Hyper-v 2016 vs vSphere 6.5

[abugeja]

Hi,

understand im on a VMware forum but would like your honest opinion on hyper-v & vsphere. Have people migrated from vsphere over to hyper-v and found issues between the hypervisors? What could they do before that you cant do now etc? Can anyone point to a good article in this area as the majority of the ones I see are very heavy one way or the other

Thanks.

[Eric_Allione]

This video pretty much says it all:

[abugeja]

haha nice video

anyone else have a view?

[Eric_Allione]

I could not help myself with that one.

But attempting to be serious now, I work with Microsoft field engineers often and I like to ask them tons of questions about their opinions on the industry and where the technologies are heading. Just a couple weeks ago I was speaking with someone who was conducting training in Windows 10. In the class he brought up Hyper-V; on a brief technical note, he mentioned that the Hyper-V on Windows 10 is not as good and does not support nested virtualization, which is something we need for network hypervisor like Cisco's VIRL.

However, what surprised me is that he said that, feature-wise, Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016 is on par with only vSphere 4.1. This was coming from someone who is a trained evangelist. Also, he stated unashamed that Microsoft does not support a VDI solution of its own but instead endorses Citrix.

Of course, he still aggressively pitches Hyper-V despite its inability to match up to the vSphere features. Part of this argument is that Hyper-V ships out of the box as part of the Windows Server package and that it can integrate seamlessly with Azure. And of course, once we start trying to compare vCloud to Azure, there is no question about which has more hope for the future. The buzz on Twitter is that vCloud was sold and is on its way out. However, VMware will be getting an integrated solution with AWS pretty soon (this is in beta), and this should stand it up very well to anything that deploys out of Azure.

It is a compelling case for Hyper-V, pricewise, that if you are already using Windows Server and want to virtualize it that you would use the native Hyper-V. However, if you want a large and complex private cloud environment, then I would be curious as to how anyone would try to do that with Hyper-V.

[abugeja]

Thanks for the reply. I guess im after more of a comparison between the two. Such as HA, DRS, Memory oversubscription between the two of them.

[Eric_Allione]

Shortly after posting that I ran into a different Microsoft field engineer. I thought of this thread and even showed him the video in the first reply.

He thought it was funny but had a much more focused explanation and comparison, also explaining why the other Microsoft tech said that vSphere only aligns to 4.1. It's because the comparison is fundamentally unfair because Hyper-V by itself is extremely limited. The reason for this, however, is that it depends on SCCM and subset components of SCCM for all advanced features. For example, PowerShell DSC directly competes against Chef/Puppet, being a subset of the massive SCCM suite.

SCCM is also very hard to test since there is a lack of evaluation opportunities. Microsoft does have its version of Hands on Labs though, and it was also explained to me that if you join the Microsoft Developer network for a few hundred dollars then you can have access to it. I'm also interested in hearing the answers to your questions. Sorry no bites yet.

[abugeja]

from the articles ive seen on the web the two products are the same in terms of max configurations but im not interested in a VM that has 62 vCPUs or 512Gb of ram.

For some reason its very hard to find this information around.

[abugeja]

im surprised there is no other comments regarding this topic other than Eric and myself.

[abugeja]

still no comments regarding this. Anyone care to add their 2 cents?

[PCTechStream]

MY 2 CENTS!!!

If you're interested in learning how the latest releases of Hyper-V and VMware vSphere compare, this is the session for you!

LINK: https://sec.ch9.ms/ch9/679c/c311fe4b-a6e5-4b9a-8c2f-9f3cd7c5679c/CDCWindowsServer2016HyperV_high.mp4

If you're interested in Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the differences, this is the session for you!

LINK: http://apmdigest.com/sites/default/files/images/VMvSphereHyperV_Whitepaper.pdf

If you're interested in Migrating to Microsoft: VMware to Hyper-V, this is the session for you!

LINK: https://sec.ch9.ms/sessions/ignite/2015/BRK3493.mp4 

"Edited Highlights:

• The Microsoft Firewall is your enemy. It can cause things to stop working in all places where Windows is used – SCVMM, Windows Hyper-V and then source VM – whether that source VM is running in VMware vSphere and/or Windows Hyper-V

• VMware Convertor works with or without VMware Multi-Hypervisor Manager – and generally presents more options/features. However, if you want to have simple/quick method of converting from Windows Hyper-V to VMware vSphere then MHM is your man, if you want the fancy options then VMware Convertor is what you should focus on IMHO.

• VMware Convertor can convert both physical and virtual machines – on the fly without a power down of the source Windows Hyper-V VM. Remember VMware has been doing conversions like this ever since the P2V product which I first started using in 2003.

• The time to convert from M2V is considerably shorter than the time convert from V2M (5-6mins compared 30-40mins).

• VMware Convertor can do a “final sync” between the source (Windows Hyper-V) and the destination (VMware vSphere) which gives you an consistent copy of the VM.

