Hyper-V is powerful and well integrated with Windows, albeit not the easiest or fastest virtualization software out there.
November 29, 2018
Hyper-V is powerful and well integrated with Windows, albeit not the easiest or fastest virtualization software out there.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
I currently use Hyper-V with two clients to virtualize a number of different functions. Specifically, I have VMs acting as domain controllers, Linux servers, and a QuickBooks server. Using Hyper-V to virtualize these machines allows for more easy management, especially if a restart is required, as that can be done remotely without worry of the machine not turning back on. In addition, the entire VM can be backed up and restored in the case of a catastrophic failure. Finally, using Hyper-V allows me to have multiple single purposes machines running on a single higher powered physical machine.
- Hyper-V is deeply integrated with Windows Server, and works with the built-in Windows Server backup software, as such a 3rd party backup solution is not required.
- In general, Hyper-V is easy to set up. There are a number of different options to choose from, but they are laid out in a logical manner and explained fairly well within the Hyper-V interface.
- Hyper-V's virtual disks (.vhdx) are extremely flexible and robust. They support dynamic resizing, i.e. you can create a 1TB disk that will show up as 1TB within the VM, but on the real machine the vhdx will only be as big as the amount of data within the VM.
- Microsoft provides a plethora of support documents for Hyper-V usage.
- Hyper-V's support for non-Windows based OS' (i.e. Linux) is only OK. You can certainly virtualize a Linux machine, but it's integration with the rest of Windows is limited, and it's performance is only OK.
- Adding an external hard drive (USB or otherwise) to a VM is clunky at best, as it requires the physical to be set to offline via the Disk Management snap-in before it can be added to the VM.
- Backing up a VM can be lesson in frustration at times. While a VM can be easily backed up using Windows Server backup - when an issue arises with the backup, it can be very difficult tracking down exactly what the issue is.
- Being able to use one higher powered machine to then virtualize a multitude of other machines has definitely saved on hardware costs. The exact amount, however, is difficult to calculate.
- Initial setup of Hyper-V can be time consuming, and setting up individual VM's is more time consuming than setting up a real machine. However, once the initial setup is done, overall time costs are lowered.
On a Mac I have used both Parallels and VMware Fusion - both of which I like a lot, but they are Mac specific (and Hyper-V won't work on a Mac either). I have briefly used VMware Workstation on a PC, and found it very easy to use, but I do not believe it is nearly as feature rich or flexible as Hyper-V is. VMware VSphere on the other hand is a strong competitor to Hyper-V, but I have very little experience with it.