Hyper-V vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.

[ Red Hat Enterprise Linux] (RHEL) is a great suite for almost everything Linux and has a great ecosystem free Open Source of third party repositories to find what is not provided by default. ... an environment where 24x7 support is required, their support level is awesome, environments with a lot of vendor dependent applications, since almost all of them build their apps for [ Red Hat Enterprise Linux] (RHEL). [ Red Hat Enterprise Linux] (RHEL) could improve: SAP environments, I've compared its integration levels to other Linux vendors and it could be better. Mainframe (390) solutions. Although [ Red Hat Enterprise Linux] (RHEL) support for System Z is great, I believe SUSE's is better.

• 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.

• Support for multiple shell environments. It supports most of the popular shell environments and lets you create shell scripts for your backend tasks.
• It comes with nice out of the box features for OS level performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
• RHEL has a great support forum. If you ever need technical help, the forum is extremely useful.

• The only issue I have with Hyper-V is I am unable to use Veeam on my Windows 2016 Server to backup my FreeBSD HAProxy VM.
• There is some sort of checkpoint issue that I have been unable to figure out, but it works just fine on my Windows 2012 Servers. I do believe this is a Microsoft issue and not a Veeam issue though.
• Another thing that could be useful that Hyper-V does not have would be some sort of GUI that shows the status of all the VM's on a given server to help us manage them easier and know what is going on. However, I do have Zabbix for this and that does a good job at monitoring all my servers.

• We were hoping to deploy Red Hat Certificate Services but even after professional consulting with Red Hat, we weren't able to integrate it into our Microsoft environment due to the inability of performing workstation auto-enrollment.
• The license renewal/support costs appear to rival those of other operating system providers which makes you wonder about the added value you are expecting.
• Hardware compatibility can be a little restrictive if you are using lesser known non-mainstream specialized products.

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.

We find RHEL to be a superior OS with stable operations and long life. It is also easier to use and fix then most other OS's.

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.

RHEL has most of the features that are required by an ERP solution. If you need any additional packages, RHEL has a great repository and a very easy package installation/upgrade process.

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.

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.

Hyper-V is greatly supported by techs around the world. There are tons of forums, help websites and individuals ready to answer questions. I've never needed to contact Microsoft for help...because help is so easy to find out there. Do a search online for anything related to Hyper-V and you will certainly find an article with spelled out steps on how to do what you are looking to do.

Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.

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.

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.

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.

Don't be afraid of it, its easy to install and configure for the tasks needed.

While many have additional features or lower overhead the ease of use and low-cost licensing make Hyper-V our preferred choice for most clients. And because we are mostly a Microsoft shop and it is built on Windows when we need to troubleshoot the hypervisor itself we already have the needed skillset with very little additional training and no need to learn an additional OS like Linux.

While the other flavors of Linux listed above can be used to achieve similar goals, RHEL was chosen due to: 1. Excellent support, both professional and through the community 2. Tried and tested security 3. Its Binary compatibility with Cent OS is a major plus as it allows a test environment to be built without additional licensing

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.

• Hyper-V has provided for an extremely cost-effective virtual environment with disaster recovery. For the size of our business, it's all we need to ensure our desired level of continuity of services and protection against hardware failures.
• Since we are a Windows shop, deploying Hyper-V means we don't have the added cost of a hypervisor, since it's included in the cost of the Windows Server license. It's all we needed to achieve our goal of running all our virtual machines on a single server with another, less expensive server on tap for replication and failover.
• We wanted easy deployment and management with disaster recovery while having the ability to leverage our years of Windows SysAdmin experience. Hyper-V fit the bill.

• Overall, RHEL has helped us achieve heights in performance management and handling a large crowd at once with its huge management capacities. It is highly reliable and if used with apt load balancers you will not require more than one backup server because the crash frequency is minimal.
• No negative impacted has been faced as of now since using RHEL.