• If you’re serious about (or forced against your will into) a multi-hypervisor strategy – I think neither VMware MHM or Microsoft SCVMM, where one vendor manages another, is a serious proposition. I think if your serious about this approach then you should be looking at a provisioning tool like VMware vCloud Automation Center.

• Adding VMware into SCVMM requires – adding vCenter, adding vSphere hosts AND retrieving/authentication to each and every host to get full functionality. Neither SCVMM or MVMC (Microsoft Virtual Machine Convertor) allow you to convert a vSphere VM to a Windows Hyper-V without some sort of power down in the process, and as consequence a maintenance window

• Using SCVMM to convert V2M is fraught with authentication/communications problems, using “Convert Physical Machine” might work better and quicker (around 10mins compared to 30-40mins with MVMC/SCVMM V2M). I understand that SCVMM R2 removes “Convert Physical Machine” from SCVMM. This in the release notes for SCVMM R2 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn303329.aspx

• After any successful conversion from vSphere to Hyper-V I’ve yet to see any method that successfully allowed for Microsoft Intregration Services to be installed – that means no mouse control, and in some case no network capabilities."

MORE:

"Multi-Hypervisor Management and VM Conversion"

• Installing VMware Convertor
• Installing VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager
• Adding Windows Hyper-V Servers to VMware vCenter MHM
• Adding vCenter/vSphere hosts to Microsoft SCVMM
• Converting a Windows Hyper-V VM to a VMware vSphere VM with VMware vCenter MHM: (M2V)
• Converting a Windows Hyper-V VM to a VMware vSphere VM with VMware Convertor: (M2V)
• Converting a VMware vSphere VM to Windows Hyper-V VM with Microsoft SCVMM: (V2M)
• Converting a VMware vSphere VM to Windows Hyper-V VM with MVMC: (V2M)
• Conclusions: Time to stop kicking the tyres?

Raul.

VMware VDI Administrator.

http://ITCloudStream.com/

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[chrishorne]

I believe its actually more useful to compare the complete stack - after all hyper-v and vsphere hypervisors are actually just a part of the overall engineered stack. This is when the Management tools, the storage later, network and of course the hardware used have an impact on the solution.

The company I work for has a Large vSphere footprint and is actively migrating a lot of it to Hyper-V. The stacks that have been provided to us are very different and not directly comparable  - even some of our architectural patterns are not possible on Hyper-V due to the lack (currently) of Sync Replication and a SRM equivalent in our stack.

We have found that we have also had to introduce new versions of our vSphere stack for very specific use cases - software and/or workloads that for whatever reason need to run on a vSphere Stack.

We've found dynamic memory for our workloads useless - almost all of our workloads need static memory (including MS products).

Good Blog with some vSphere and Hyper-V information is virtual10.com

[rafficvmware]

Here is the detailed comparision between Hyper-v and VMware

VMware vs Hyper-V - Virtualization Battle

[Eos]

Hi Raul,

in the first video: Windows Server Nano related disccussion are mostly absolote as microsoft later announced Nano (which even more restrictive as core) would be repositioned as an OS only for Windows Containers and not matching requirements for most VMs today. With this HyperV again considerably falling back on the most important advantages of vSphere: Security & Reliability

What is next for Windows Server and System Center with a faster release cadence | Thomas Maurer

Delivering continuous innovation with Windows Server – Hybrid Cloud Blog

[user9922]

While I would love to love ESX.....there is one thing that talk against it: Running local storage.
VMware earn their money on their Enterprise customers which use SAN, e.g. i SCSI,  and expensive enterprise hardware hence this is where focus is....and it shows!
It means ESX have a limited hardware support and often terrible performance on local-storage-setup. One exception is USB pass-through though, which Hyper-V doesn't have.

You can get good storage performance with SSD or/and have a lot of hardware storage cache to compensate for the terrible ESX-local-storage handling.
To get a decent performance on ESX with local storage you have to virtualize something like FreeNAS to deliver iSCSI and  pass-through your local storage adapter(s) to FreeNAS so ESX doesn't touch it directly. Then have ESX use the iSCSI that FreeNAS deliver, which is virtualize by ESX itself, a long way to just get decent local storage!

You can also pass-through a whole disk to a VM (using a RDM-file on ESX), but then VMs can share storage and not have a VM in one file, which it many cases is on of the biggest reasons to virtualize in the first place.

Another thing to prove my point ESX doesn't support disk with 4K sectors which has been around for a long time and is the future. Hyper-V (and for that matter FreeNAS) does of course. But again ESX didn't want to use "5 minutes" to implement it in ESX....I believe the job is already done in the linux kernel, they can just grape it, they don't have to build from ground up.

Compared with Hyper-V where local storage works like it should out of the box with good performance....even support Intel RSTe raid.

ESX is Linux and have a small footprint.....Hyper-V is Windows and we all know what that means, although it's a Core version.

