Hyper-V

Easy to create new VMs

Free virtualization solution

Conflict with other virtualization applications

Load balancing not available

Hyper-V does not need to be installed as its own entity, it can be added as a server role.

Windows 10 virtualization is much more fluid than other competitors.

Management with System Center should be more fluid and intuitive.

There is significant overhead with Hyper-V compared to other alternatives.

Checkpoints are the easiest in Hyper-V. Creating them on live systems, restoring a system to a previous checkpoint in seconds and maintaining the one you were just using in case you have to go back to it again.

Controlling the resources is extremely useful in Hyper-V as opposed to other solutions that have basic tools only. With Hyper-V you can assign specific number of cores of CPU, or amounts of RAM, and you can set these dynamically with a type of "importance" for each VM, so that if one VM is more essential than a 2nd one, but both are trying to consume 100% of the CPU/RAM, you can designate which server has the most importance and Hyper-V will give it the resources over the 2nd one.

Replicas are required! If your Hyper-V host dies, your company dies. If you have a Replica Hyper-V Host, you are in good shape! Spinning up a replica server can be done automatically when the primary VM fails, or manually to give you a chance to modify IP/MAC/HostName/etc. This can be done in seconds and have your company up and running again in moments versus days!

I would love to see Hyper-V add a better remote control feature. As it is, it uses RDP to connect to any VM in the host. This is old technology and slowly deprecating. It would be significantly more useful to have a controlled interface for remoting to the VM's that is much more like Teamviewer, LogMeIn, etc.

Virtualization - Hyper-V does this well and I feel like it might be the best and easiest software out there to use. I am able to spin up virtual environments very quickly. Hyper-V also has a "quick" add feature where you don't even need to have the OS ISO on your computer and you can choose between Windows 10, Server or Ubuntu.

Setup and Management - Hyper-V is pretty straight forward. When I first started using this it seemed a bit confusing, but after a couple of days of playing with it you end up finding out everything is pretty straight forward and really not that complicated.

Just turn off the VM and go into the settings and you can manage the Storage, Memory, and CPU's.

Setting a VM up on a Domain is super easy and you can create a static mac address for the machine so in Windows DHCP you can use that static mac address to give that VM an IP it can use every time it boots up.

I think the best feature is the ability to create "Checkpoints" - If you are going to be doing something over and over and you need to start from the same point with each test you can setup your VM the way you need it prior to testing. Create a Checkpoint. Do your tests and then revert back to the Checkpoint so the system will be exactly how you had it setup prior to testing. Then you can go on and do your second set of tests and so on.

Another great thing is the ability to just backup the vhdx file.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this review we run most everything from Hyper-V. I make weekly backup of the vhdx files which are the Virtual Environment files.

This is an extreme example, but if the building ever caught on fire I could go out and buy like 15 PCs at Best Buy and load up Hyper-V on them and just import the vhdx files and be back up and running fairly quickly.

The only issue I have with Hyper-V is I am unable to use Veeam on my Windows 2016 Server to backup my FreeBSD HAProxy VM.

There is some sort of checkpoint issue that I have been unable to figure out, but it works just fine on my Windows 2012 Servers. I do believe this is a Microsoft issue and not a Veeam issue though.

Another thing that could be useful that Hyper-V does not have would be some sort of GUI that shows the status of all the VM's on a given server to help us manage them easier and know what is going on. However, I do have Zabbix for this and that does a good job at monitoring all my servers.

Using a scale-out file server for hosting the HyperV disk ensures no downtime.

Setting up the environment is easily done within a few hours.

Licensing cost - Free with an SLA.

Deploying VM's is very easy once it is set-up.

Apart from having to buy systems with large amounts of the local disk we have not run into an issue with Hyper-V as of yet, and you don't necessarily have to use local storage but storage spaces direct and scale-out file servers work better with local storage.

There is more of a hardware impact upon initial purchasing in my opinion.

Windows updates are hazardous to your Hyper-V server's health.

Reduce hardware

Save money

Maximize investment on kit

Setup can be a little difficult and required some reading up on Hyper-v to get it all running properly

When we used failover clustering, we had some issues with performance so had to stop that

It can be tricky with updates

Ease of use for Windows administrators. These days the maturity of a virtualization platform is a non-issue. All have been around long enough to be full-featured and stable. If your current IT staff has a strong background in Windows systems then Hyper-V will be easy for them to manage without having to take on a full-time contract with a VAR.

Cost of licensing. Licensing for Hyper-V using Microsoft's Datacenter licensing model will license all your servers and the Windows VMs without having to purchase two separate licensing. Lowers costs and makes licensing management easier. Which is always a plus with Microsoft.

Portability and ease of recovery. This one is often missed when Hyper-V is discussed. In the case of a disaster and administrator to connect to a remote share, or copy the disk files from a Hyper-V VM right to their laptop. You can then double click that disk file and open it like a remote drive. This can save hours of recovery time during a migration or disaster. You cannot do that with other disk formats so seamlessly.

