Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

John C — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:00:31 GMT

I agree with Suraklin. So many of these points failed to address the actual issue raised by the original article, instead focusing on why the missing feature wasnt really that useful anyways (2, 4, 7-- especially conflating OS limitations and hypervisor limitations in 7), or why its acceptable to install an unsupported OS (Debian? RedHat? Solaris?) on a hypervisor and then rely on community support, without the ability to install the integration patches.

It seems like several times Chris came close to actually acknowledging weaknesses honestly, but never really got there, instead insisting that less is more, and that anyone who wants some of these more advanced features doesnt know what theyre doing anyways.

I was most disturbed by the attempt to assert that Hyper-V has been out as long as VmWare, when the first version of HyperV came out in 2008, and ESX has been out for more than a decade. What gives? Are you going to seriously claim that vSphere is a different system than ESX, and somehow is brand new?

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Suraklin — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:36:04 GMT

I read this with interest because we are always looking to improve our IT offering and Hyper-V is certainly worth keeping a watch on.

However I was doubly dissapointed as not only is much of what this piece claims flat out incorrect but it also does not address the original article so much as what the writer wished the artciel HAD said.

For example when addressing point 4 the writer has a big to do about how the original piece claims that Hyper-V can't do live migration. Whereas, in reality, the original piece acknowledges the addition of live migration and actually focuses on the limitations of the MS version.

So the writer here is deliberately misrepresenting the artivcle he is responding to - which by my standards is dirty pool and reveals a lot about the nature of the writer.

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Travis — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:54:36 GMT

I've built VMWARE environments and Hyper-V invironments and I can say three things that should be mentioned here.

1. VMWare and Hyper-V both have Live migration, but the way they do it is very different. When running side by side tests I lost connectivity for 10 seconds in VMWARE when migrating VM's from Host to Host and 90 seconds in Hyper-V (this was actually better than expected.

2. Setting up HA in Hyper-V was considerably more complicated than in VMWare.

3. The management console for VMware seemed much more user friendly to me and had various additional features that I found useful. Even SCVMM falls far short of Vsphere.

You would expect to hear these things from an UNIX guy, but I'm a Microsoft Baby. Hyper-V should have been easier for me than VMWare, but unfortunately it wasn't.

I guess you're not suppose to mention these types of comparisons, but I would think you would have more credibility if you did. It's OK to say we are not as good in these ares's today, but we are aware of that and working on it.

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Hank Freid — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:23:16 GMT

We have to make this possible

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Hank Freid — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:13:50 GMT

I guess this one is true

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

raihan — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:28:37 GMT

Hi Chris,

You are a MVP. It is one of the condition to become a MVP is to represent Microsoft @all time. Lets someone do it and I will copy the idea. Bing and Hyper-V are just two of them. vSphere will leave Hyper-v far far behind when Microsoft Hyper-v catch up to current ESX4.0 and VC4.0 level. Microsoft is just trying to get a Market share of virtualization. That’s all about it. By the way, I am a MCSE, MCSA and CCNA but not biased.

Regards,

Raihan

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Dr. Malkov — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:31:07 GMT

Guys,

Strongly recommend to read David Davis' White Paper published at http://www.5nine.com/p2v-migration.aspx (Hyper-V or VMware?).

Hyper-V is getting mature, and we will see major ENT and SMB deployments this year and thereafter.

It is a complex subject - as many factors are involved: Capacity and Migration Planning, Consolidation ratios, licensing costs, performance of V-Environment after P2V, Management Tools and supported Guest OSs.

There are emerging tools that help you to make a right decision for your Data Center ( take a look at www.5nine.com ). Secondly - main thing is that most of the common Guest OSs are indeed supported by Microsoft ( and more to come ); and - using objective analysis shows that for SMB - ROI ratios are always better for Microsoft solution. For Enterprise - with various licensing aspects - MS solution should prevail, especially if you use 'Avarege memory utilization' method for your Migration planning.

VMware technology is great, while I believe many SysAdmins will use mainly Hyper-V for SMB, and also for Enterprise once various easy-to-use Virtualization Management solutions for Hyper-V become available.

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

AndersGregersen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:09:03 GMT

Setting the record straight is only fair, but adding fuel to the fire is not helping anyone. Neither Microsoft or VMware are trustworthy critics of their own product compare with competing products, they are incapable of such.

Both products are great, depending entirely on the specific problem we customers are trying to solve. All hypervisors have the basic features and differentiate on features that we say we love to have, but seldom use.

There is no doubt that the only truly right product only can be determined by having a business case and see what product fits best (and remember to reevaluate).

In the end a product is either chosen based on a set of business needs or a "religious" belief.

Thanks for the setting the records straight, adding some fuzziness to the answers and keeping the same level as InformationWeeks article.

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

optimus — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:20:41 GMT

Noah, your post lacks logic. You say you don't get how not overmotting memory is better for performance but then go on to say that you don't mind performance being degraded because memory is overcommitted. Obviously, you must understand that overcommitting the memory is a performance problem if you are willing to accept the degradadtion? Furthermore in your example you are assuming that you can just overload one box's memory (sounds like you are looking for doubling up even) in afailure situation and have everything just work. If your VMs aren't really using the memory alloted to them that might work, but if they have loads that are actually using their memory then you may not just have degradation, you may not work period. Memory overcommit is really only good for collections of VMs that have sporadic memory use. If you have a bunch of one tasker systems that each only need memory at short intervals, then fine, but real application workloads rarely fit this model.

I personally disagree with your failover design from the get go. Froma resource perspective it is much smarter to design your failover as an N+ model. If you have enough workload to need two hosts, buy three and have the third available as the failover for either of the two primaries.

re: Guest post: "Setting the Record Straight - 9 Reasons Why Hyper-V is a Great Choice for Enterprises"

Noah — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:09:21 GMT

Chris, I disagree strongly with your views on Hyper-V Memory Management and fault tolerance.

You say that the memory management is designed for maximum performance - However in a 2-server fail-over environment, you will have to keep half the memory of each host free, in case the other one fails over. How is this maximum performance? Imagine I have one 32GB box and the most I can load it up is around 12GB, because in the rare case that the other box needs to be taken offline, I'll need that memory free.

I don't mind that performance is degraded because ram is oversubscribed in the rare case that one box goes down.. It's going to be back up again in less than a day because of my servicing contracts anyway. Our staff are not going to walk off the job because the servers run slow for 6hrs.

For the record, we are a Hyper-V shop.