How Does Microsoft's Hyper V Stack Up Against VMware?

Virtualization technology remains a dominant reason organizations move their workloads from standalone systems to more optimal platforms. Virtualized platforms allow for multiple instances, all with different OS versions. This architecture is ideal for organizations supporting end-of-life operating systems (OS) applications. A virtualization engineer can provision a virtual instance in minutes with an OS with the required computing, storage, and memory resources.

Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere continue to dominate virtualization marketing. Even with open-source solutions widely available, these two market leaders continue to drive innovation and value for their clients. 

What makes one hypervisor better than another? Organizations looking to merge or expand their current architectures must consider each offering's pros and cons. 

Organizations needing advice from an industry expert should schedule a call with a virtualization team. iuvo's virtualization specialist understands the value of each of these offerings and helps create a successful consolidation strategy for their clients. 

Sunsetting of VMWare

Broadcom's decision to sunset the free versions of vSphere and ESXi opens the door for competing hypervisors in their strategic customer accounts. Previously, organizations, students, and research personnel could download free versions of these virtualization tools. This strategy helped fuel VMware's growth in the market. A large number of free users eventually became paid subscribers. 

Test labs, disaster recovery sites, and application development labs used the free version of vSphere as well.

Hyper V as a Substitute for vSphere

Hyper-V is in Windows Server and standalone as Hyper-V Server. You can manage it with a GUI or PowerShell, and it has APIs for automation and integration.

Here are several other value points of Hyper-V as a replacement for vSphere:

• Live Migration: Hyper-V supports live migration between virtual machines with no downtime. 
• Linux Support: Hyper-V supports a wide range of Linux distributions. This feature benefits cloud providers and software houses that leverage open-source libraries.
• Support for Nesting: Hyper-V supports nested virtualization. This feature allows the developers and engineers to run virtual machines within other instances. 
• Support for High Availability (HA): Hyper-V offers HA failover support in case of physical hardware failure. 

Hyper-V: Developed by Microsoft For Windows-based systems.

A critical value point: Hyper-V is built for Microsoft operating systems and cloud applications. Vmware vSphere supports several applications, including Microsoft solutions. However, Hyper-V is purposely constructed to integrate far better than vSphere within the Microsoft stack.

• Hyper-V offers a much tighter integration with Microsoft's advanced features, including memory allocation and virtual networking.
• Hyper-V Integration Services enhance the performance and manageability of a guest operating system in a Hyper-V virtualization environment, similar to VMware Tools in VMware infrastructure.

What Management Tools Does Hyper V Offer Similar to vSphere?

Evaluating virtualization management between VMware vSphere and Hyper-V can be challenging because of their similar features. Both platforms provide centralized management for streamlined virtualization administration, enabling users to oversee all VMs from one place, regardless of location.

• Hyper-V comes with a Windows Server and a management tool called Hyper-V Manager. “Organizations wanting to move virtualized management functionality will leverage System Center Virtual Machine Manager.”
• VMware's primary tools for managing virtual environments are vCenter Server and ESXCLI, but other tools, such as Carbon Black and Workspace ONE, are available.

However, VMware has more tools and is more versatile in managing VMs.

Transitioning to Hyper-V A lot Easier for Microsoft Experienced Organizations

Organizations standardizing on Microsoft gain several advantages by leveraging Hyper-V as part of their enterprise license agreement. 

Benefits of Hyper-V

Integrating Hyper-V with the Windows ecosystem provides a notable advantage over competing platforms. Hyper-V, having a tighter integration between Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft stack, ensures better performance and compatibility.

Hyper-V's integration with Active Directory, Group Policy, and Windows Update delivers exceptional manageability and alignment with other Microsoft services.

• Hyper-V runs on Windows Server and Workstation.
• Organizations also have access to the Microsoft Azure cloud version of Hyper-V.
• Microsoft Knowledge Sharing: Organizations investing in Microsoft training and long-term Microsoft application lifecycles reduce the complexity of integration between the virtualized stack and the applications. This tight integration allows application developers and DevOps to access additional controls within the hypervisor.
• User-friendly: Hyper-V's user-friendly interface and seamless integration with familiar Microsoft tools characterize it, making it easier for administrators who are used to managing Windows environments to adapt.
• Cost-effective: Hyper-V is usually cheaper than VMware, especially for organizations that use Windows servers. It's included in Windows Server, saving on licensing costs.
• Scalability: Hyper-V offers excellent performance and scalability. It allows for dynamic memory allocation to adjust VM memory as needed. 

Pros and Cons

VMware and Microsoft both have potent platforms. They cater to small shops and large enterprise environments. VMware vSphere and Hyper-V have similar feature sets. Both offer network virtualization, VM migration, storage migration, and NIC teaming. Organizations must compare Hyper-V and VMware vSphere for data center use, considering feature capabilities, cost, licensing, management tools, and infrastructure differences.

Hyper-V Pros

Hyper-V is integrated into the Windows Server operating system without requiring separate licensing costs. However, the cost of Windows Server licenses must be factored in when determining the total expense of utilizing Hyper-V.

Hyper-V Cons

Hyper-V has limited support of non-Windows OSs, needs extra setup for Linux, has fewer resources, and has a smaller community than VMware. While hyper-v does have snapshots (checkpoints) for Linux - their "production" snapshots are only for Windows due to the fact that it requires VSS. However, Hyper-V does offer several security features, including isolation.

Hyper-V is more for servers and could be better for desktop visuals. Also, Hyper-V needs to catch up in its software-defined networking capabilities compared to the maturity of VMware AppDefense and NSX.

Vmware Pros

Compared to Hyper-V, vSphere offers more third-party connectors, greater access to management tools, and higher performance and scale. The vCenter client is a user-friendly interface for managing all VMs and hosts regardless of location. The vCenter service provides centralized management platform capabilities, including resource allocation and performance monitoring.

vSphere also has more mature security with NSX and a virtualized isolation model, including virtual machine encryption, secure boot, and a virtual trusted platform model. Also, VMware's global community hosts millions of users and article contributors compared to Hyper-V forums. 

Vmware Cons

Price is always a concern with VMware, especially now that Broadcom owns this solution stack. Also, VMware requires more hardware for its virtual machines to function compared to Hyper-V. Furthermore, while VMware has several successful on-premise deployments, the company still needs to gain valuable footholds within the cloud providers. Most cloud providers choose open-source to more flexible development options at a much lower cost. Microsoft's Azure cloud is a heavy consumer of the Hyper-V for Azure solution. 

Summary

Why iuvo?

Deciding between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V requires an organization to develop a matrix relevant to its business and technology operations objectives. iuvo's virtualization specialists understand the need for clients to get it right the first time as migrating from one solution can be costly and time-consuming. 

Click here to schedule your initial consultation with the iuvo virtualization team!

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