Hypervisor for the Budget Conscious
June 13, 2023
Hypervisor for the Budget Conscious
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Hyper-V
Hyper-V is our production hypervisor, replacing VMware's ESXi which we ran for nearly a decade. We moved from ESXi to Hyper-V after support issues during a major incident. We also wanted to have closer integration with Microsoft Azure, our chosen Cloud platform. This has opened up the door to Azure Site Recovery to address potential Disaster Recovery scenarios.
- Integration with Microsoft System Center.
- MS Windows administrative users have a head start with using Hyper-V as it is a familiar product.
- It's very cost effective compared to VMware ESXi.
- We manage Hyper-V using both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the in-build Hyper-V administration tool, the former being the main product we use as the built-in tool is very light on functionality, unlike VMware ESXi.
- Management of storage is not great and quite a shift away from how VMware does it with ESXi; there is no separate panel/blade/window for LUNs/data stores, which means there is a lot of back and forth when trying to manage storage.
- A dedicated client with all functionality in one place would be awesome.
- Having the equivalent of ESXi's virtual console is something which is absolutely needed.
- Integration with Microsoft Azure.
- Low cost.
- Manageability.
- We effectively saved c.£50K a year by not renewing our ESXi licensing and moving over to Hyper-V.
- Hyper-V's management console isn't as feature rich as VMware ESXi.
- Hyper-V has given us back stability in our virtual estate.
Considering the maturity of ESXi, Hyper-V is something I would definitely consider using in future jobs or organisations. We selected Hyper-V after many years of using ESXi; several factors led us to this change, including a poor support experience with VMware, and the lower cost of Hyper-V. We looked at other options including Nutanix and Hyper Converged Infrastructure, however with such a busy team we didn't have the time to learn this completely new technology stack, whereas (whilst also new) Hyper-V had a much easier learning curve.
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