Hyper-V

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.

Hyper-V is a great technology and its inclusion on a large number of Windows Operating systems, not just servers allows for a lot of opportunity to experiment and play with the technology, both from a learning standpoint, as well as gaining experience that will translate into working with Azure and other cloud based technologies. Azure is the next step in server and infrastructure management.

At first, I only used Microsoft Hyper-V on my own computer. This virtualization software, Hyper-V, is very good to use for creating local labs with one or more virtual machines to do reproductions. Or to perform tests without affecting any production environment. Since this is only used on a local computer, I can't tell how it performs or how manageable it is when used in production environments.

Hyper-V is an OK virtualization hypervisor when used on a Windows workstation or when you have a license for it as a freebie (and no budget and/or knowledge for one of VMWare's solutions). You can do a lot of virtualization tasks manually without problems. Long-term management and more complicated use cases will be challenging and need to be considered. Finally, Hyper-V is not that well suited to be a part of hybrid cloud infrastructure - most of the tooling is proprietary to Microsoft so it's very rare that someone or some system is able to manage Hyper-V hosts using SDKs and APIs.

We run all our Windows servers virtualized on a couple of physical servers. All the hosts run Hyper-V servers and each will run a couple of virtual servers. It is easy to do backups and restore full VMs when needed. Some VMs we have on multiple hosts in case a host goes down and we quickly need to get the VM up and running again.

I see Hyper-V as working well in a shop that has limited resources. First, it's available at no extra cost via Windows Server licensing. And, if you license Windows Server Datacenter on your Hyper-V host, you can spin up as many servers as your hardware will allow. It gives you flexibility in being able to create/decommission servers without the hardware investment.

I'm a Microsoft Windows 10 Pro user and it provides me a Hyper-V which is HyperVisor which allows you to use An OS on top of your current OS Running on Your Laptop/Desktop, with the Hyper-V one can allocate separate ram/rom from our machine Virtually on the VM to the task more efficiently.

Hyper-V is well suited for virtualization of Windows Server workloads as well as virtual desktop infrastructure. It also works well for building of development and test environments at a lower cost. Hyper-V is less appropriate for environments running multiple operating systems including linux and Apple OSx.

Hyper-V is well suited for shops that are not completely sold into using VMWare for its virtualization needs. There is some limitation on using some hardware with Hyper-V but when it comes to every day server user, the Hyper-V technology is so mature that almost any in house scenario can benefit from its use. Whether it is for space, power or DR reasons.

The only time I can think it would be less appropriate is the case where someone wants a server to have full, un limited access to a hardware based disc system and does not want any competition for the use of the system.

Better use of the company's existing infrastructure: when executing various services on a server or set of machines, for example, one can take advantage of the processing capacity of this equipment as close as possible to its totality;
The number of machines is smaller: with the best use of existing resources, the need to acquire new equipment has greatly decreased in the company, as well as the consequent expenses with installation, physical space, refrigeration, maintenance, energy consumption, among others.

With Hyper-V, you have the ability to virtualize and manage virtually every aspect of a service. It allows you to create screenshots of the state of the machine, in order to save the state of the machine up to a certain point and continue with a copy, leaving the previous version intact.

I will always recommend Hyper-V because it outperforms all competitors, comes free on Windows 10 Pro and you can host VM's as easily as you can deploy a new pc. Hyper-V is simple to set up and creates a workstation or server on your machine in seconds.

A specific scenario where Hyper-V is well suited would be for environment testing purposes. Let's say you want to learn or test a new OS for a product or just for learning purposes. You are able to boot up this OS in just a few mins on Hyper-V and then begin working, testing and learning with no money out of your pocket. You don't have to go out and build or buy a new PC (assuming your current PC has enough memory and CPU usage for a single VM.).

I do not think there is a scenario where this would not be appropriate. This is not really a piece of software that you need to install to do other things. If you are enabling Hyper-V you are using it to create a virtual environment. The only time you really wouldn't use this is if your application would be better off running in a docker/container setup.

