Hyper-V

VmWare, VirtualBox, Vagrant.

VMware is the gold standard and while the up front cost is higher the maturity of the underlying hyper-visor is far superior. ESXi's smaller footprint and typically more resilient platform makes for easier to achieve long duration up times. VMware will perform better and more reliably under more resource constrained scenarios that Hyper-V Finding people skilled in VMware is far more easier than Hyper-V. Hyper-V is best used in single server small footprint use cases where the up front cost is more important.

As already described, my impression is that Hyper-V is lacking in features that are offered by other alternatives (albeit, at a potentially lower price point).

We are still primarily a VMware shop, but Hyper-V supports 40% of our environment. That may change over time if Hyper-V keeps getting easier to use and more third party support grows.

While Hyper-V did stack better for our needs than Proxmox VE or KVM, it did not offer the features that ESXi did for our needs and we had to forgo choosing Hyper-V for the promiscuous mode needs.

Hyper-V can host more memory, CPUs per host, and logical processors than can VMware's vSphere, and while it is well integrated in my opinion to the Windows OS, it has significant drawbacks that VMware does not. You can better manage and balance storage needs with VMware than you can with Hyper-V - especially without the need to down servers. VMware uses data stores -- NFS or block based -- which can be presented to the hosts via fibre channel over Ethernet, plain fiber channel, or iSCSI. VMware's downfall there is that it uses a proprietary format (vmfs). Hyper-V uses SMB, or CIFS, and may also use iSCSI, fibre channel and fiber channel over Ethernet. Hyper-V storage uses either the Windows NDFS or ReFS file systems.

All the technical pros and cons aside, the one reason we have Hyper-V in our infrastructure is the huge cost saving we are experiencing with SQL Server licensing by putting them into farms on Hyper-V. We had these same clients previously in VMware, but the licensing based on CPUs and cores was millions of dollars more expensive over a five year lifespan.

I have never managed another virtual server environment so I cannot comment on how it compares.

It's easy to start using this system as for system administrators as for users.

In my opinion Hyper-V, is always lagging behind VMware from a feature and product maturity perspective. It works as designed but I personally would not use it in a production environment.

Cheaper.

We compared Hyper-V beta with VMware and Hyper-V had all of the features we needed at the time. As our virtual environment has grown so has Hyper-V's capabilities. If you have to buy the OS license anyway, why pay more for the virtualization platform as well? That is what VMware never understood. For us there are no longer any features that are missing from Hyper-V.

In the beginning (Server 2008) Hyper-V was missing some of the functionality of VMWare and at first it was selected because of the Datacenter VM licensing policy Microsoft came out with. However, today there is no functionality in VMware that Hyper-V does not have and it is much easier to configure clusters across geographically diverse locations with Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is MUCH cheaper and includes all the features without needing to purchase additional features. We have also found it much easier to install and manage, and it has eliminated the need to hire consultants in our business to help manage our virtual infrastructure. We have teamed our Hyper-V with Tintri storage solutions to make our implementation [is] simple which has also reduced the labor costs needed to manage the VM infrastructure and storage.

Only thing I miss was the passthough of usb devices. We were already a windows shop so we went with that over vmware.