VMware vSphere 4 vs. Microsoft Hyper-V R2 – A CTI Strategy Whitepaper
We’re pleased to make available our first whitepaper. This one is a technical analysis of vSphere 4 vs. Hyper-V R2. If you have any comments, please post them here.
The Executive Summary should give you guidance as to whether this whitepaper will be of use to you:
The battle to be your virtualization vendor is in full swing, and it has important ramifications for the vendors involved, and for your data center. The goal of this whitepaper is to analyze the technical aspects of the two major choices: VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 (as part of Windows Server 2008 R2). This paper considers server virtualization alone, not desktop virtualization or “presentation virtualization”. Certainly presentation virtualization will be an important aspect of the virtualization gamut, but with the entry of Microsoft into the server virtualization market, and the still-unrealized huge potential for server virtualization, this is a topic of great interest to many datacenters.
This whitepaper covers the following topics:
› A summary of virtualization technologies and terms.
› The reasons to consider virtualizing.
› The features of virtualization and the effect it has on application implementation, and datacenter facility implementation and management.
› The impact that future server technology will have in driving virtualization, based on the need of datacenters to achieve optimal resource use and optimal application performance.
› Decision criteria to use in determining when and how to virtualize a datacenter.
› A description and comparison of the features and pricing of vSphere and Hyper-V.
› An analysis of the current state of virtualization and best practices to consider when deploying virtualized infrastructure.
› Our prognosis of the future of virtualization, the expected next feature sets of virtualization, and the future of data centers management and application deployment.
› Advice on how to determine which of the virtualization offerings to consider and how to test that chosen path.
› Reference pointers and suggestions for further reading.
The whitepaper is free and available for download in .pdf format. Registration is not required, but if you register, we will let you know when the next whitepaper comes out. We have a simple privacy policy and we will not fill your inbox with junk.
Virtualization Whitepaper - VMware vSphere vs. Microsoft Hyper-V (1.1 MiB)
What is your take on Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 vs. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 w/Hyper-V when compared to VMWare’s ESX. It seams like MSFT is going for the same Type 1 low footprint install. And as a plus they are offering it for free.
Hi Ernesto,
In the white paper we discuss both the low-level hypervisors (like ESX and Hyper-V) as well as the virtual machine manager eco-systems like vSphere and Microsoft Systems Center. You are certainly correct that ESX (and ESXi) are free (but you have to pay for maintenance). Just like Hyper-V is free with Windows Server 2008 R2. But no one (or at least very few sites) run just the hypervisor. You need the management infrastructure as well, which is why we include that in the discussion. Also in the white paper is a cost analysis of a couple of scenarios, including hypervisors, management, and maintenance.
Technically there is certainly a debate about whether Hyper-V is a type 1 or type 2 hypervisor. That’s also discussed in the white paper. But my take is that Hyper-V is closer to a type 1 than a type 2. If it’s stable, functional, and well-performing, then it qualifies for production use (in my book). There is no thin deployment of Hyper-V though, unlike ESXi, so I feel VMware has an advantage there.
–Peter
Can I just say that some of the examples given in the document are not based on real world experience. For example, you are talking about an implementation of 10 hosts, with 4 CPU sockets each, that will be running 30 virtual machines: that is an average of 3 VMs per host. Another point which is not taken into consideration is that VMware vSphere is capable of running more VMs per host than Hyper-V is.
Marc.
Hi Marc, thanks for the comments. The examples I picked were designed for easy comparison and costing, not necessarily real-life accuracy. However I do think the points made are valid and that the costing shown is usable for other scenarios.
As to your statement that VMware vSphere is capable of running more VMs per host than Hyper-V, what is that based on? Certainly the vendors specifications are covered in the tables in the whitepaper, and in fact according to the specifications Hyper-V can have 512 guests while vSphere can only have 256 per host. But practically, it is likely that because vSphere has more advanced memory management, it can run more guests than Hyper-V could on a given server. I know of no proof of that assertion however. If you have data, please send it along. Because that is an important and seemingly open issue, we are planning on testing memory utilization of the two virtualization platforms in our labs and posting our results here. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed or check back for updates.
–Peter