Hyper-V

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.

In my opinion, if you are purely virtualizing and managing Windows VMs, Hyper-V is the clear winner. If you require a vastly diverse virtual infrastructure, other alternatives would be better suited for the lower overhead, and less frequent required host reboots. Hyper-V is also competitively priced, so if budget is the main concern Hyper-V is a solid choice.

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.

In education Hyper-V is still the best bet. In our case, it's included in our regular Microsoft licenses. VMware is a whole different issue when it comes to licensing and adds significant cost in our situation. The hardware requirements are also different for VMware. The big question is what you need versus what the virtualization software company wants to make you think you need.

We had limited space for physical servers and the hardware space needed for the virtual environment only utilized half of the space the on premise servers used.

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.

It is a great application if you are looking for an alternative to VMware. I honestly do prefer VMware but Hyper-V does a good job of getting the job done.

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.

Hyper-V is well-suited to smaller environments and those that have budgetary constraints. It's also very good for those businesses that need an inexpensive virtualization solution but also doesn't want to go open source. There are a few limitations with using Hyper-V but careful planning and good administration can overcome most of them. If I were asked to build a large (>100 systems) mission-critical environment, I wouldn't use Hyper-V. It's good for smaller installations, but VMware is really more scalable and better suited to large environments. Some might disagree that Hyper-V falls short but for my money, VMware is the better choice in those situations. I really like Hyper-V, but you have to be ready to make some concessions for its shortcomings.

Well suited:

• Virtualization of internal infrastructure
• Virtualizing Windows OS
• SQL Server hosting

Less appropriate:

• Hosting Linux web server farms

If your in-house talent is very good with Microsoft products, and comfortable with dealing with problems that come up themselves, and have a tight budget - Microsoft Hyper-V works well. If your company would prefer to have a more reliable support contact - then VMWare may be a better option.

Hyper-V is easy to use as a solution for a DTAP environment. For a small business, it is also suited well to run multiple VMs on just one server. In that case, it can function as an infrastructure solution. It is less suited to work in an environment with different hypervisors; it is not easy to migrate from VMWare to Hyper-V and vice versa.

Since Hypervisor technology is software on which multiple virtual machines can run, we use this very effectively for resource allocation to our virtual machines and our virtual desktop infrastructure platform, which is run on Nutanix, with Hyper V performing the sizing and allocation of compute, storage, and manual laborers that are needed.

Any organization big enough to use AD should install it on top of Hyper-V in my opinion to streamline Disaster Recovery scenarios. Also when several server roles are needed it should be used to install then across different (virtual) instances. It is also great for test environments as you can install, or even re-image pre-installed, OSs