Pro's and Cons - Hyper-V vs VMWare

[cpjitservices]

Hi all,

 

I'm just weighing up a few options at the moment as it's the time when my VMWare subscriptions come to the point of renewal.

 

Having never even used / tested/ or really looked at Hyper-V whats the benefit of using that over VMWare ?

 

In my understanding Hyper-V runs on Windows (2008 & 2012?) so what if your server becomes compromised ? Is this a risk where all my Virtual Machines could be at risk too ? By that I mean if the OS goes down does Hyper-V go with it ?

 

HOw easy is it to cluster Hyper-V servers and restore VM's in case of failure ?

 

I do have a couple of Xen / KVM / oVirt servers BUT I don't run them on my production network. At the moment I have one server running ESXI 4.1 and one running ESXI 5.5.

 

What is your opinions ? Please Discuss!

 

 

Thanks all.

[SHimmer45]

i have been looking at Hyper-V as well (been testing hyper-v server 2008 ) and so far been please with it runs nicely and is pretty straight forward getting something simple up and running, im just using local storage at the moment so havent used any of the clustering bits yet as this requires SAN/shared network space i dont have currently.

if you using hyper-v as role in Win Server if the host has a problem it can effect the guests (power outage etc)

 

i need to investigate options for backing up and restoring VM's as well heard good things about veam not sure on cost though or if there are tools which MS provide for back and recovery

[glennda]

The support for linux machines in Hyper-V is awful as far as I am away.

@SHimmer45 - If you go with the newer versions of Hyper-V I don't think you need a San to do clustering.

 

Hyper-V is simple and ok but i would still go VMware all the way.

[clodhopper]

We run three Server 2012 Datacentre in a cluster off our SAN and it just "works" run Linux & Windows guests.

 

We did look at VMWare as well just could justify the cost over HyperV that did all we needed.

[Theblacksheep]

Setup VMware before Hyper-v got acceptable and had the basic VMware features, now worth looking at.

 

I still personally prefer the lack of windows as the host OS and vCenter > SCVMM

[SHimmer45]

@Glennnda that be all the fuss about SVR2012 Storage Spaces/SMB3?

 

i read a bit about people who have two complete boxes with one for live fall over (so you pull a plug on one box and the other detects its missing) but could quite get my head around how AD would work with that as that is essentially what having multi DC's and GC's is for)

[glennda]

We run three Server 2012 Datacentre in a cluster off our SAN and it just "works" run Linux & Windows guests.

 

We did look at VMWare as well just could justify the cost over HyperV that did all we needed.

 

Yes - but only for the very latest versions - lots of companies still have legacy systems which Hyper-V doesn't play ball with well.

[clodhopper]

We're running a mixture of older CentOS 5.4 - 6.x & Ubuntu9 to 12.04 and they're all happy, even does live migration.

[SHimmer45]

@chodhopper what do you use for live migration?

[Norphy]

We have recently migrated from VMware ESXi managed by Vcenter to a HyperV cluster managed by SCVMM. VMware is undoubtedly the better product but HyperV has got to the point where we have found it's "good enough". Considering what a System Center license and a Windows Datacenter license costs, we couldn't even begin to justify the cost of VMware any more.

 

HyperV has so far proven to be fast and reliable and it was relatively easy to set up. SCVMM has its quirks and frankly I think Vcenter is a better product but as I say, it works well enough. The Linux guest support is limited but as long as you stick with Microsoft's supported distributions you'll be OK.

Edited February 3, 2014 by Norphy

[clodhopper]

@SHimmer45, just the stuff built into HyperV

[SHimmer45]

i must be missing something obvious as i have only seen the export function using the Hyper-V manager tool

[tmcd35]

@SHimmer45, added to 2012 IRC. You're looking for "Move" in the context menu's.

[sonofsanta]

Failover Clusters are easy to set up - it is quite literally an Add Feature wizard. If one host goes down, the VMs running there are booted automatically on the other host. If you are taking a host down yourself, SCVMM makes it half a dozen clicks to put a host into maintenance mode and live migrate all the running machines with no interruption.

 

I set up virtualization Summer 2011 here and it was pretty straightforward. Server 2012 has made it even better (memory dedupe for one). I suspect VMWare is still better, but for a school environment, I've never found Hyper-V lacking.

[SHimmer45]

@SHimmer45, added to 2012 IRC. You're looking for "Move" in the context menu's.

 

ahh ok only running Hyper-V Server 2008 so looks like it would be worth changing the test bed to 2012 which means having a management machine with SVR2012 or Win8 as i think they changed server manager and the older OS's cannt connect

 

apologies for the serious thread hijack

[sonofsanta]

You can live migrate in 2008R2 without SCVMM - open Server Manager on one of your hosts and expand Features, expand Failover Clustering, expand your cluster, select Services and applications, right click a VM you want to transfer and Live Migrate... is the fifth option down.

[SHimmer45]

will give it a go when i attempt to do any clustering

[tmcd35]

@sonofsanta, That relys on having a failover cluster which, in 2008R2, means a SAN. Support for Cluster Shared Volumes was (officially) added with 2012. The 2012 live migration doesn't require any shared storage at all, the VHD's are copied between servers local storage.

[sonofsanta]

@sonofsanta, That relys on having a failover cluster which, in 2008R2, means a SAN. Support for Cluster Shared Volumes was (officially) added with 2012. The 2012 live migration doesn't require any shared storage at all, the VHD's are copied between servers local storage.

 

Ah, fair play - misunderstood. I was playing with a SAN when I first started playing.

