, which is not the case in VMware. Again this is an advantage of a cluster file system which Microsoft still does not offer.
DRS vs NLB:
Network load balancing is nothing new, and it only work on the network layer. It distribute the network load equally between the virtual machines only depending on the traffic load on them not on how they are utilized. In addition, it require you to run several virtual machines with OS which support NLB and configure NLB for each of them depending on the configuration required for that OS which can be complex for some OSes. They does not come even near what VMware offer with
DRS which distribute the load of the virtual machines dynamically and can shift Live virtual machines between different hosts as required to obtain best performance based on setting and configuration controlled by the administrator. In addition, VMware support NLB for its virtual machines, but it did not limit its capability to that.
Storage VMotion:
SVMotion is a new feature of VMware VI3 where the entire disk files of a virtual machine can be moved from one storage array to another without affecting the operation of that Virtual Machine. This mean VMware VI3 users can avoid downtime for their virtual machines when they need to carry a storage maintenance. It means as well they can easily upgrade or move to a new storage without the need for a down time. This feature has no equivalent in MS Hyper-V at the moment, which mean downtime for storage maintenance can't be avoided.
Cluster File System:
VMware VMFS is a cluster file system, which give vmwareESXi a great flexibility & a key factor in most of the advance features VMware offer. In the other hand, Hyper-V Server 2008 still use the same non cluster File System Windows use NTFS which make it lag in functionality behind VMware.
NIC Teaming:
VMware offers a network card independent NIC Teaming, where Hyper-V is dependent on the network cards teaming driver & Software offered by the network card vendor. Virtual Machine support SCSI disk Boot MS Windows Hyper-V still does not support booting virtual Machine from Virtual SCSI disk. It only support it from Virtual IDE disk which will highly slow the performance of these virtual machines. It is not clear yet if upcoming upgrade of Hyper-V will support booting virtual machines from virtual SCSI disk as no announcement on that have been made. If MS does not come up with boot from virtual SCSI then they are risking their product of a very bad performance lag behind VMware which has that capability. Online Backup VMware VCB Is a great backup advantage as you can with it take live backup (image) of running virtual machines without affecting the performance of the host neither the virtual machines
performance, where with MS Hyper-V that still seems to depend on the host capabilities using the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to enable you to take Live Backups of running virtual machines in terms of snapshots, but still affect the Hyper-V Host performance while the backup is running. Max virtual Machine Specs Although Microsoft has been good in keeping up with numbers for marketing, still VMware can offer a better specs virtual machines for most Operating systems beside windows 2008. At the moment, 4 virtual CPUs are only recommended on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. Its not even recommended to use more than one virtual CPUs with most other OSes at the moment, but this hopefully would be resolved in the next release. The following quote is directly from Microsoft Hyper-V Beta release note:
==============From MS Hyper-V release note Begin============
Configure the virtual machines as follows:
For the guest operating system, install one of the following:
Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta, with a maximum of 4 virtual processors. No other release of Windows Server 2008 is supported with this release of Hyper-V.
The Windows Server 2003 operating system, with a maximum of 1 virtual processor. You can install either a 32-bit version or an x64-based version."
=============From MS Hyper-V release note End===============
- Although the above quote is quoted from the beta release note, it still highly recommended to follow it to get a better stability of the virtual machines hosted on hyper-v.
Special Hardware Requirement It seems Microsoft has forgotten again that many companies have some older hardware that does not run 64-bit and would like to virtualizes their environment. MS Hyper-V force companies to obtain a newer more expensive hardware to be able to virtualize. VMware still have a supported list of hardware, but most well-known vendors servers are supported even the old ones.
We've made the assumption that you've already paid for the host server OS in this comparison.
Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Existing OS Microsoft Hyper-V Server System Center Management Suite Enterprise + 2-year SA System Center Ops Mgr Server System Center Configuration Manager System Center Data Protection Manager Server Total VMware ESXi with Existing OS Existing operating system vCenter + 2-year SA 2 processer infrastructure Enterprise License + 2-year SA
5 Servers $0 7,520 581 580 581 $9,262 5 Servers $0 7,318 42,125
Total
$49,443
Hyper-V R2 versus VMware - Feature Comparison The following chart compares VMware Enterprise core features with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V (r2) and System Center Management core features. VMware VI Enterprise ESX/ESXi Virtual Center None VCB (proxy only) Virtual Center VMotion Yes Yes None DRS None None Microsoft WS08 Hyper-V R2/SMSE Hyper-V SMSE (VMM) SMSE (VMM) SMSE (DPM) WS08 Clustering Live Migration Not yet SMSE (SCCM) SMSE (Ops Mgr) SMSE (PRO) SMSE (PRO) SMSE
Feature Bare-metal hypervisor Centralized hypervisor management VMware and Microsoft management VM backup VM High availability/failover VM migration Storage VMotion Guest OS patching/management End-to-end OS monitoring Host/VM level optimization Application/service monitoring Integrated physical and virtual management
VMI: VMware Infrastructure WS08: Windows Server 2008 R2 VCB: VMware Consolidated Backup SMSE: System Center Server Management Suite VMM: Virtual Machine Manager DPM: Data Protection Manager
Notes: With Microsoft, virtualization with Hyper-V was built into Windows Server 2008. For heavy Microsoft shops, this means tighter integration with your existing infrastructure and management tools. Since Hyper-V is part of Windows Server 2008, your IT staff will use it seamlessly because they are familiar with the Windows look-andfeel. Fewer virtual machines, in some situations, can be run on Hyper-V than you can on ESX Server, but Hyper-V is based on Windows Server 2008 and because of that you can run these machines on pretty well any hardware configuration, any hardware configuration that is designed to support Windows. You can only run VMware on maybe dozens or fewer number of server configurations than you can run Windows. That means that Hyper-V can be run on hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of configurations whereas because ESX Server, VMware is a more limited product because of that. One thing that Microsoft has done very well is that they have tried to add as many management tools for virtualization as possible and of course, the market leader in terms of virtualization management tools is VMware. Microsoft has almost as many tools as VMware in terms of virtualization management. Microsoft, by the way, just upgraded the number of cores that you can run with Hyper-V by releasing support for Intel¶s new 6-core processors, so that means you can now run up to 24 cores.
Microsoft supports a limited number of Linux distributions (today SUSE), so keep that in mind. If you have a wider number of platforms to support, VMware ESX is your choice. Hyper-V lets you manage virtual and physical environments and uses common deployment, provisioning, monitoring, and backup methodologies across both. VMware¶s answer to management is to use Virtual Infrastructure Enterprise and Virtual Center, but even these tools won't allow to manage multiple hypervisors, physical resources or applications. You may also want see how Hyper-V compares to Xen.
Pricing This can really be misleading as for Microsoft Windows Hyper-V you still have to pay for the host operating system (Windows 2008), which is for some versions almost the equivalent of what you would pay for VMware 3.5. So if your virtual machines are not running windows 2008 and if you don't benefit of the special licensing offered by Microsoft for running several Windows version in a virtualized environment then people should look at the cost of Windows 2008 as the cost of Microsoft Windows Hyper-V. Anyway, if your guest are not Windows then the cost of windows 2008 is obviously only for the hypervisor which does not seems to us being free!! MS Hyper-V Server 2008 has been released as a separate media which will provided a lightened version of Hyper-V which can be obtained totally free, though this is the equivalent of VMware ESXi which VMware started to distribute for free as well. This comparison is not covering these two products for that check out VMware ESXivs Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008.. Another important side of the cost of Hyper-V Virtualization Solution & VMware virtualization which usually get ignored is the management application cost. VMware has Virtual Center for one fixed cost of $4000 and can manage unlimited hosts, where with MS to get the same functionality you will need to get System Center Management Suite Enterprise which cost about $1000 per host. So the management cost will depend on how many servers your virtualization infrastructure will have. It can go quite heavy with hyper-V. In addition, in VMware VI3 you can run more virtual machines on the same specs machine as VMware offer memory over commitment and waste less resource than Microsoft Hyper-V solution in most cases. In many cases that it self will make up for the cost differences. Don't let the initial price fool you. I have seen many scenarios where the cost per VM in VMware got to be lower than Hyper-V. If you are getting one thing of the cost comparison then let it be to do a TCO study of the solution you are going for instead of just the initial cost. Make sure you calculate the management tools & maintenance of the solutions you are deciding on as these are going to be your real cost
Production Environment MS Hyper-V has just been out of beta for less than a year, and its main management tool SCVMM has been released for just a bit more than a month now. So it is not yet running in many production environments, though many testing and development environment have already adopted it. Though that might change in the future if it proves stability.
