Hyper-V is not ready for prime time, but has merits in SMB or small workload scenarios
May 02, 2017
Hyper-V is not ready for prime time, but has merits in SMB or small workload scenarios
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
We began to make an entire conversion to Hyper-V over the last 2 years for our new DC and also our remote locations. The problem it was supposed to solve was the increasing cost of VMware.
- 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.
- The allure of Hyper-V is its initial cost, but the real TCO is not as clear as the skills required are hard to come by and the overall reliability due to complexity wind up being less.
- For simple single server installations the ROI may be valid, but you must look at all aspects of supportablility and possibly having split trained staff.
VMware is the gold standard and while the up front cost is higher the maturity of the underlying hyper-visor is far superior. ESXi's smaller footprint and typically more resilient platform makes for easier to achieve long duration up times. VMware will perform better and more reliably under more resource constrained scenarios that Hyper-V Finding people skilled in VMware is far more easier than Hyper-V. Hyper-V is best used in single server small footprint use cases where the up front cost is more important.