Hyper-V is the place to be for Virtualization if you are an SMB
Updated April 05, 2020
Hyper-V is the place to be for Virtualization if you are an SMB
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
Hyper-V has been our hypervisor of choice because of its fairly seamless integration with the rest of the Windows stack and its great price. We used it to consolidate our server farm into just a handful of actual physical servers. It is being used by our whole organization in that almost every piece of server infrastructure, except the hosts themselves, is hosted on a hyper-v server. Some are in clusters and some are standalone. It solves the need for additional hardware expense, space needed to house the servers and saves money when it comes to power consumption. In conjunction with Windows clustering, it also gives us an in-house live backup in that the virtual servers can run on any of our clustered hosts.
- Hyper-V is both fairly easy to learn while being robust in its capability of taking one physical server and turning it into multiple functioning systems for user consumption.
- One of the gigantic strengths of Hyper-V is the fact that it is included with Windows Server.
- When used in conjunction with Windows Clustering, Hyper-V goes from just being a virtualization product to also being a Disaster Recovery product. Setting up multiple hosts in a cluster, if all of them have the capability of hosting all machines at once, allows one to know that if one host goes off line the other hosts will pick up the slack and keep the virtual instances running.
- Since Hyper-V is free and a MS product there is copious free support for it on the web. Most issues and questions can be dealt with just by doing some searching.
- Hyper-V's snapshot feature can sometimes be a little clunky and cause issues removing the snapshots. Most problems are easily rectified but it is a weak point of the software.
- Host Servers that have Hyper-V installed on them, if there are a lot of servers, becoming fairly useless when it comes to being used for other functions...both in a literal sense and licensing sense.
- Despite the product being free with MS server, the new licensing scheme MS has available makes it more costly to host Hyper-V instances when one wants more than two per physical host.
- Hyper-V has allowed us to take a small IT room and have it server up dozens of servers despite the lack of space available for hardware.
- Since it is basically free, any return from its use is a positive return on investment and the lessened power usage is a great way to show this when considering Hyper-v.
- We have had many instances of host machines blue screening or rebooting on their own and the clustering capability of Hyper-V, when used with Windows systems, has allowed these issues to be invisible to users.
Hyper-V is much less expensive than VMware, which is always a plus. It is also more friendly to new administrators trying to pick up the system for the first time. With that said I would consider VMware to be slightly more enterprise friendly when it comes to features and WMware is definitely used more when it comes to larger IT shops. We a re a medium sized shop and VMware was a bit overkill when it came to our needs.