Microsoft's view on free Hyper-V 2012 vs. free ESXi 5.0

[VirtualBen]

Alexrogi,

You can do the equivalent of mounting a VHD to edit files of a failed guest in VMware. Simply switch off the ailing VM and attach the disk to another VM of the same OS. This usually comes in handy when performing a tricky P2V, ie NT4 if you are unlucky enough to still have it lurking around.

This method is safer as you can use an admin VM to perform this operation. Attaching a disk of unknown state to a hyper-visor or other business critical server is fairly risky practice.

Another advantage is this method will work for any OS

[tjohnsonlcsd]

I actually run Vmware vSphere 5.0 cluster, free ESXi 5.0 and Hyper-V 2008 R2 Core, we also previously used Citrix XenServer in production.

The biggest problem I had with Hyper-V is that I could not team NICs, it had to be done using 3rd party software (and on core it needs to be done via command line) and even then it did not work caused my network connection to drop and NIC teaming on any MS OS (not sure about 8 or server 2012) is not supported natively in the OS (BTW my Netware and Linux server do this just fine). That said if I was an all MS shop and starting out with virtualization I would have to consider Hyper-V because you know it is going to work well with Windows, other interoperability is another issue, I think SLES is still the only Linux flavor officially supported as a guest on Hyper-V (other flavors may run and probably run but are not officially supported). All in all probably not the best but it will work well if you are all Windows and AD.

Vmware is Vmware and are still the leaders and while ESXi free may not have some of the features of Hyper-V it still has NIC teaming and better guest support. If I am using ESXi licensed then it is doubtful I would use ESXi free except for dev or, as I do now, for some server that I need at remote location but that I want to be VMs and not physical servers.

XenServer was a great product, their distributed management was great but at the time (2010) they were not there with regards to feature set.

I really want to take a look at RedHat's KVM based virtualization, their licensing is compelling and they have a truly OS agnostic management interface.

I think the key to appeal to a large number of users is to support standards, don't say you have directory integration and then tell me that I need MS AD, support LDAP, for bare metal hypervisors please support nic teaming, make your hypervisor lightweight enough to run from a USB stick.

Just my opinion.

[scott.anderson]

Hyper-V snapshots - using VSS!!! on shared storage.
About as reliable as a wet paper bag.

MS have been trying to get VSS reliable for years and its still rubbish.

We have clients using Veeam B&R on both VMWare and Hyper-V (2008R2 and 2012).

VMWare snapshots just work, Hyper-V doesn't. The majority of clients using Hyper-V have had VSS issues. In fact I can't think of a client using Hyper-V that HASN'T had a VSS issue at some point!

[Gostev]

I think the main problem is that using VSS on shared storage requires 3rd party hardware VSS provider. Depending on how "lucky" you are with your storage vendor, those can be unreliable indeed.