Great Hypervisor for IT and More
April 04, 2019
Great Hypervisor for IT and More
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
Hyper-V is our bare-metal hypervisors. Anything that we run on-premise resides on a Hyper-V virtual machine. Our Hyper-V implementation is simple, with local storage on the servers and no failover clustering.
- Hyper-V is free. Totally free. No feature limits aside from the lack of a GUI on the server itself, but so long as you have a Windows workstation, you can manage it remotely.
- Remote management is excellent, and the default way to interact with the hypervisor.
- PowerShell is extensively supported and very powerful. If you have complex needs or like to get your hands dirty, the tools are very powerful.
- It's a very stable platform. Our hypervisors require so little maintenance it's a dream. And the virtual machines are also stable and fast.
- There are some options not present in the GUI tools. It seems features are implemented with PowerShell commands before being brought to the GUI.
- Hyper-V will sometimes be a bit slower to pick up new virtualization technologies like GPU sharing, as compared with VMware or even Microsoft's own Azure.
- We haven't spent a penny on Hyper-V, but Microsoft still makes their nut from the other products you inevitably purchase to use with Hyper-V, like the Windows Server.
- We've been able to very cheaply provide on-premise virtual machines for developers without having to pay a cloud provider.
I have used VMware Vsphere for a few edge cases such as Mac virtualization. I found the GUI to have far more options, but also found the documentation less concise. I've also used Virtual Box and VMware Fusion for desktop virtualization. Both are good and have the advantage of being cross-platform. If you're running Windows already, Hyper-V is just an add-on feature away, and has nearly all the features of a server installation, including full PowerShell support.