The small-business market is HUGE and can be a good business....but VMware still have to wake-up and smell the coffee.
VMware should put a price tag on ESXi at $125 instead of give it away free and sell 100.000 licenses...that should cover the "5 minutes" it take to implement descent local storage handling. On top of that VMware would get even more fans which would choose ESX over Hyper-V when they one day move to enterprise-class.

[Mrgrouchy]

Hyper-V is far more stable.  It is NATIVE to its operating system which is designed to run on ANY hardware.   The UI design is far superior. It is nowhere near as buggy as VMware. VMware does not work on anything hardware unless it is specifically supported, good luck trying to match up your version to what ever hardware you buy and if it's not supported you will never have a stable environment, and even if you do put the properly supported software with the correct Dell hardware model, firmware version, it STILL is unstable.  This is why HyperV and Linux KVM is superior to VMware no matter how many features VMware gets.  vSphere is an idiotic piece of software.  You must keep changing versions to work with different versions of VMware.  Who wants to deal with all of that nonsense? The VMware website is a disaster of useless navigation and super over complexity. Even the branding of products is terrible where most everyday users don't even know what does what. Buggy software is unacceptable the primary purpose of an OS is stability and user interface design a close second. Features last. When VMware works properly it does have a lot of features unfortunately this company has extremely poorly written software, with a poor overall design, usability and architecture, and that is why we see now an exodus of users to other options like the public cloud and KVM based Linux etc

[user9922]

Thank for you feedback and direct  honesty, I guess you really don't like ESX 😛

But I agree with you on many of the issues you point out. Quality of the software, the website, their product naming/branding.
Management tool....I don't agree so much.Try to connect Hyper-V manager to a HyperV server (non-desktop version of course) not joined to the domain....that's take a lot of work!
I think the ESXi did a pretty good job with the Web client, and I like you can SSH to your ESX  server....you can't do that to you Hyper-V. You can use PowerShell, but I still prefer my putty and WinSCP 🙂
Unfortunately I need USB passthrough, that's why I consider ESXi.

[pwolf]

I think you can get summon the biggest differences between the two:

- Hyper-V runs on almost any hardware and you can keep current with the software without changing you hardware for quite a long time

- ESXi is quite pesky at the hardware it runs on - and you can be quite assured, that the newest version of ESXi will not run on any server older than 3 years. That is the biggest disadvantage of ESXi in my opinion

- Hyper-V is very pesky at the VM Guest software you are running under its hypervisor and if you need a graphical console other than RDP on your VM guest, the graphic is really bad - further there is no real support for USB (pass-through) devices. That are the biggest disadvantages of Hyper-V in my opinion.

- ESXi supports a multitude of VM Guest software and you can even run quite old guests easily, it has a really good graphics performance and it does support USB-passthrough for almost all available USB devices

- Hyper-V is Windows, so you can use a multitude of software for all sorts of jobs to be done including management of the hypervisor, but the included management tools are quite limited in my view

- ESXi is quite proprietary, so the software options you can run on your server are quite limited, but the included management tools (if you are using Vcenter server) have much more possibilities (they are only horribly slow, if you look e.g. on the webclient)

The rest is of importance only for very specific or big environments IMO.

[Soap01]

I don't agree with the comment about ESXi not running on server hardware older than 3 years. We are typically refreshing hardware every 3 to 4 years but some of that always trickles down to TEST/DEV and it's all still listed on the HCL and supported. Granted at some point it's going to fall off the HCL for the latest version of the hypervisor but your usually on hardware that is over 5 years old at least by that point.

And to Mrgrouchy, you work for Microsoft I assume right? So much false information spewed in that only ever post from you. Sigh....

[hle9999]

Hi,

In my environment I have both Hyper-V 2012R2 and Vmware 5.x to latest 6.5 , each have 3 hosts running total 25 VMs serving all kind of applications (SQL, Firewall, RSA...). They are up for more than two year now. I do support on my own learning mostly on YouTube and google search. I do have backup system using Arcronis, or do manual backup provided by the product. Both conversion tool from Microsoft and VMware are not perfect, I found it work most for me when I perform conversion make sure to stop all application services, batch processes, and do not start the new VM after conversion to allow you to check the settings of the new VMs. Also I found that VMware did not work well with application using hardware dongle key.

when you perform P2V make sure your DNS settings and domain name are correct.

I read all comparing information on both product mostly online and do my own research, take notes on problem or errors from others that do the installation or conversion, and just pick one that work good for my environment regarding to operating system (windows or Unix), licensing, in my case my company mostly on Windows environment but I do have a few applications do not support Hyper-v at that time that why I ended up have both VMware and Hyper-V They both are good, I have not had a failure VM before, I did test restore VM on the same host or to different host on both product and it works very well. I will plan to convert the host to Hyper-V 2016 in the future.

Just my 2 cents, and sorry English is not my main language.