http://www.microsoft.com/

virtualization-consolidation.aspx

-: MS Windows Hyper-V 2005 R2 VS VMware VI3:-

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 ESXi vs 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

Moving to production, but for most companies still at testing & development 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.   

-: Microsoft Hyper-V  VS VMware VI3:-

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.

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 Center can 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.

Microsoft might have more support resources than VMware,

that direction.

in Production) 

- MS Windows 2003/2008

- MS Windows 2000 Server/Advanced Server SP4

- Windows XP SP2/SP3

- SUSE Enterprise Linux Server  

  10 SP1/SP2

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 Paravirtualized Xen Kernal 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.

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.

- Higher Performance

- More virtual Machines per hardware as it support memory over commitment.

- Perform well with Operating systems that understand its running in a virtualization environment currently Windows 2008 & SUSE

ITComparison

Comments

The performance advantage of VMware is related directly with its smaller foot print than Microsoft Windows 2008 Hyper-V.

Live Migration

(VMotion)

High Availability

(HA)

Dynamic Resources

(DRS)

Storage VMotion (SVMotion)

Cluster File System

Network Teaming

Supported

Supported

Supported

Supported

VMFS

Supported

Quick Migration (not real Live migration)

Quick Migration (Host Clustering)

NLB is all MS Offer !!

N/A

N/A

Dependant on the NIC manufacture.

ITComparison

Comments

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:

Cluster File System:

VMware VMFS is a cluster file system, which give vmware ESXi 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.
 

ITComparison

Comments

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.

ITComparison

Comments

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.

64GB of RAM

4 CPU

64GB of RAM

4 CPU

ITComparison

Comments

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:

ITComparison

Comments

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.