Hyper-V

Great for small to medium-sized offices with modest needs. Once you get to large businesses, managing and configuring your VMs requires dedicated staff.

Hyper-V is incredibly well suited for proof of concepts, mixed hardware clusters, and low-cost server consolidation. It is not well suited for scenarios requiring high-speed memory access.

Hyper-V works really well when you have a machine that you want to roll back on a regular basis, for purposes such as testing software. In some situations, such as hosting graphics-intensive applications, Hyper-V (while having RemoteFX available in some environments) can be an unnecessary piece of the puzzle where a 'real' machine would be more appropriate.

Hyper-V is well suited for development. One is able to stand up VMs to replicate an environment using a single host computer. You can then shut the VMs down, back them up, snapshot them, and roll them back to a previous snapshot. The entire process can be automated using PowerShell as well.

It will work fine in smaller deployments (200 or less VMs), and all Microsoft shops.

If you need a cheap hypervisor for development purposes or production which does not require 24/7 operation and are running mostly Windows VMs, Hyper-V is hard to beat but if you need reliability and performance, Hyper-V is not the right choice for you.

Well suited for managing Windows Servers and also for Linux. Less appropriate for FreeBSD and MacOS.

Hyper-V is best used in an SMB or remote office scenario where you have a standalone server. Clustering Hyper-V is not as intuitive as VMware and thus a single server install is far easier to set up and support. If you run a lean staff Hyper-V may not be for you because finding people that are decent with Hyper-V is difficult. The future is more cloud oriented and thus people will be focused on that vs. Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is an obvious option for organizations that employ Windows OS on servers. It makes sense for companies that have a relatively small number of virtual machines. Obviously, it would not be a logical consideration for Linux or mixed OS environments. Nor would it be the best selection for companies that intend to utilize a larger number of VMs.

Hyper-V is well suited for quick turn and burn VMs. One of the products we had a hard time with and could not virtualize with Hyper-V was the Websense Network Agent software which required promiscuous mode on the NIC to sniff all traffic from the physical and virtual networks.

The best case I can make for using Hyper-V over VMware is where the cost of licensing for SQL Server is skyrocketing. We are literally saving millions of dollars over a 5-year period by moving our SQL Server systems to Hyper-V. Where Hyper-V is not currently a good candidate is where the client server residing on Hyper-V have large and rapidly increasing storage requirements. Managing and balancing that kind of load becomes cumbersome and time consuming.

Hyper-V is great for having low overhead as far as physical systems go. You can spin up or get rid of VMs as needed for various IT needs. Testing environments that can be spun up quickly at various application levels is great to reduce the time to get testing going or to be able to respond to client issues in a timely manner. It is less appropriate for a company who does data processing and needs people at desktops to just process applications or some form of data.

It's much better to use Hyper-V in the big clustered environment, were you do not need to deploy or remove big amounts of VMs everyday. It's also good to use it for personal use on a workstation.

Hyper-V is a decent product I am just not sure that it is up to the same standard as some of its competitors.

Single node where cost is a factor (ROBO) go ahead.
Multi node where uptime is important no.

I have not found too many situations that Hyper-V is not a fit. It is great to get started with a test/dev environment to get familiar with it then start rolling it out to production. I like being able to just copy the virtual hard disk (VHD) from my desktop to the server and turn it on.

Hyper-V is as good as VMware and much better than Citrix and the only place it is more difficult to use is in the VDI space.

I would highly recommend having fast drives, such as SAS or SSD drives. It seems to lag a bit on an array of SATA drives, especially with speeds of 7200 or less. I have also found that dynamic memory does not work as well, and would recommend having enough memory in the server to have static ram for all your virtual server. Beyond this, I use Hyper-V for small businesses with only 2 VMs to large business clusters with 8 or more nodes hosting over 100 VMs.

Great product for the price, most companies use Windows products.