Hyper-V is great for the right scenarios. Remains basic, but does the job and is easy to use.
March 25, 2022
Hyper-V is great for the right scenarios. Remains basic, but does the job and is easy to use.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
Hyper-V comes with specific Microsoft licenses to our organization so we use it as a "freebie" which makes it more desirable in some cases than any other virtualization solution simply because we don't need to pay hefty Enterprise-grade licenses. We do use Hyper-V in a rather simplistic way - host servers and guest VMs on each one. However, for this purpose alone we are pretty satisfied with what we get. In a previous company, I was a part of the efforts for automated provisioning of VMs in Hyper-V and even though it required A LOT of reading semi-internal documentation and some in-depth posts, we got it running in a pretty stable state.
- Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
- Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
- Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
- Hyper-V is very slow to adapt to trends in infrastructure and its features are very basic when compared to the offerings from VMWare and some other companies.
- For instance, VMWare has implemented a built-in Kubernetes cluster provisioning feature (that comes with a specific license that costs extra of course).
- Hyper-V's infrastructure monitoring is very basic and altering is non-existent. It's up to the system administrators to either create or install separate monitoring & alerting solutions.
- Hyper-V cannot handle some virtualization needs all that well - my example is with VM backups and snapshots. Both of these are supposed to fulfill specific needs, but there are a number of gotchas in each of those cases (easily corruptible VHD files, gradually growing in size snapshots) that an administrator needs to address occasionally - administration overhead where you would not expect it.
- Licensing and cost - you can have a deal with Microsoft and get Hyper-V licenses as a part of a bigger licensing contract. Thus, Hyper-V can be an Enterprise-grade solution that you get essentially for free which may even include support from Microsoft.
- Ease of use by less experienced people - the GUI is very easy to navigate and use. I have used Hyper-V on multiple workstations and my experience translated easily to managing Hyper-V on physical servers.
- Stability - Hyper-V provisioned VMs are pretty stable.
- Because Hyper-V licenses were essentially free, that allowed us to have multiple Hyper-V-based hosts for our business needs.
- Ease of use - the people who manage Hyper-V were able to do so very quickly because of the ease of use of the product.
The ease of use and essentially free license made the adoption of Hyper-V in some parts of my current and one of my previous organizations a no-brainer.
For sure it's not the best product on the market, but it will do the job just fine in a lot of use cases. Automated provisioning can be very tricky, but with enough effort into investigating how to do it (reading documentation, forums, blog posts, projects on GitHub) it's doable, but with gotchas along the way.
For sure it's not the best product on the market, but it will do the job just fine in a lot of use cases. Automated provisioning can be very tricky, but with enough effort into investigating how to do it (reading documentation, forums, blog posts, projects on GitHub) it's doable, but with gotchas along the way.
Do you think Hyper-V delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Hyper-V's feature set?
No
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