Hyper-V vs. VMware vCenter

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Hyper-V
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
N/A
$24.95
per month
VMware vCenter
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
$6,044
per year
Pricing
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Editions & Modules
Developer
$24.95
per month
Bronze
$49.00
per month
Silver
$89.00
per month
Gold
$135.00
per month
Platinum
$199.00
per month
Basic
6,044
per year
Production
6,244
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Considered Both Products
Hyper-V
Chose Hyper-V
The ease of use and essentially free license made the adoption of Hyper-V in some parts of my current and one of my previous organizations a no-brainer.
For sure it's not the best product on the market, but it will do the job just fine in a lot of use cases. Automated …
Chose Hyper-V
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 …
Chose Hyper-V
Hyper-V performs very well in environment running windows operating systems and performs well under various workloads. The replication and recovery features of hyper-v work well but lack some of usability of tools such as Zerto, VMware replication and site Recovery Manager to …
Chose Hyper-V
We went with Hyper-V since it's backed by Microsoft. Most of our businesses use MS, so going with supported products helps when we need to open a case if we run into issues. There are other alternatives, but the ease and support of Hyper-V make it our go-to product for …
Chose Hyper-V
If someone asked me to choose between the two I probably would go with VMWare. Maybe it is just personal preference but I am more familiar with VMware, it seems to be used across the industry more widely. We have also had to contact support before and they were helpful. However …
VMware vCenter
Chose VMware vCenter
These alternatives (if you can call them that) like Hyper-V and Virtual Box are a sad comparison. Do they allow you to perform similar functions? Yes, but their feature set is like comparing a small puddle to the Pacific Ocean. Trust me, VMware is the way to go.
Chose VMware vCenter
At the time we purchased VMware, Hyper-V was one of the only competitors. We chose VMware because they were at the forefront of the industry in virtualization.
Chose VMware vCenter
I have used Hyper-V in the past which is a great product, but what VMware brings to the table is beyond comparison. It definitely is expensive and not for everyone, but the tools you can put together and ease of management makes them number 1!
Chose VMware vCenter
I have used Microsoft Hyper-V in the past but really don't have anything to compare to VMware vCenter Server. It's in a league of its own.
Chose VMware vCenter
I have used Microsoft Hyper-V at a previous employment. It was good in those situations of a small batch of servers. Hyper-V is relatively easy to manage and can use Powershell scripting for management and control.
In larger deployments, like we have currently, Hyper-V
Chose VMware vCenter
We considered Microsoft Hyper-V very briefly. At the time we considered Hyper-V you still needed to purchase an extra management product to get features similar to vCenter; and even then, it didn't seem fully baked, yet. The situation may, and probably has changed, with later …
Chose VMware vCenter
Citrix XenCenter used an isolated client that directly connects to the hosts instead of using a management agent. This causes a number of issues if the host is not optimally configured. Microsoft Hyper-V has been behind VMware in feature set for many years, but is starting to …
Chose VMware vCenter
vCenter beats the daylights out of Microsoft Hyper-V. Actions that take multiple clicks with Microsoft can be achieved in a single click with vCenter. It’s less expensive and easier to deploy and maintain.
Chose VMware vCenter
Hyper-V is not a bad product by any means, and it does have the benefit of not costing money for the software itself since it comes with the OS. That being said, it did start quite far behind VMware in features when it first came to market. Microsoft has been catching up, and …
Chose VMware vCenter
VMware vCenter Server's biggest competitor is Microsoft's Hyper-V Server. We prefer VMware vCenter Server because the hypervisor is much less resource intensive. It also gives us a different environment so that a specific Microsoft bug wouldn't take down all of our VMs if the …
Chose VMware vCenter
Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality
MS Hyper-V... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment
Chose VMware vCenter
There was not much competition, VMware has been in the market the longest and other systems are still catching up. VMware is proven, trusted, and has a good support base, the other main differentiator is VSAN for storage, reducing the need for physical SAN(s) which can become a …
Chose VMware vCenter
VMware vCenter Server is a much more simplified, in my opinion, platform for managing a virtual infrastructure stack. There are a number of features that are available at the Enterprise and Enterprise+ tiers of service that other hypervisor environments do not excel at, or do …
Chose VMware vCenter
I've selected VMware vCenter Server among the other Virtual Server solutions because it reduces the amount of time and effort to run and set up maintenance tasks, create hosts and back them up. Replication is so easy when you have a second vCenter Server linked remotely that …
Chose VMware vCenter
VMware vcenter server is way ahead of the competition in terms of features and thought that has gone into the product.
