There was interesting debate in about month ago "
Can Windows Server 8's Hyper-V finally make inroads against VMWare?".
I want to share some interesting notes from this debate.
My notes are written in italic type.
Green selection is for Hyper-V fighter, blue is for VMware.
"
Currently available statistics show that only around 50% of workloads (e.g. Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, etc.) are currently virtualized."
"If I were in product marketing at Microsoft, however, I'd tell you that it's a VMware killer. That's just good business. Also, if you think that VMware isn't going to continue to innovate and produce in the field that it created, you're sadly mistaken. Microsoft's Hyper-V is basically an attempt to enter a committed market."
That's right. All cool Hyper-V features can be found in 3.0 version only that's only in Beta. And I think that only after about year we can try real Hyper-V 3.0.
"It's very difficult to compare a list of features between two products like VMware's vSphere 5 and Microsoft's Hyper-V 3. Why? Because Hyper-V 3 isn't available until next year and vSphere 5 will go through at least one major feature update between now and then. Hyper-V really comes out of the gate in catch-up mode and it will always be in catch-up mode compared to VMware."
"Hyper-V 3 is Microsoft's Great Virtual Hope because they realize that heavy, non-virtual operating systems are about to die a painful and malingering death by attrition"
"I believe that Red Hat and KVM-based offerings from the Open Virtual Alliance will offer a compelling solution for cloud providers who for whatever reason, will want a 100 percent open source virtualization solution and will want to roll their own infrastructure or rely on systems integrators to tie in most of the pieces. But I think this will be the exception rather than the norm -- the majority of enterprises are unlikely to go this route, they will want fully supported vendor solutions if they end up doing things in-house"
"Some people complain about VMware's pricing but those are not the decision makers, they are the techies. People who have the financial responsibility for SLAs and customers aren't going to bank on an unproven technology. When the techies are home playing video games or geeking out over a new gadget, the C-level executives are planning and constructing next year's budget and their long-term plans for expansion and they want stability, scalability and VMware's experience behind that."
Does Hyper-V really save money? How much?
"VMware costs can run 10 times Microsoft's costs"
"Hyper-V isn't free. You have to purchase the base OS, which is far from free. There might be a "free" version but you don't get any Windows licenses with it. That's useless. There are other free hypervisors available if you're looking for free ones.
To say that Hyper-V is free is really not being honest. If it's totally free, then can I run it on Linux? No, I have to buy a MS licensed OS first. That really isn't free"
How easy is it to migrate from a Vmware infrastructure to a Hyper-V infrastructure?
"Very easy... First, System Center can manage both a VMware and a Microsoft environment, allowing co-existence and easy migration. Additionally, Hyper-V comes with Windows Server, so most customers already have it."
"What you really need to know is how difficult will it be to change back to VMware from Hyper-V, once you realize your mistake." I like it :)
Does the pain of migrating justify the cost-savings?
Absolutely...
No way. Absolutely not... Did you have doubts? :)
"Even with a high migration cost of $600/VM, migrating from VMware can produce a savings of $4 million over 5 years, for a 1000 VM environment."
"
Think of the Celsius to Fahrenheit temperature conversion formula when you think of converting from VMware to Hyper-V; double your current hardware requirements and add 32.
This is the step known as the "Microsoft Tax.""
How about "private cloud"?
"Microsoft is the only company that has in-production private and public cloud offerings today. "
"If you want to lock-in to a vendor for public/private cloud services, then Microsoft might be for you."
What about the Netware comparison?
Perlow brought up the NT versus Netware race as comparable to Hyper-V versus Vmware. How and why does this comparison work, or why doesn't it?
"they (VMware) only have a virtualization stack, they do not have a NOS, they do not have end-to-end managment, and they do not have the application infrastructure. When compared to the overall MS ecosystem, VMware only has virtualization"
"Hyper-V, on the other hand, is really an unnecessary effort on Microsoft's part. These days data centers and desktops need no such consolidation or standardization. Management is (or should be) web-based so that workstations can be Linux, Mac, Windows, Chrome or mobile devices."
How do we tell who's winning in 2012?
"I believe when IT environments start looking at how they need to consolidate imporant, performance based workloads such as SQL server, Sharepoint, and Exchange, and start thinking about creating large shared infrastructure that can be easily provisioned, then we are going to see Hyper-V gather significant market share"
"2012 isn't the deciding year. 2013 won't be either. Your probably looking at 2015 before you'll see any sort of uptake or adoption of Hyper-V, if any. Why? Because of maturity...This isn't VMware's first rodeo, as we say in Texas, and by the time any companies might begin to embrace Hyper-V, VMware will have produced another major version or two, while Microsoft will still be patching Hyper-V version 3 with weekly "Patch Tuesday" updates or releasing its R2 version"
Summary
"
VMware has a single area of specialization -- Virtualization, for which it charges a heavy premium. And that single area of specialization is an exposure when your competitor has a complete solution across the entire stack and your entire reason for being is to provide virtual access to your competitor's operating systems.
With Hyper-V in Windows Server 8, Microsoft will offer you a best in class hypervisor along with great deal more built-in features for a heck of a lot less money, which has become scarce in today's shrinking IT budgets. These financial constraints have been pressuring CIOs to do a lot more with a lot less, and it's a trend that is not going to change anytime soon.
The bottom line is that Hyper-V has been a stable, proven, high-performance virtual infrastructure solution for at least the last two years, and it has already been gaining some traction in enterprises for its ability to consolidate high-performance Windows workloads. Environments should not throw out their existing VMware infrastructure, but if your organization is looking to grow its virtualized Windows footprint, you'd be foolhardy not to give Hyper-V a very close look"
"VMware has more soldiers than Microsoft does. Virtualization is VMware's only profession. Microsoft is a highly diversified software company that produces hundreds of different software programs including games, desktop applications, server applications, operating systems, servers and more. VMware invented x86 virtualization. Hyper-V is Microsoft's attempt to remain relevant in this cloud-oriented, virtualization-focused world"
Audience Favored: Hyper-V (54%)
My vote is for VMware. What's about you?
