ESX Enterprise and Hyper-V

[zenomorph]

Hi there,

As the subject states ESX Enterprise and HyperV an old topic.

Right now were faced with a difficult decision which I have been chosen to make. We've been evaluating VMware ESX Enterprise 3.5 in our environment for almost 2 years now and its been a great product and we love it. Especially the features like memory sharing, resource allocation and overcommittment. We've been using it in a standalone (non SAN) environment.

However with the recent release of HyperV we've sort of come to a state where we need to re-evaluate our virtualization solution. For us fortunately or maybe not we have a global license with MS so all the MS products are free to us including all versions of HyperV.

So now I need to make the decision between the 2, based on my study of HyperV and usage of ESX Enterprise I find it to be a far more superior product for our environment - and now were planning to move to the next step of SAN. But before we even get there I need to somehow propose the VMware ESX Enterprise solution with its approx. US$16000 price tag against the free HyperV solution available.

For me some of the points I can think of for VMware is:

- Better clustering solution Active-Active vs. HyperV which is more based on Windows CLustering hence probably Active-Passive is more appropriate (means we need a standby machine for HyperV)

- Memory sharing

- More control over failover since we can readily have different ESX hosts pick VMs and load them from any LUN within the SAN, whereas HyperV like Windows cluster picks up a whole LUN which may contain several VMs

- Features like "Fault Tolerance", vMotion VMware wins in these

but what I need to do is somehow justify spending an additional $16000 on ESX versus free HyperV which I'm finding quite difficult. For a start I've tried calculating cost/benefit based on consolidation ratio given that HyperV when allocating resources the VM takes consumes the RAM once allocated compared to VMware which can share memory saving about 30% but based on this alone I don't think the extra VMs I can load on ESX is enough to cover the $16000 for the Enterprise license.

Can anyone give other pointers or advice on what you think.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Can you provide a bit more information:

You didn't mention the size of your environment, or how many virtual machines you will be hosting. Can you provide this information?

Its interesting that your company has been evaluating ESX for almost 2 years, but it sounds like this same company is ready to move on Hyper-V without any evaluation period. Is this correct?

Does your free MS licensing include Windows Server Enterprise as well?

[AntonVZhbankov]

Hyper-V is not free really. Do not compare prices for hypervizors.

Add storage, hardware, networking, power. Add management solution (SCVMM is not free), backup solution etc.

This is the price of virtual infrastructure. What part of whole price takes hypervizor?

Add OS licensing. For example, Windows Datacenter is about 7000$ for dual-socket server. If you can place equal number of VMs to 2 VMware Servers instead of 3 Hyper-V, will you count this difference? Will you count difference on network ports, FC ports, power etc?

Add application licensing. What part of this takes hypervizor price?

And this is the only right way to think about prices for virtual infrastructure.

Oh, I just forgot. Can Hyper-V work with Linux and Solaris machines as good as ESX? Maybe Hyper-V can provide Fault Tolerance? Can Hyper-V work with snapshots as good as ESX?

If I remember right MS team is very proud, they just released drivers for Linux VMs, so now we have really amazing new feature: Linux VM in Hyper-V now supports mouse!

---

VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[jbruelasdgo]

how did you manage to maintain evaluation for 2 years?

and suddenly implement something you have not evaluated (but hey is free)

if you really like free stuff, then there are superior products like ESXi, XenServer, Oracle VM, etc

Jose B Ruelas

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You might want to check out the cost calculator here - http://www.vmware.com/go/costperappcalc.

Dave

VMware Communities User Moderator

New book in town - vSphere Quick Start Guide -http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/08/12/new-book-in-town-vsphere-quick-start-guide/.

Do you have a system or PCI card working with VMDirectPath? Submit your specs to the Unofficial VMDirectPath HCL - http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=21.

[ealaqqad · Accepted solution]

For others falling in the same situation where they have to compare hyper-v vs VMware, I thought to let you know that ITComparison.com has updated their comparison in this regard & the new one can be found at:

MS Hyper-V R2 vs VMware ESX 4

I hope this help some one, if it does please reward points.

Enjoy,

Eiad Al-Aqqad

System X & Storage Technical Specialist

Founder of