Why Hyper-V might be for you
July 25, 2017
Why Hyper-V might be for you
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
We use Hyper-V for development VMs as well as for production VMs. I run, manage and help developers use our 600+ development VMs including all the underlying infrastructure.
- 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.
- We experienced a lot of hardware problems which resulted in restart of all the nodes which is the exact opposite of what I think a cluster should do.
- Thanks to Hyper-V, we are able to fully utilize our hardware and therefore cram our 600+ VMs on our 10 hosts.
- Thanks to Microsoft developer program we can run most of our developer VMs for a really competitive price.
- VMware
Hyper-V is less advanced and less stable than VMware but it is also a lot less expensive. You get a lot of features from the start with Hyper-V where with VMware you need to add quite a bit of products (vCenter, etc.) to get basic features like clustering.