Hyper-V

Easy to configure.

Free with every copy of Windows Server

Dynamically adjustable memory on the VMs

Clustering can be tricky to configure

Replication sometimes fails and needs to be reconfigured.

Easy to lose track of VMs created.

Built-in backup tools inadequate.

Easy to use

Easy to deploy

Cloud consistent

Fully integrated with Microsoft management tooling

Overall memory management is still not as advanced as VMware ESX.

The virtual thread model used by the hypervisor has improved but does not maximize the true power of the host CPU.

The model for over-contention of CPU allows for significant overutilization leading to bad performance.

Checkpoints - used on a daily basis many times, we would be lost without this functionality.

Flexibility - Hyper-V manages its hardware demands seamlessly distributing memory across the guest machines without compromising the guests or the host.

Ease of administration - Tied into the Windows OS (Server and 10 now) it is very easy to get a virtual environment running.

Hyper-V Manager - our main Hyper-v server (for test VMs) has many virtual machines on it, and we find managing more than a handful of machines in the Hyper-V manager can become a little cumbersome.

I like the snapshot feature where you can take a snapshot of the VM and later apply that snapshot if you want to roll back your changes.

The dynamic memory is a very nice feature. This allows the host computer to allocate memory to a VM as it is needed.

It is nice being able to use PowerShell to manage the hyper-v service and the VM management process.

There is nothing that I'd like to see done differently. It is simply a great product.

Built into Windows, and free!

It's getting better at having the same functionality as VMware.

Microsoft support is very active with assistance.

Continuing to integrate with Azure for hybrid deployments.

Installation, particularly networking, is difficult.

Need to improve upon cluster stability.

Several components are needed to manage from hardware to Hyper-V. Needs a single pane of glass.

Use of scripting to create and automate VM creation and management. Powershell is one of the best scripting languages there is and Hyper-V like all Microsoft products supports it out of the box.

Integration via Virtual Machine Manager. The real power of Hyper-V is when you pair it with VMM. You then get easy templating and a lot of other more advanced features.

Since Windows Server 2016, Hyper-V clusters support automatic load balancing between nodes.

Hyper-V clusters are really not reliable enough if you need 24/7 operation. We encountered a lot of hardware failure which resulted in the cluster restarting all the nodes (even the nodes which were OK) which is kind of the opposite goal of clusters.

Poor support for less popular Linux OS like Arch Linux.

Practically no features when used without Virtual Machine Manager. No templates, no user management, no balancing (Except on Windows Server 2016), etc.

Very satisfied with the results: simplicity, reliability and its speed of work.

But found several cons: absence of drag-and-drop, clipboard also does not work, therefore there is no possibility to copy-paste files from my PC to Hyper-V. Can do this only via RDP but it takes some work: install XRDP, open ports. So, per my point of view it needs refinement to make such things easier.

Lower cost if you are a MS Windows shop. You have to license Windows anyway so if you have a data-center license you get the rights to use unlimited Hyper-V on that host.

Third party support is lacking. It is easy to get third party tools and support for VMware, but not so with Hyper-V.

Uses too many resources. Unless you run 2016 nano it is still to bloaty and consumes too much of the available host resources. Typically 4-8GB compared to less than 1GB for VMware.

Requires third party plugins to get good monitoring of resources.

VMM is the equivalent to vCenter and it pales in comparison. It is for more complex to use and is extremely bloated and slow. Nothing is intuitive and the complexity means you are more likely going to make mistakes or have issues.

Backing up VMs is difficult unless you have a fully supported guest and properly running integration services. Hyper-V does not support crash consistent snaps like VMware does and will often pause the running VM it it can not get a clean snap. This is clearly unacceptable in a mission critical environment.

Since Hyper-V is a Microsoft application it integrates seamlessly with the OS and other related tools.

Setup and Maintenance of VMs is straightforward.

As an established product, Hyper-V is supported by most other systems (e.g. Disaster Recovery).

We use Hyper-V in a Windows Server 2012 environment. As with many other features of this Server OS, certain aspects are less than intuitive.

I don't have experience directly with other products such as VMware. But I have the impression, from peers in other organizations, that Hyper-V is somewhat less powerful and feature-rich.

Included in Windows Server licensing with Enterprise Agreements. Leveraging value from the EA and saving money over main competitors like VMware is a key business strength of the solution.

Hyper-V is relatively easy to manage if you have experienced Windows engineers on staff.

I have found the solution to be very reliable (not your typical reboot every couple weeks kind of solution).

Monitoring the performance and uptime of the solution is still best achieved with third party tools.

Hypervisor replication like Zerto or VMware Site Recovery Manager are still superior products for high availability.

Quick and easy deployment

Managing the environment was easy for anyone with Windows experience.

Well documented on the internet for self help.

Very resource intensive.

A learning curve coming from ESXi.

Some limitations such as promiscuous mode on a NIC.

The greatest good the use of Hyper-V has done for our company is to significantly reduce the cost of SQL Server licensing.

