Microsoft Hyper-V vs. VMware ESX

This is not just another post to compare VMware ESX with Microsoft Hyper-V since i certainly believe without any doubt at this moment VMware ESX is leaps ahead of other competing hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper-V. What Microsoft has done with Sp1 for Windows 2008 R2 is introduce couple of cool features in Dynamic Memory and Remote FX to Hyper-V but these are not game changers. In this post , I am just trying to portray the  advantages and short comings of both ESX and Hyper-V.

What works for VMware ESX ?

• Virtual Center, the management console of VMware for managing multiple ESX Servers generally does not get the credit it deserves. A single management console for managing , monitoring and patching of ESX hosts and the Guest VMs and it’s Applications makes administrator’s work easier.
• Ability to configure Customized roles for administrators in Virtual Center.
• Huge list of supported of Guest Operating Systems
• Memory Management features such as TPS , Ballooning , Swapping and Memory compression.
• HA & DRS Clustering capability of ESX is technologically superior to Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cluster giving the ability to provide high availability to VMs and at the same time distributing loads evenly across the hosts.
• Fault Tolerance capability of VMware ESX
• Third party plugin support from various vendors like EMC , NetApp , f5 , Dell etc.. that helps administrators manage them from Virtual Center
• Advanced technologies like Storage vMotion , Storage IO Control , Network IO Control , Host Profiles and DPM ( Distributed Power Management)
• VAAI (vStorage API for Array Integration)  helps offload the load of Storage related task on to Storage Array’s
• Whole community of bloggers and lots and lots of free tools for VMware environment
• VMware KB – Knowledge base site of VMware that is constantly updated and contains step by step resolution for most of the issues on VMware environment.
• Stability/Resiliency of ESX

What VMware ESX lacks ?

• There is no single management console for managing multiple free ESXi Servers. This can be achieved for Hyper-V using Hyper-V Manager..
• Cost – Costlier when compared to Hyper-V but one has to consider the amount of features that comes packed with ESX which makes ESX worth every penny spent !!

What works for Microsoft Hyper-V ?

• Microsoft recommends Hyper-V as part of their solutions and tight integration and support with various other products of the Microsoft Eco-system helps in adoption of Hyper-V.
• Hyper-V Manager that helps in managing multiple Hyper-V Servers from a single console . Please note that there is limited functionality but still one can manage multiple Hyper-V Servers from a single console.
• Cost ( Hyper-V is part of Windows 2008 family of products) – If the Virtual machines that run on Hyper-V are based on Windows , the cost associated with Hyper-V goes down dramatically since in a VMware environment we have to account the OS cost of VM’s as well.

What Hyper-V lacks ?

• Dependency on multiple applications for managing ( SCVMM) , monitoring ( SCOM) and patching (SCCM/WSUS) of Hyper-V hosts and VMs and also the fact that there is no tight integration between these components.
• Lack of Customizable roles for Administrators in Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM
• Resiliency/Stability of Hyper-V cannot match that of ESX
• Lack of advanced technologies supported by ESX like Storage vMotion , SIOC , NIOC , VAAI etc…

These are my personal opinion of what works for the hypervisors and what they lack ? Would love to hear your comments as well.

My Wishlist for Hyper-V

As part of my work, I get to work on VMware Virtual Infrastructure as well as Microsoft’s Hyper-V environments and there is a lot of difference that one cannot ignore with a blind eye . VMware for sure is way ahead in the race as far as Server Virtualization is concerned. Knowing Microsoft , I am sure they will do everything possible to catch up with VMware in the race . They have already announced Remote Fx and Dynamic Memory as part of their SP1 for Windows 2008 R2.

So here goes my first set of Wish list for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and SCVMM . These are some basic feature requests that would help Hyper-V Administrators world over :

• Integration of SCOM , SCCM & SCVMM into a Single management console should do a world of good for lot of Hyper-V Administrators. Today we are dependent on three different products for managing Hyper-V.
• Role based access for System Center Virtual Machine Manager / Hyper-V Manager.
• Providing GUI based tools for configuring Hyper-V running on Server Core .
• Improving Integration with Third party backup products.
• Improving the mechanism in which snapshots are handled today in Hyper-V.
• Make Technical Documents on Hyper-V more accessible to the end users .
• Increase the number of Third party tools available for managing  Hyper-V environments.
• Increase the number of Guest Operating Systems that are supported on Hyper-V.

So What’s your wish list for Microsoft Hyper-V ?