Chose VMware vCenter
When we were selecting a hypervisor a few years ago, VMware was the clear leader at the time. Now the gap has lessened but I still like the feature set and feel of VMware. VMware is also moving in a direction I generally like, so I don't have any reason to replace what we've …
Chose VMware vCenter
Vmware is still the leader, but Microsoft is catching up, specifically with Azure Stack. VMWare has to find a cloud partner (AWS) and implement a solution very much like Azure stack.
Chose VMware vCenter
It feels like other hypervisors are either trying to catch up to VMware or filling a smaller niche that VMware may be too broad to fill. VMware continues to bring the newest features and improvements and it's hard to compare any other hypervisor as long as VMware continues to …
Chose VMware vCenter
Microsoft Hyper V has gotten a lot better over the years and in Server 2016 it is even better than 2012. I still prefer Vmware due to my use of it over the years and having used it for clustering HA, sharing SAN and Compute resources has always been very reliable. I have …
Chose VMware vCenter
Easy to use, more intuitive.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Hyper-V
8.5
70 Ratings
2% above category average
VMware vCenter
-
Ratings
Virtual machine automated provisioning8.958 Ratings00 Ratings
Management console6.970 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup9.462 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration8.465 Ratings00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security8.865 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Small Businesses
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(71 ratings)
9.6
(50 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(6 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(7 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(16 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Hyper-VVMware vCenter
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
If budgets are stretched, Hyper-V is a very cost effective solution. Any veteran MS Windows administrators will have little issue in getting to grips with this. If you are familiar with VMware solutions, then you may find Hyper-V a little frustrating as it does lack some of the functionality of those products, however nothing that will prevent you from managing your virtual workloads and estate. Since rolling out Hyper-V 2019 we have had no real issues with it; ESXi seemed to have more issues and was less forgiving with hardware compatibility.
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VMware by Broadcom
The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.
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Pros
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
  • VSAN storage management and redundancy - high performance IO with built in fault tolerance across the cluster, not reliant on a single hardware item
  • VM fault tolerance. The ability to relocate a running VM and restart VMs from failed or isolated nodes
  • Resource management and alerting. Tracking load across physical systems and allowing us to rebalance for better utilisation
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
VMware by Broadcom
  • Currently, the HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, however, it would be nice if they would port all management functions over to the HTML 5-based Client.
  • Performing updates and upgrades to the infrastructure is a bit challenging for someone that may not be as intimate with vSphere. I think the updates/upgrades should be more integrated into the UI and provide the ability to push to the hosts, etc...
  • It would also be nice to have a more robust snapshot management tool to prevent snapshot overgrowth. It would be nice to be able to set a lifespan for the snapshot(s)
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Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
VMware vCenter Server does a great job with maintaining your virtual environment. It has great role based features to delegate various administrative tasks to multiple users. It is an excellent 'all in one' dashboard for viewing all aspects of your vSphere infrastructure. All alerts to software and hardware issues are easy to trace from this interface
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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Performance
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.
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In-Person Training
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
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VMware by Broadcom
Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality
MS Hyper-V... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • 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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • The positive impact of vcenter is definitely felt in larger organisations in terms of being able to manage multiple servers all in one environment
  • It will decrease the amount of time your server engineers will have to spend in the server room or datacenter.
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