Clustering in Hyper-V is well done, once you get used to the differences between Microsoft's way and VMware's way. Log into one of the hosts or at the cluster level, and get to work. In VMware, you have to log into a vCenter host first, then open the vSphere tool and wait for it to authenticate you.

Storage management is an one area that is a prime candidate for improvement. One should not have to shut down a host in order to balance out storage utilization across systems, but that is what we have to do here. We can't just juggle clients and their storage between systems to balance the disk storage utilization out.

For the novice, it can be confusing in trying to decide when to use the Cluster Failover Manager and when to use the Hyper-V Management Console. A lot of what an administrator needs to do is not, at first, intuitive. Finding where to go to pause and drain rolls -- while simple enough once one is accustomed to it -- can be very intimidating to the uninitiated.

Make creation of VMs simple with a wizard that will walk you through each step. A brand new user to Hyper-V should be able to open Hyper-V and create a VM in a matter of minutes. Creating and using the VM are different but creating the actual VM is simple.

Taking snapshots of VMs is simple. Just choose the VM and choose to create a snapshot. The snapshots are easy to manage and are shown in a graphical 'tree' to show how they are related and what the order of their creation is.

Changing VM setting and configurations are simple within Hyper-V settings. You can change everything from the amount of RAM to the size of the hard drive along with how many processors a VM is allocated from the Hyper-V host. You can also add network 'cards' and drives to mimic different RAID and networking setups.

Migrating files from one Hyper-V host to another can be tricky if the VM has snapshots. In testing environments most VMs will have snapshots and it can be a headache to move a VM from one host to another.

Export/Import process is a bit clunky. There are various options when exporting and Hyper-V doesn't do the best job describing them for new users. Once you have done this a few times it is easier but the first few times may be more difficult.

Cloning VMs causes issues. This is more of an issue with Windows and the system ID that Windows has but cloning a VM is not as easy as just copying the files and pasting them in another folder. The VM setting will clone just fine but the VM hard drive (VHD or VHDX) could cause issues.

Hyper-V is available. It won't take you much time to create your own virtualized environment.

It's easily scalable. Not a big deal to add more nodes to cluster.

It's reliable. High Availability goes out-of-the-box.

Not informative. It's hard to find how much of sources used.

Logs not so great. It's hard to troubleshoot issues.

Hard to operate with templates.

It's a challenge to deploy big amount of VMs at one time.

Hyper-V is easy to manage and has a fairly quick learning curve for people who are used to other hypervisor management software.

Hyper-V's high availability options are on par with any other hypervisor solutions available, however they do tend to be a little more difficult to configure.

Storage management is easy to do and the high availability works well.

We have seen hiccups when losing connectivity to either storage or a network that require manual intervention.

Would love to see a more striped down version of windows that the Hyper-V hosts get installed on.

Initial setup is very easy. Just add the role and you've got a hyper-visor that's easy to use

Cheap

Hypervisor itself is stable. No BSODs

Hard/confusing to setup a failover cluster. Must install a separate role on the server and use a separate tool.

Reliability in multi-node cluster is poor. Live migration has failed on a fresh/correct configuration. Solution on technet was to reboot the VM!

Product feels "glued together." Use Failover clustering for some things, hyper-v manager for others, SCVMM for others. Confusing.

Less flexibility. If the host loses management/heartbeat the whole cluster will shutdown to protect integrity even if the VMs are fine. As near as I can tell neither 2008 r2 nor 2012 r2 have an option to control this.

It is easy to get started.

If you are a Microsoft shop, you have to buy the server OS licenses any way and it saves the other hypervisor costs.

It works and just continues to run.

Permissions to individual VMs in a large environment can be difficult to get set up properly.

Third party integration is still developing.

Would like to see a broader adoption.

Extremely easy to manage and cluster.

Exceptionally robust and able to recover from disaster very well.

The product makes good use of available system resources.

It has a way to go in VDI. While the functionality is fully there it is more difficult to deploy than Citrix or VMware.

It needs a better way to upgrade the virtualization framework drivers between revisions and when it is updated for the host system.

Hyper-V allows you to do replicas to another hyper-v server.

Hyper-V in clustered mode is easy to setup and easy to manage.

Hyper-V allows you to seamlessly migrate servers to other Hyper-V instances even at other sites.

Hyper-V allows for seamless integration to Microsoft Azure for a could solution.

Occasionally there are issues that need to be resolved that prevent online migration of a single VM to another host.

SCVMM is needed to optimize a cluster and have it automatically spread the VMs out across a cluster.

Hyper-V supports SMB 3.0, but it must be a Microsoft SMB solution for backups and use of a quorum drive.

Microsoft Hyper-V, a great tool to virtualize physical servers.

Ease of management, you can manage the server from the host or from your desktop.... win win, and i don't mean rdc

Supported OS

Hyper-V needs to include USB pass though.

Smaller footprint installation.

The only thing i would have done differently is automated the deployments to speed up the process.