Pro's and Cons - Hyper-V vs VMWare

[PotNoodleTech]

I'd like to try HyperV in anger - I was going to use HyperV on our RDP server estate but as I'm phasing that out now there's no point.

 

Been using VMWare for so long now that it just seems unnatural to use anything else!

 

VMWare is SO mature and reliable, so fast and has such a small footprint, I’ve had physical servers with 362 day uptimes, only brought down to actually check they booted back up again OK from cold!

 

HyperV has come a long way - but it is still playing catch up and IMHO still has a fair way to go to be as tried and tested, fast and slick as VMWare. Yes licencing is cheaper... but when your trusting your entire server estate and the uptime of your entire network to it, licencing costs don't play such an important roll for me. It's not as if VMWare is excessive, ~£500 for Essentials or £1500 for Essentials Plus to cover 3 x Dual CPU physical hosts - all most schools would ever need!

[caffrey]

I'm playing with both over the half term, I liked hyper-v but ESXi has it for me as it boots off a usb stick inside the server leaving me with the disks for the datastore.

Came to the conclusion they basically both do the same job and the free version of EXSi is more than enough for me for now

[m25man]

I don't think anyone will argue that VMWare is the most mature of the big two Hypervisors but combined with Microsofts huge Edu Licensing discounts every school I've worked with bar one chose Hyper-V on cost.

The one that didn't failed to buy into the VMWare ongoing maintenance and licensing plan.

This resulted in issues with VMWare, being unable to access updates and features and the system fell into a state of disrepair and problems.

 

They have now switched to Hyper-V as it was a zero cost option.

 

I think that the current VMWare Edu packages are very well priced but faced with ever deepening cuts finance is a big issue and for that reason alone I see more Hyper-V deployments in the next few years.

[mrtechsystems]

Just wanted to say thanks guys for the information interesting subject and plenty of info to digest

[Roberto]

As @Norphy said, we switched from VMware to HyperV in the 2013 summer break. At the same time we updated the virtual host hardware in one of our two virtual server farms.

 

We had 9 virtual hosts in total between the two farms, moved to 7 in total (with higher processor density) and the fact is that it cost us substantially less to buy SCVMM than it did to renew the support on the licences we already had from VMware (we had windows datacentre licences either way...). As much as Vsphere might be the better product overall I can't ignore that kind of price saving now that hyperv is 'good enough'.