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)