In the other site VMware have been mature enough for production environment for a while. It has been used by most of the fortune 100 companies in production. That prove readiness of VMware Virtual Infrastructure. It will take time for MS to prove the same. Infra v3:bare metal Windows 2008 x64 Standard/Enterprise /Datacenter Editions VMware bare-metal & Small footprint installation harden the security of its product and make it independent of any operating system security risks and breaches unlike the Microsoft Hyper-V which unfortunately still affected by the (Domain 0) OS (Windows 2008) bugs, viruses, and security breaches even if only windows 2008 server core is running. In addition, not using underlying OS make it more resource efficient although Hyper-V is using hypervisor technology equivalent to Xen which make it a lot faster than its previous virtualization product Virtual Server 2005, still got lot more constrains when compared to VI3 Infrastructure specially when it come to Linux and Legacy windows systems. Virtual Center 2.5 Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 has been just released around a month ago, which put it right in the testing age. Though it offered a quite good manageability and being able to manage VMware VI3 & MS Virtual server is a plus if MS can keep up with that. As with our last test VMware VI3 3.5U3 was not supported yet & plenty of the features VMware VI3 gain from Virtual Centercan not be delivered by SCVMM 2008. The keep up is not going to be easy, but I have to give credit for trying. VMware Virtual Center 2.5 has been the leading virtualization management software for a while, and implemented in many environments which prove its stability. It enhances the VMware VI3 with advanced features that Microsoft still does not match, which are discussed further in this comparison. Though Virtual Center only can manage VMware VI3 & VMware is not trying to manage other virtualization products from their interface as they believe in their superiority & spread in the market. Support resources Microsoft might have more support resources than VMware, but not when it comes to virtualization, though they are investing into that direction. Its obvious that VMware has production support for many more OS than Microsoft. Actually supported guest operating systems in Microsoft Windows Hyper-V is very limited. In addition, not all supported OSs on Hyper-V will run with optimal speed on it. This is due to Hyper-V need for the virtualized OS to understand its running in a virtual environment to perform well on Hyper-V, which is not even the case with windows 2003. Its obvious at the moment that Hyper-V still lagging on Linux support, where VMware support running most version of Linux without the need to modify it, Hyper-V still only officially support SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 SP1/SP2 at the moment. Other Linux versions that have ParavirtualizedXenKernal should run at the moment, but still not officially supported. Even with the limited version of Linux being supported by MS Hyper-V it still not that easy to setup. To illustrate the required steps to setup Linux on Hyper-V read below:
Microsoft Hyper-V provides Integration Components for Linux OSes, It would been acceptable if the Integration Component for Linux OSes were straight forward to setup but it require many complicated steps and what worse you have to do the same steps over and over again for every Linux virtual machine including the following:
1- Manual installation of Xen Kernel.
2- Excute a seperate script that modifies the Linux bootloader configuration to allow the use of Microsoft Hypercall adapter.
3- Run a perl script to install the Integration tools and paravirtualizeddrivers.
Note: If you want to see a full step by step of how SUSE is install on Hyper-V look at SUSE Installation on Hyper V at Virtualization Team Blog Its clear that setting up Linux on VMware is way easier and cleaner than Hyper-V at the moment, but Microsoft might change that with future releases. Further More, Hyper-V still does not support the 2nd generation of Paravirtualization for Linux (paravirt_ops / VMI (Virtual Machine Interface)). Method used to support Paravirtualization with Linux in hyper-V increase the maintenance of Linux OS as the administrators will have to keep up with two kind of kernels for virtualized & Physical servers. In addition, they have to recompile their Linux kernel in order for it to work. In the other hand, VMware are already offering support for paravirt. Performance The performance advantage of VMware is related directly with its smaller foot print than Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V. This is an obvious advantage of MS Windows Hyper-v over MS Virtual server which did not support any 64-bit guest OS, but still lag behind VMware on this one as well. Dependant on the NIC manufacture. Its a great features that VMware came up with and Microsoft still can't match. Although many assume some of the Hyper-V features match these of VMware, you can see the differences illustrated below:
VMotionvs Quick Migration:
VMware VMotion is real Live migration where Quick Migration is nothing more than host based clustering. It has more requirements on the host side as it have to support windows 2008 clustering requirements and not as easy as VMotion to setup. In addition, Hyper-V Quick Migration require a downtime enough to get the machine to save state then shift the LUN group owner then bring back the machine to running state. This downtime may vary depending on the speed of the SAN, size and usage of the virtual machine a good sample of this downtime can be found at Hyper V Quick Migration Downtime. In the other side, VMware VMotion requires a zero downtime which can be a major advantage for environment which does not tolerate downtime. Even Microsoft clearly know the differences and announced that they have delayed theLive migration feature to a future release.
