Item: Hyper-V
Rating: 10
Author: Jeffrey Sabotin

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Hyper-V is used across the whole organization. It solves the problem of agility, not having to purchase a physical for every function needed, saves money, allows for maintenance during business hours, etc.

Pros and Cons

Hypervisor
Populating with virtual machines
Redundancy and replication

Not so difficult to setup outside the normal usage
Storage spaces direct is quite difficult to understand and setup
Centralized dashboard

Return on Investment

Lessened Server Sprawl
Made things simpler
More agility
Saved power and battery

Alternatives Considered

Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer) and VMware ESXi

You already have to purchase the licensing for Windows Servers so why not bundle that in with the cost of the hypervisor. VMware seems to be a better virtualization platform with a better dashboard, but if you aren't managing hundreds of physical servers across multiple data centers, then Hyper-v should work really well. Citrix seems to be getting out of the server virtualziation market from what I can see.

Support Rating

Most of the time, you can find support on the thousands of websites, blogs and community sites that are out there. Very much Internet supported, and if you don't stray too far away from the standard setup of Hyper-v, you shouldn't go wrong. I've had to call a couple of times, and Microsoft was very good at resolving my problem. it seem that Microsoft has heard from people and their support system, and are doing a much better job in this.

Key Insights

Do you think Hyper-V delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Hyper-V's feature set?

Yes

Did Hyper-V live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Hyper-V go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Hyper-V again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Parallels Remote Application Server, Microsoft SQL Server, Camtasia

Likelihood to Recommend

Simple setups are really great when you want to put multiple VMs on the same physical hardware. You then could use replications of those VMs so that you would have a redundant copy of the VM. You can do this every 5 minutes. Probably not appropriate if you put all your servers in the cloud anyway.

Hyper-V gets the job done while being included in the cost of Windows Server.

Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V