Item: Hyper-V
Rating: 7
Author: Alan Matson, CCNA:S, MCP

Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Hyper-V to support virtual applications and additional virtual machines for production and development. The ability to spin up a virtual environment which could be backed up and re-stored quickly was critical for our infrastructure for development of new support for our client base. We tested several virtual environments during the time phase and Hyper-V was one of them.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Quick and easy deployment
Managing the environment was easy for anyone with Windows experience.
Well documented on the internet for self help.

Cons

Very resource intensive.
A learning curve coming from ESXi.
Some limitations such as promiscuous mode on a NIC.

Return on Investment

Ultimately we did not choose Hyper-V due to the limitations mentioned previously.

Alternatives Considered

VMware ESXi, Proxmox VE and Kernel-based Virtual Machine

While Hyper-V did stack better for our needs than Proxmox VE or KVM, it did not offer the features that ESXi did for our needs and we had to forgo choosing Hyper-V for the promiscuous mode needs.

Other Software Used

Proxmox VE, Kernel-based Virtual Machine, Cisco ASA

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Hyper-V Feature Ratings

Comments

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The not so Hyper virtualization platform Hyper-V