Web-based management is still lacking. Microsoft's SCVMM is still a "thick" app and clunky to use compared to the HTML 5 based website of vCenter. Microsoft's new platform Windows Admin Center is trying to fix this gap, but it is not built for huge deployments and is still slow and difficult to manage users.

Heavy PowerShell required for complicated deployments. I love PowerShell, but not everyone does. For your basic clusters, you do not need it. But if you want to delve into configurations like S2D you will need to know PowerShell.

Difficult to find VAR support. Every vendor out there has engineers that know VMWare. It has been a challenge to find vendors that have Microsoft Hyper-V engineers on staff. The certification program for Hyper-V is not near as strong as VMWare.

Allows you to dynamically add storage, memory, and networking, all without powering down the VM.

You can set VM resources to adjust dynamically in response to what other VMs are doing, including weighting VMs based on the criticality of their functions. This is a great feature to ensure VMs "behave" themselves when dynamic resource allocation is utilized while ensuring that VMs that are spiking in utilization can automatically ramp up their resources to match the load.

The Replica feature means you don't have to invest in expensive and complicated clustering technology if your goal is simply to achieve resiliency against hardware failure. Replica works really well, is easy to set up, and can even be placed in a remote location.

If you're a Windows SysAdmin, Hyper-V is intuitive to deploy, monitor, and manage.

I like that you can specify the boot order of the VMs when you power on the Hyper-V server. You can also stagger the "on" state of each VM so you don't overwhelm the host, and you can specify what happens to each VM after the host reboots.

For me, checkpoints have been a sore spot over the years. These are system snapshots, where you can roll back the system to a previous point in time if you encounter issues after installing updates, applications, or making changes to the system. I'm using Server 2016 and haven't tried them in this version, but earlier versions created all sorts of issues if you ran into a scenario where you needed to recover a VM. I don't use these, instead relying on Veeam backups.

Moving VMs from one server to another could be easier. To be clear, I'm not talking about Replica, but actual VM migration.

Hyper-V is very easy to administer. Day-to-day operations are done through the Hyper-V Manager, which is simple and intuitive to use.

It allows complete servers to be easily be backed up to either local storage or cloud storage (or both). You can restore whole virtual machines as well as individual files if needed.

It is simple to create a checkpoint of a virtual machine before any changes are made or updates applied and changes can be easily rolled back if needed.

Hyper-V does require adequate CPU and memory and should be used with fast storage, so plan ahead.

It would be nice if there was a way to upgrade virtual machines from generation 1 to generation 2.

Also, better support for older operating systems.

Live migration.

High availability.

Easily create new VMS.

Dynamically adjust RAM.

Troubleshooting can be difficult.

Occasional live migration failures are causing all other VM's to fail.

A fair bit of setup is needed to get a cluster configured and up.

Windows Server Virtualization

Windows Server Configuring

Uptime

Microsoft Licensing is Complicated

Harder to configure real-time migration

Focus on Microsoft products, support is weak for non-Microsoft systems

Virtual Environment

Scale-ability

Ease of use

None that I have noticed.

Hyper-V is free. Totally free. No feature limits aside from the lack of a GUI on the server itself, but so long as you have a Windows workstation, you can manage it remotely.

Remote management is excellent, and the default way to interact with the hypervisor.

PowerShell is extensively supported and very powerful. If you have complex needs or like to get your hands dirty, the tools are very powerful.

It's a very stable platform. Our hypervisors require so little maintenance it's a dream. And the virtual machines are also stable and fast.

There are some options not present in the GUI tools. It seems features are implemented with PowerShell commands before being brought to the GUI.

Hyper-V will sometimes be a bit slower to pick up new virtualization technologies like GPU sharing, as compared with VMware or even Microsoft's own Azure.

Hyper-V is better than having a lot of physical boxes and hardware.

Hyper-V is priced well; meaning if you buy a Datacenter center license its free for unlimited, the standard is up to 3 VMs.

You can buy single VM licenses to add to standard in lieu of Datacenter license. I think the cost equals out after 8 single VM purchases, so if you plan on running more than 8-10 VMs you may want to look at Datacenter.

Hyper-V is behind the curve in terms of live migration. I feel that the winner for this is VMWare.

This is a Microsoft based program, so getting support on it can prove more difficult than others. More than likely you'll get quicker support from your reseller.

Hyper-V was awful in 2008, it started getting better in 2012 and was pretty good in 2016, but still inferior to VMWare.

Switch Manager. Once you get your Hyper-V Manager set up, it is pretty easy to use the Virtual Switch Manager to toggle between different connection types for different VMs. It even allows you to change that switch configuration on a running instance without rebooting.

Multiple VMs. It is very easy to maintain multiple VMs, hence the name "Manager" in Hyper-V Manager.

Metrics. It is very easy to see the metrics for any specific instance. For example, the allocated memory, checkpoints, security settings, etc.

Initial Setup. Adding in new VMs is not an intuitive process. Going through the boot file, the ISO, and figuring out how to get that initial configuration right can be challenging.

Stability. Overall, it's pretty stable, but I have had my VM crash unexpectedly more times than I expected. It's caused me to take certain precautions in how I handle the data that I keep on there.

