Vmware or Hyper V

[MikeGreen]

Morning All,

 

I am a network manager of a large academy and we are about to embark on a big project. We are planning to move away from our RM CC4 network to a vanilla solution. We already have our server virtualisation in place and we use VMware. However I have spoken to a lot of people who are recommending moving to Hyper V. We are trying to decrease our IT Spend where we can so we can put investment in to our ageing PC's so from this point of view it makes sense as we would have under a year left on our VMware subscription at the switch over. My knowledge on the ESXI platform is also not great where as Hyper V is just another windows server. Saying that VMware is already in place and works, we have an IT provider who also recommends Hyper V and they would also change our virtual platform as part of the scope of work if I wanted them to. Has anyone moved from VMware to Hyper V and regretted it? I have tried to make a list of pro's and cons but the issue is I don't have enough exposure to the virtualisation world and have only used one of the 2 products.

 

Cheers

[Oaktech]

VMware every time, if only to remove the temptation to install something important on the host OS, also for freeing you from having to reboot the whole shooting match every wednesday after the inevitable gazillion windows updates on patch tuesday. I find ESXI to be pretty intuitive.

 

I've come from a VMware environment into a hyperv setup and I'm going to be converting to VMware as soon as the opportunity presents.

[pantscat]

Personally I prefer VMware it just makes more sense to me, but I guess that's because I've been working with it for the last 3-ish years.

 

You could definitely reduce your costs by moving to Hyper-V and these days I can't really think of any particular feature that you would miss. Moving to Hyper-V is also fairly straightforward, there are quite a few tools that'll help you do V2V conversions of existing VMware VMs.

 

In your position I'd setup a lab with Hyper-V and familiarise myself with it. You've not really got anything to lose.

[3s-gtech]

I have both in full production. My ESXi servers are used for older, Select licensed servers (and a 2012 R2 DC so it's virtualised off-domain in case of disaster!) and Linux VMs. My Hyper-V servers are for my EES licensed servers under the Datacentre licensing. Moving servers between the two is straightforward (even though we use ESXi Free) using Disk2VHD and other tools (MS released a standalone tool to pull straight from Vsphere into Hyper-V which looks ace).

 

I love both platforms. ESXi is so easy to manage, move things around, and all run from a USB stick off the drive arrays. Hyper-V is so cheap on EES, simplicity itself to move VMs between hosts, and so amazingly quick to learn.

 

for freeing you from having to reboot the whole shooting match every wednesday after the inevitable gazillion windows updates on patch tuesday

 

^^This is very true!

Edited October 23, 2014 by 3s-gtech

[Mcshammer_dj]

Look at what you are planning to virtulise and what will work as well. If you are going down the appliance route for security there are some suppliers who will only support specific models. i.e. Sophos Web Appiances can only be virtulised on VMware

[SteveM555]

Not sure if this helps - we went from completely physical servers to using Hyper-V. When we compared the options available to us, we decided to go for Hyper-V over VMWare.

 

It was more cost effective for us to use Hyper-V with Server 2012 as we had existing licenses/agreements in place, as well as being used to managing a Windows environment and we haven't previously used any VMWare products.

 

You'll find people rooting for both VMWare and Hyper-V depending on past/present experience of using either.. they are both good products and from looking at various 'comparisons' on websites they both do the same job at the end of the day (I am led to believe) There are some nice Microsoft features though, such as Storage Pools, ReFs, Hyper-V Replica, Failover Cluster Management/High-Availability I am not sure how VMWare compares with these features.

[zag]

Haven't used Vmware myself, but have had good success with Hyper-V in our school.

 

To be honest its just a hypervisor and should basically be invisible.

[SHimmer45]

only experience of VMware is the old vmware server on server 2008 which works well and is free, havent looked at ESXI as went with hyper-v as it is a more familiar platform.

running a hyper visor from a USB stick is something i havent looked into seeing if hyper-v server can manage this.

[sted]

as to hyper v and reboots for windows updates if thats an issue you can install hyperv core server (or install standard 2008/2012 as core and add the hyperv role with the advantage with 2012 install it with a gui do all your setup then you can remove the gui and you can always add it back later if you want to (personally i want a gui on my server personally im just happier that way it means i dont need a second pc to manage the main one

[Davit2005]

Having used VMWare ESX since ESX3.5, I'd say VMWare everytime. + It is a very light Visualization platform. I manage over 16+ hosts and I have not had any major issues at all, even the upgrade from 4.1 to 5.1 was a pretty painless experience.

 

Every time I've loaded HyperV on a test server at home it gets replaced with ESXi within a week. But you can't ignore the fact that the MS route does look very appealing on a cost basis.

 

If my employer made the decision to migrate I'd have to reluctantly go with it

Edited October 23, 2014 by Davit2005

[synaesthesia]

VMWare every time. HyperV is alright but even as a Windows guy, ESXi just thrashes it IMO for performance and reliability. It's not like the cost for VMWare Essentials is high considering it's a one-off cost.

[Arthur]

also for freeing you from having to reboot the whole shooting match every wednesday after the inevitable gazillion windows updates on patch tuesday.

Cluster Aware Updating solves that problem.

[sister_annex]

We run Hyper-v on all our servers, we used VMWare until it got stupid expensive (we have 10 hosts) - if I'm honest the VMware management tools blow the System Center ones out the water but i'm just nit picking.

 

Now we have a lovely HA Cluster with CAU and even with the dreaded patch tuesday reboots dont have any issues and what it also means with the HA is that we can have near 24/7 uptime on all services

 

oh and like others have said, we install our servers with the GUI, no other reason as it makes them easier to manage and if you provision your virtuals carefully you should never run out of resources

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

We run Hyper-v on all our servers, we used VMWare until it got stupid expensive (we have 10 hosts) - if I'm honest the VMware management tools blow the System Center ones out the water but i'm just nit picking.

 

Now we have a lovely HA Cluster with CAU and even with the dreaded patch tuesday reboots dont have any issues and what it also means with the HA is that we can have near 24/7 uptime on all services

 

oh and like others have said, we install our servers with the GUI, no other reason as it makes them easier to manage and if you provision your virtuals carefully you should never run out of resources

[bossman]

What about Citrix Xenserver which is now totally free and supports a majority of the platforms?

 

Just another viewpoint to look into!

 

I keep being told that I need to move to VMWare but I can't see why when all I require is in Xenserver and it now looks as if they are moving up a gear.

 

Just a thought

[Oaktech]

Cluster Aware Updating solves that problem.

 

This always assumes that your system is capable of functioning a cluster. What I have inherited at the moment, if I tried to move a guest to another host I'd just take the host down. I prefer to be substantially free of updates by design rather than have to shuffle things around to accomodate them.

[tmcd35]

Personally, I'd go Hyper-V every time. MS have bought it up to a level of parity with the paid for version of VMWare that means it does almost everything you could want in a VM environment. For me the inclusion of Cluster Shared Volumes, Windows Storage Pools, and Hyper-V Replica at no additional cost is what finally won me over. Back in the Server 2008R2 days I missed ESX but Microsoft have pulled the product so far forward over the past couple of releases it's getting harder to make a good business case to spend thousands on VMWare to achieve the same thing. Lets face it you've pretty much got to buy the DataCenter licences anyway, once you've done that for 2012R2 you've got everything you need software wise.

 

About the only thing I can see is missing is proper centralised VM management. Haven't looked at the cost of buying into SCVVM yet, but I'm sure it'll work out less than buying all the VMWare equivalents. But then I haven't found the need for that level of VM management. The standard Hyper-V Manager MMC plugin seems to have all the functionality I need on a day to day basis.