For Quick Migration to do the job you will need to have a separate LUN per Virtual Machine which can be a burden on the storage & more work for the SAN administrators. This is not required by VMware VMotion as VMware is using a cluster file system called VMFS.
HA vs Host Clustering:
Windows host clustering is harder & had more requirements to setup than VMware HA, but it can do the job.
Windows host clustering will failover all virtual machines installed on the same LUN in case of a failover, which is not the case in VMware. Again this is an advantage of a cluster file system which Microsoft still does not offer.
DRS vs NLB:
Network load balancing is nothing new, and it only work on the network layer. It distribute the network load equally between the virtual machines only depending on the traffic load on them not on how they are utilized. In addition, it require you to run several virtual machines with OS which support NLB and configure NLB for each of them depending on the configuration required for that OS which can be complex for some OSes. They does not come even near what VMware offer with
DRS which distribute the load of the virtual machines dynamically and can shift Live virtual machines between different hosts as required to obtain best performance based on setting and configuration controlled by the administrator. In addition, VMware support NLB for its virtual machines, but it did not limit its capability to that.
Storage VMotion:
SVMotion is a new feature of VMware VI3 where the entire disk files of a virtual machine can be moved from one storage array to another without affecting the operation of that Virtual Machine. This mean VMware VI3 users can avoid downtime for their virtual machines when they need to carry a storage maintenance. It means as well they can easily upgrade or move to a new storage without the need for a down time. This feature has no equivalent in MS Hyper-V at the moment, which mean downtime for storage maintenance can't be avoided.
Cluster File System:
VMware VMFS is a cluster file system, which give vmwareESXi a great flexibility & a key factor in most of the advance features VMware offer. In the other hand, Hyper-V Server 2008 still use the same non cluster File System Windows use NTFS which make it lag in functionality behind VMware.
NIC Teaming:
VMware offers a network card independent NIC Teaming, where Hyper-V is dependent on the network cards teaming driver & Software offered by the network card vendor. Virtual Machine support SCSI disk Boot MS Windows Hyper-V still does not support booting virtual Machine from Virtual SCSI disk. It only support it from Virtual IDE disk which will highly slow the performance of these virtual machines. It is not clear yet if upcoming upgrade of Hyper-V will support booting virtual machines from virtual SCSI disk as no announcement on that have been made. If MS does not come up with boot from virtual SCSI then they are risking their product of a very bad performance lag behind VMware which has that capability. Online Backup VMware VCB Is a great backup advantage as you can with it take live backup (image) of running virtual machines without affecting the performance of the host neither the virtual machines
performance, where with MS Hyper-V that still seems to depend on the host capabilities using the Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) to enable you to take Live Backups of running virtual machines in terms of snapshots, but still affect the Hyper-V Host performance while the backup is running. Max virtual Machine Specs Although Microsoft has been good in keeping up with numbers for marketing, still VMware can offer a better specs virtual machines for most Operating systems beside windows 2008. At the moment, 4 virtual CPUs are only recommended on Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. Its not even recommended to use more than one virtual CPUs with most other OSes at the moment, but this hopefully would be resolved in the next release. The following quote is directly from Microsoft Hyper-V Beta release note:
==============From MS Hyper-V release note Begin============
Configure the virtual machines as follows:
For the guest operating system, install one of the following:
Windows Server 2008 RC1 with Hyper-V Beta, with a maximum of 4 virtual processors. No other release of Windows Server 2008 is supported with this release of Hyper-V.
The Windows Server 2003 operating system, with a maximum of 1 virtual processor. You can install either a 32-bit version or an x64-based version."
=============From MS Hyper-V release note End===============
- Although the above quote is quoted from the beta release note, it still highly recommended to follow it to get a better stability of the virtual machines hosted on hyper-v.
Special Hardware Requirement It seems Microsoft has forgotten again that many companies have some older hardware that does not run 64-bit and would like to virtualizes their environment. MS Hyper-V force companies to obtain a newer more expensive hardware to be able to virtualize. VMware still have a supported list of hardware, but most well-known vendors servers are supported even the old ones.
