Hyper-V vs. VMware Horizon

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Hyper-V
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
N/A
$24.95
per month
VMware Horizon
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
A VDI solution used for the secure delivery of virtual desktops and apps from on-premises to the cloud. It is used to deploy, manage, monitor and scale desktops and apps across private, hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure using a cloud-based console and SaaS management services.
$4.67
per month per user
Pricing
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
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
Horizon Apps Standard
$4.67
per month per user
Horizon Standard Plus
$5.79
per month per user
Horizon Apps Universal
$6.00
per month per user
Horizon Enterprise Plus
$10.71
per month per user
Horizon Universal
$12.50
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
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 Horizon
Considered Both Products
Hyper-V
Chose Hyper-V
The main reason we are looking into Hyper-V is the cost of VMware licensing and support. We running a lot of hosts and the cost of renewal every year is very high when compared to freemium and all-inclusive because we have an SLA. And the functionality of Hyper-V is very good, …
Chose Hyper-V
Hyper-V has better deployment options and is easier to maintain backups. The functionality that exists between client and host also works more effectively with Hyper-V. VMWare is a bit more intuitive but is limited in its functionality and isn't always the ideal choice for …
VMware Horizon
Chose VMware Horizon
Citrix vid setup was very difficult and initially hard to set up. I believe this has changed somewhat now, but there are still multiple servers that need to be set up before it can be used. Vmware VDI was fairly easy to set up and was immediately working and up and running, …
Chose VMware Horizon
I suppose I'm prejudiced but I don't think either of those products is in the same league. I know XenDesktop has made some strides I just think VMware has the superior product.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Hyper-V
8.5
70 Ratings
2% above category average
VMware Horizon
-
Ratings
Virtual machine automated provisioning8.958 Ratings00 Ratings
Management console6.870 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine backup9.462 Ratings00 Ratings
Live virtual machine migration8.465 Ratings00 Ratings
Hypervisor-level security8.965 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
Small Businesses
Proxmox VE
Proxmox VE
Score 9.3 out of 10
VMware Fusion
VMware Fusion
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
VMware Fusion
VMware Fusion
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
VMware vSOM (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
VMware Fusion
VMware Fusion
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(71 ratings)
7.2
(35 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(6 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(7 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(16 ratings)
8.1
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.7
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Hyper-VVMware Horizon
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
VMware is well suited to a business where there will be many remote users needing to connect to the companies desktop. The installation on a remote computer is simple and is easy to use remotely but can be complicated to set up on the back end on the office system. It may not be worth the effort for a company that has few people who need remote access.
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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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • It provides a robust, secure, rich desktop environment that is able to access all internal network resources.
  • Addresses security and compliance concerns as all data resides within the internal network. All data accessed stays within the internal network and does not need to traverse a VPN to the local desktop where it may be cached, etc.
  • The connection is thin client that does not require large amount of bandwidth.
  • Client application is available for all common devices and O/S’s.
  • No need to install, configure and maintain applications on local desktop.
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.
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VMware by Broadcom
  • Move away from Adobe Flash version in UI, currently on the path but they need to hurry up
  • Speed up the boot process of the environment when servers need maintenance
  • Provide clear steps on what should be upgrade path in terms of components, the order
  • price! A bit too much
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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 committed to VMware Horizon and we plan to stick with it for the future unless something drastically changes.
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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 Horizon is very easy to use. It is very easy and quick to log in remotely. It is very easy to install remotely. It is usable easily on many different operating systems. It is easy to set up which tools are available to each remote user so that each user has just what they need to perform their work without any extra tools cluttering up their space or bogging down the system.
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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
Performance is excellent of you provide the needed hardware to support the sessions/connections. Pages load very quickly at the client end as the thin client application does a very good job and requires very little bandwidth. All applications function well, as they are running on a session on an internal server that is accessing data directly on the network
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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
It is surely way better than Citrix, but it could improve a bit. Usually, they send us the solution without saying what was the root cause so we can avoid breaking something in the future. Besides that, VMWare support answers in an OK time-frame and even speaks our language (Portuguese).
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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
No answers on this topic
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
Although I really prefer Microsoft Remote Desktop for accessing Windows servers (from Windows machines especially), and this can be done from off-site with a VPN, this entails much more effort, namely getting everyone's Active Directory in the correct group to have access. VMWare Horizon is a much simpler solution in terms of granting access. Chrome Remote Desktop and TeamViewer are really not viable solutions for remotely accessing servers in business settings, although they work alright for home servers and such, especially from off-site.
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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
  • Saved money on PC purchases.
  • Save a lot of man hours by not having to image new PCs. We just create one Template VM and clone the others from that.
  • Bit of a learning curve to get the deployment right for the environment.
  • Ability to make sure VMs always turn back on once they are shutdown. This speeds up load times for users.
  • Less management for our PCs. If one gets a virus or something corrupts we just refresh it and within 5 minutes the user is back to work.
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ScreenShots