We are exploring using it in our VDI environment and it doesn't seem to be quite there for what we want it to do but it would work and would be free. It is also well suited to host our Citrix server environment. Using it as a replacement for VMware can take time to migrate from one environment to another but it can have significant cost savings.

It's great if you already have a Windows server and need to create some more servers (using the 2 VM licensing allowance with server standard). It does pose an issue for backups though, as you have to be careful what and how you back them up. We've opted for Veeam and this seems to work well.

ROBO server builds make Hyper-V a great candidate. Microsoft has spent decades perfecting driver integration. As such, Windows Server will run on almost any hardware without much trouble. It is easy to allocate older hardware or cheaper hardware to Hyper-V and run workloads quickly and cheaply.

Hyper-V scales really well, so if you have a lot of compute capacity (lots of RAM and CPUs) and ample storage, you can run dozens of VMs on a single server. This makes it extremely cost-effective. Throw in Hyper-V Replica, which you don't have to have an identical server to accomplish, by the way, and you can achieve disaster recovery for a fairly modest cost.

Note that Hyper-V Replica is not a substitute for backups, because if you have an issue with the primary VM's software, for example, that will be copied over to the replication server. Ditto for altered or deleted files. But for a small- to medium-sized business, Hyper-V represents a robust virtual environment solution with disaster recovery built-in. Large enterprises will likely need to employ a clustering solution for desired system resiliency and performance--Hyper-V Replica is not meant for that. But for the SMB, you're getting a full-featured hypervisor for the cost of the Windows license--if you're going to be running Windows Server anyway, it really makes for an affordable solution.

It has been a superb environment for the virtualization of our infrastructure. We have gone from many separate, stand-alone servers to primarily virtual machine based servers without any problems. We have reduced hardware costs, allowed much easier scale-ability, and provided more comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plans with few hindrances.

I've always had good success with Hyper-V. Since we moved to Windows 2016, we have had issues with Windows updates taking hours to install. The server will sit at "please wait," while updates are installed for hours. It used to be minutes with Windows 2012R2. As a result, updating our Hyper-V servers takes an entire day instead of hours. Hopefully, this issue will be resolved with Windows 2019 Hyper-V.

Hyper-V has been a very reliable hypervisor for use in an IT organization. It's free, well documented, and powerful. Where it may fall short is in a Linux shop, where existing tools and skills would be better spent on a nix hypervisor. Virtual networking support on Hyper-V is also not as advanced as something like VMware, potentially important for web hosting projects.

If you have a limited budget, this will be a tossup with KVM Open Source Hypervisor.

Well-Suited
1) Multiple VMs to manage. It works well if you have multiple VMs to manage, and don't have external software to connect to them (and would rather maintain them locally).
2) Specific images required. In the consulting world, if a client requires a specific OS image for their work, Hyper-V is perfect for maintaining that image.

Less Appropriate
1) No image required. If the work that you do doesn't require a specific image, but rather just access to propriety data and systems, online portals might be a better option.
2) High levels of security. If you have a setup that requires token authentication, MFA, etc., maintaining all of that through an instance on Hyper-V can be challenging.

HyperV is well suited for most environments. Most system engineers or business owners can take advantage of the quick learning cycle with the product. There are a lot of online resources available. It is a great functional, low cost and viable solution. Small Business or Enterprise can adopt this technology without much concern. If your Virtual Machines have a requirement to be hosted on a Linux based host then perhaps you should use a competitor software versus HyperV, but I have not seen this as an issue very frequently.

Virtualizing a Windows Server via Hyper-V works really well. I especially like using it to virtualize a domain controller that requires 100% up time. While you can use Hyper-V on a regular non-server version of Windows Pro, it isn't as tightly integrated and some features aren't available (such as being able to be backed up using built-in software). Finally, I would NOT recommend using Hyper-V to virtualize a non-Windows OS machine.

Hyper-V is well suited for some larger scale networks and projects. It shouldn't be used in any case as a Virtual player for one single virtual machine. So the downside of Hyper-V would be its lack of awareness for a single Virtual machine but better usage overall for a great number of machines.

Hyper-V is good for maintaining real networks and connecting to the servers.