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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
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!
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
I was not involved in the evaluation, but my understanding from colleagues was that the years of experience in VMware vs. Hyper-V were very evident. VMware vCenter was simply a much more mature product.
Not really a competition. Proxmox and Hyper-V both lacks the manageability and easy to use access for multiple nodes and clusters. Also Hyper-V has the ability to use Multiple nodes but it does not compare to the level of VMware vCenter Server. All the integrations possible …
VMware as a product was most advanced hypervisor when we made the decision for our datacenter. Over the years VMware vCenter has kept it's edge and we have seen no reason to change to any other product as we have gained experience over the years. We do still continue to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
Hyper-V makes a lot of sense in scenarios that will support several Windows Server-based OS virtual machines. The only limitation of those licensed VMs is the hardware that hosts the Hyper-V role. If you need to deploy many servers running Windows Server OS, it is worth the price. Hyper-V also does a great job of managing the server host's computational resources, including memory, CPU, network, and storage.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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
It is quite intuitive. Junior techs are able to provision and administrate Hyper-V virtual server infrastructure with little to no additional training. Documentation from Microsoft is easily avaliable and decently well written. Hyper-V is reliable and does what it is supposed to. Can be admin from an intuitive gui, or aoutmated with extensive powershell.
I work with vCenter for 10+ years and i love it. I can find my way around and can help building and expanding the platform. It is easy to use and there are a lot good communities for the extra support when needed. Even the Homelab community is of great value.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Massively positive impact on expenses in my company by reducing our storage needs drastically. We were able to reallocate the budget to upgrading our primary Hyper-V server with pure enterprise SSD's as we reduced the storage needs by over 50% and by this we increased performance by over 400%.
We have deployed more than 8 servers with EXTREMELY minimal cost using Hyper-V and not requiring another hardware server to host it. We have leveraged our hardware resources in our 2 servers so well that we were able to add many new services, not in place prior, as we did not have the servers to host them. Now with Hyper-V, we deployed many more servers in VM's, purchased OS's & CAL's, but did not need any hardware, which is the greatest expense of all.
With Hyper-V, our ROI was reduced from 36-40 months on our primary server, down to only 13 months by reducing costs of storage and adding so many more servers, by calculating the "would-be" cost of those servers that was avoided by creating them in Hyper-V.