[tmcd35]

Speaking of comparisons, this is one area where I think VMWare has the edge. I found clustering much easier to setup in ESX. Servers shared the same LUN(s) on the SAN and checked each others heartbeat. Most magical thing I've ever seen was a blade being removed from a server cluster and all the running VM's automagically relocating themselves.

 

Not been able to set this up in Hyper-V due to constraints impossed by our current set up. Think I need to convince the boss to splash £10k on a new storage server...

 

But, yep, Hyper-V pretty much does everything (all the important stuff) and is included in the price of Windows Datacenter (which you'll need anyway).

 

Not done the research in a while, but what are the current limitations of the free ESXi product?

[glennda]

 

Not done the research in a while, but what are the current limitations of the free ESXi product?

 

320 physical CPUs per host (160 in ESXi 5.1)

4 TB of Memory (2 TB in ESXi 5.1)

16 NUMA Nodes (8 in ESXi 5.1)

4096 vCPUs can be allocated to VMs (2048 in ESXi 5.1) EDIT: The free limit is 8VCPU per vm

 

You obviously don't get any clustering features - or the ability to live migrate (as you need VCenter)

 

Also with Free ESXI you cannot use Veeam.

Edited February 3, 2014 by glennda

[tmcd35]

 

You obviously don't get any clustering features - or the ability to live migrate (as you need VCenter)

 

This is the bit I was looking for. Curiosity got the better of me, just looked over VMWares website. Accepting edu discount is probably available - just shy of £2k for vCenter Foundation (up to 3 host servers). I must say, at that price I'd stick with Hyper-V whic gives clustering and live migration without the need to buy SCVMM.

[glennda]

This is the bit I was looking for. Curiosity got the better of me, just looked over VMWares website. Accepting edu discount is probably available - just shy of £2k for vCenter Foundation (up to 3 host servers). I must say, at that price I'd stick with Hyper-V whic gives clustering and live migration without the need to buy SCVMM.

 

VMware Essentials plus is what most of my small clients work with is yes around 1.5/2k (cheaper for edu) which gives you the majority of required features. My Larger client use VMware Standard and Enterprise.

 

Most of my clients are not schools though now

[rich_tech]

I use Hyper-V on 2x Windows 2012 DataCentre Hosts (Proliant DL380 Gen8) here (v. decent specced) and the servers are hosted on a HP P2000 MSA iSCSI SAN, the OS we used largely because its within our EES Agreement, so was included within the costs minimally with what we were already paying when we looked at the others (I think there was a slight increase for the Datacentre Licenses for the hosts), vmware is great and I have used their free versions several times in the past its very polished, but the costs were too prohibitive for us when we looked at that, same with Xenserver for the HA/Failover stuff it ramped up the costs.

 

Initially it took me a while to setup primarily as it was a large virtualisation project we undertook here and I have not set anything up like this before on this scale - it took me about about 3 weeks in total on and off(because I am the sole technical person at the site here dealing with staff hardware issues, Gareth the NM does the more web-related and purchasing related stuff and as a teacher that is his primary role in the school, so I was doing this whenever I had no calls on our site) and I had to tear it down and restart it once because of issues with MPIO initially, though this was solved through building the two hosts up from the base OS and updating them as much as possible until they were equal before doing any of the Hyper-V building.

 

We have it setup as a 2-Node Cluster with a SAN and it runs with failover and High availability of the VMs on there, we currently back it up with the Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0 Free Suite, we have the servers split over 2 UPS also to prevent any massive problems with outages.

 

It was quite fiddly to setup initially I found because we were "bleeding edge" at the time (2012 had not long been out then) and I am in the middle of creating a rather tomelike blog post to cover the steps and stages I carried out when making the cluster because of the fact that we were using a newly released 2012 and most books were out of date we could find or referred to the BETA and features which got changed for the live, but once it validated itself it was all really simple from that point onwards.

 

As for it being live here now:-

 

We dont at this time run SCCM or any of that suite, ours is a standalone hyper-v cluster with failover and high availibilty configured. The priorities for the machines are all setup and their specs and things like RAM management, with load spread over both of the hosts, we don't have one dedicated offline host setup here

 

We currently host all our non-LEA in-house servers on it, its an ongoing process of virtualising our existing RM servers onto our platform, so far we have our PCounter Print Server/Exam Server/Spiceworks/WSUS/SuccessMaker Enterprise servers on the platform and we are in the process of migrating our MDT server over and our VM servers are setup with failover and high availability, if you reboot a host for any reason, it auto drains them to the other host without any loss of service so all of that technology works fully as intended from what I have seen, Hyper-V has come on massive leaps and bounds since its initial creation I reckon

 

We use VEEAM for backing up to one of our older servers on site and then to our NAS box (we use the free product which works fine for backing up and restoring VMs, but with the automation cut out of it basically), I manually run the backups on the machines when needed because nothing major is kept on the machines at present and changes dont happen massively on the machines when their running.

 

When we have had to use the restore because of issues with our Print Server(to us a major thing we host which attracts complaints if it goes down) a while back and an issue with a UPS failure and a host, that worked absolutely painlessly and the server was restored in about 3 minutes total, it even helps you migrate the server to another non-clustered host if needs be, as a product veeam is brilliant, but I will say that they have announced changes to their licensing which will possibly make the product more expensive for the paid versions in the coming months.

 

I have recently trialled the setting up of an Ubuntu server onto our box (looking at Minecraft Edu) and it works well with minimal fuss on the platform, so the Linux side of it has improved quite drastically as well, no horror screens not displaying properly like before that I have found.

[the_dude]

Hyperv has come a long way. I think the biggest pro is the cost. The clustering is fairly straightforward, see this link for info:

 

Implementing Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Failover Clustering | MS Server Pro

 

VMM will manage live migrations, but disappointingly P2V operations have been removed from R2.