Connectivity. Although the Switch Manager is easy to use, establishing that initial connectivity within the VM can be tough. In a few instances, I had to do a number of resets and reboots in order to get it to work properly.

Virtual Machine Management and Resource Management is very good. You can adjust many resources while the VM is running and take Advantage of reducing impact to production. For example you can grow a virtual hard drive "hot", even when its larger than 2TB.

Cluster Management is very easy to set up and allows you to "live migrate resources" while in use not affecting production, minimizing downtime. This allows for many events such as maintenance tasks (software updates or firmware) or performance troubleshooting issues that need addressed.

Also enables you to perform rolling upgrades on your cluster nodes to upgrade you operating systems (ex 2012R2 to 2016).

Backup Strategies have the opportunity to leverage the Hypervisor vs agent based backups. This allows for you to avoid overtaxing individual VMs during backup operations. And removing agent based backups from your environment is going to lessen the software footprint that has the possibility to create contention on resources.

HyperV could use better native tools for user to look into VM performance and health. Tools do exist but need improved to be competitive.

Errors and Warning could be more visible in the Management View. Things like High CPU, Network peaks and Memory should be able to pop to the front when there is an issue.

Hyper-V is deeply integrated with Windows Server, and works with the built-in Windows Server backup software, as such a 3rd party backup solution is not required.

In general, Hyper-V is easy to set up. There are a number of different options to choose from, but they are laid out in a logical manner and explained fairly well within the Hyper-V interface.

Hyper-V's virtual disks (.vhdx) are extremely flexible and robust. They support dynamic resizing, i.e. you can create a 1TB disk that will show up as 1TB within the VM, but on the real machine the vhdx will only be as big as the amount of data within the VM.

Microsoft provides a plethora of support documents for Hyper-V usage.

Hyper-V's support for non-Windows based OS' (i.e. Linux) is only OK. You can certainly virtualize a Linux machine, but it's integration with the rest of Windows is limited, and it's performance is only OK.

Adding an external hard drive (USB or otherwise) to a VM is clunky at best, as it requires the physical to be set to offline via the Disk Management snap-in before it can be added to the VM.

Backing up a VM can be lesson in frustration at times. While a VM can be easily backed up using Windows Server backup - when an issue arises with the backup, it can be very difficult tracking down exactly what the issue is.

Make changes on the go

Easy to migrate to

Great technical support

More in-depth options for further control of VMs

Cost

Clearer outline of future goals

Remote Connection works perfectly. It's easy to set up, control and maintain.

Organizing your environment is really easy. You can label every machine and leave notes next to them so you don't get confused.

Doesn't waste any necessary resources. It manages RAM and CPU usage pretty well, sleep option works like a charm.

It should be able to provide end user with a more convenient first setup of Virtual or remote Machine. It should be able to do this with machines on the local network.

Some automatization is needed on the maintenance level, there is a lot of things that you have to do manually instead automatically.

Hyper-V is native Windows, so it's optimized for the Windows platform. Virtual machines are very well behaved in this environment, which is a great benefit for administrators.

Hyper-V is very easy to implement and to use. A short learning curve is essential for maintaining a high level of productivity in a business. Even the newest of administrators can become proficient almost immediately with Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is flexible in which type of hardware you can use for host systems. This is especially cost-effective in businesses where IT budgets are already stretched. Being able to use a wide range of hardware systems as hosts helps maximize hardware utilization while keeping costs down because small shops don't have to go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars on the latest and greatest hardware. You can pretty much use what you have on hand, with few exceptions.

Hyper-V doesn't support some of the more cost-effective storage systems such as GlusterFS. It's unfortunate because while Hyper-V is certainly cost-effective, good leveraged storage solutions to support it are not.

I wish Hyper-V had the capability similar to VMware's DRS so that VMs could move about to balance utilization without having to use SCVMM and SCOM to get similar capabilities. SCVMM and SCOM are really too expensive and heavy for smaller shops that need DRS without the overhead.

fast and easy deployment

clustering with live migration

direct integration in the OS

manageability (Windows Admin Center will solve this in future releases)

monitoring of virtual machines performance

FREE way to run multiple servers on one box

Easy to use - Just copy/paste a virtual machine to the box, and get to configuring

Integrates with other Microsoft products such as Active Directory

Like most other Microsoft products - having to find support can sometimes be challenging

Wish there were more ways to interface with the host - i.e. using Hyper-V to see the computer as it boots up

Backups are sometimes a challenge - either the virtual machine works....or it doesn't

Create VMs, move VMs around all with PowerShell.

Creating snapshots is very easy, especially for our developers.

Hyper-V is in itself a free product, which makes it also a good product to use it in studying from home to extend my own knowledge and experience

The license costs can go fast when using it in a failover environment.

The virtual switch build into the product could have a better GUI for configuration

I would a direct build in backup function

Running old software versions

Multiple operating systems

Testing and troubleshooting software apps

Virtual networking

The digital virtualization platform could certainly use some work

Bulk licensing

Discounts

using single jbods attached to several physical servers

fail-over

legacy OS

snapshots

attach USB devices