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.

Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.

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.

Small businesses that are trying to save costs when software requires a dedicated server are what we have found to be the most useful scenario for Hyper-V as more and more vendors are requiring dedicated server installs for their software. While I understand how this makes support easier for them a small business usually has more than enough horsepower with their existing systems to support these lines of business apps, as Hyper-V licenses are already included when buying windows servers this is often a no-cost option for clients.