Hyper-V vs. Proxmox VE

Hyper-V is well suited to virtualizing low production server count environments without WAN replication or failover on discrete host hardware. It starts to be less competitive in more enterprise environments where WAN replication or SAN / Blade architecture is preferred. Scalability via dynamic resource allocation also does not seem to be as functional as the large V competition, although I have limited experience implementing this in either product.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE is a virtualization platform that provides a range of features and functionalities suitable for various scenarios. Here are some specific scenarios where Proxmox VE is well suited and some scenarios where it might not be the best choice:Well-suited scenarios:Virtualization of server workloads: Proxmox VE is well suited for virtualizing server workloads such as web servers, mail servers, database servers, and other similar applications. Its high-performance virtualization capabilities allow these workloads to run smoothly and efficiently.Hosting multiple virtual machines (VMs): Proxmox VE is ideal for hosting multiple VMs on a single server. It provides efficient resource management, allowing users to easily allocate resources to each VM.Clustered environments: Proxmox VE is a great choice for clustered environments. It supports clustering and can easily manage multiple servers, providing high availability and load balancing for mission-critical applications. Less appropriate scenarios: Limited hardware resources: Proxmox VE requires significant hardware resources to run efficiently. If you have limited hardware resources, it might not be the best choice. Simple applications: If you only need to run a single, simple application, Proxmox VE might be overkill. Other virtualization platforms or even a basic web hosting service might be more appropriate.

• Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
• Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
• Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.

Incentivized

• ZFS storage out of the box. The integration with ZFS is fantastic. You can easily create pools to store your VM images and data on, and the Proxmox web UI provides an easy way to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, etc.
• Great web UI. Practically everything configurable is available to do so from the web user interface. You'll rarely need to drop to the command line for administrative tasks, unless you want to, in which case you can do that too. The UI also provides graphs and visualisations to help you keep check of how everything is performing.
• Easy to setup a high availability cluster. Although Proxmox VE works perfectly well on a single server, you can also install it on multiple hosts and setup a cluster.
• Uses a Debian core system with an Ubuntu based kernel. This means everything to do with the base operating system is tried and trusted. We use a lot of Debian and Ubuntu installs, so having this run underneath Proxmox VE was an added bonus for us.

Incentivized

• We manage Hyper-V using both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the in-build Hyper-V administration tool, the former being the main product we use as the built-in tool is very light on functionality, unlike VMware ESXi.
• Management of storage is not great and quite a shift away from how VMware does it with ESXi; there is no separate panel/blade/window for LUNs/data stores, which means there is a lot of back and forth when trying to manage storage.
• A dedicated client with all functionality in one place would be awesome.
• Having the equivalent of ESXi's virtual console is something which is absolutely needed.

Incentivized

• The web UI does not work as well on mobile devices. It is useable, but a mobile optimised / responsive UI would be nice to have. There is a mobile app, so that may alleviate this issue, but I have not yet tried it.
• Support in the community forums could be better. There are paid support plans, but new users trying out the software will not have access to this. Answers to questions can sometimes be terse, and I can imagine this may put some people off.
• The wiki is a bit hit and miss with certain topics. I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish. I'd love to see it opened up for the community to add to.

Incentivized

Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.

Incentivized

It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.

Incentivized

The interface is easy to use for most of it, but still lacks screens for some configurations. Also, a few of the screens are not as intuitive as they could be. This is specially true with disk and network configuration, where some graphic/visual representations of the configurations would be very useful

Incentivized

In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.

Incentivized

Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired

Incentivized

I gave it a middle of the road rating - as far as getting direct help from Microsoft this never seems to happen. (Good luck getting ahold of them.) Getting help from online support forums is pretty much where I get all my help from. Hyper-V is used quite widely and anything you could need help with is out there and easily searched for on your favorite search engine.

Incentivized

They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?

Incentivized

We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.

Incentivized

The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.

Incentivized

initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.

Incentivized

It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes

Incentivized

Oracle VirtualBox works just fine on workstations, for testing pourposes. But sometimes the virtual network conflicts with the physical cards on the workstation. VMware is the state of the art, but it costs more than gold, and you will have to license every Windows Server VM hosted on it. EC2 as well; it will require an individual Microsoft Windows Server licence.

Incentivized

Proxmox Virtual Environment is better, less costly, it has better CAPEX and OPEX, is open source and more robust and flexible.

It is an agnostic product, one can use a PC clone or a high end server to install it, and it works flawlessly on both.

The product has a large life cycle, is stable and has few problems and vulnerabilities than the other propietary products.

Incentivized

Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.

Incentivized

Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.

Incentivized

• With Hyper-V implementing new software or rules on a test, beds take fewer resources and time which is a great bonus.
• Virtual SAN management and Virtual Switch management make it easy to manage network and storage options.
• Editing the disk option made us resize disks on the fly and saved us maintenance, production time, and costs.

Incentivized

• Due to the open source nature of Proxmox, we have no licensing costs while training our employees
• We've migrated 100% of our clients to Proxmox and have found improved uptime, and flexibility.
• In the 10 years of using Proxmox, we've yet to lose any data or not be notified of backup issues.

Incentivized