VMWare vs Hyper-V

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Jonski

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#52559 4-Dec-2009 12:23

We're in the process of spec'ing our shiny new virtual infrastructure, and it has been explained to me that one advantage of VMWare over Hyper-V is Hyper-V's reliance on a general purpose OS as the hypervisor in a parent partition, and that all (?) VM I/O goes through this, creating a single point of failure.

I prefer VMWare for this and other reasons (*), but I'm needing to fend off promotion of Hyper-V which I don't think is right for our setup.

I'm looking for something that compares the pros and cons of their respective hypervisor models, preferably in a nice diagram. I've seen it before, but can't find it now, having done a bit of Googleing and going back through all those supplier white papers that clog my inbox.

I've got VMWare's Features And Benefits comparison chart which is great but my managers (ahem) don't read very well- although they like pictures and diagrams with nice pointy arrows ;-)

If there's something a little like http://windowsitpro.com/files/01/97857/fig_01.jpg but with VMWare side-by-side and showing these alleged bottlenecks I'd love to see it. Can anybody advise?

Of course all other comments are appreciated too!

Thanks in advance
Jon

(*) Including smaller footprint, hardened drivers, 4th-gen technology, supports our flavour of Linux, memory ballooning, page sharing etc

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#279291 4-Dec-2009 12:34

Actually you don't need a general OS for Hyper-V.

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#279373 4-Dec-2009 16:42

I'm assuming that you mean Hyper-V R2, rather than the first version of Hyper-V? VMware beats Hyper-V hands-down, but Hyper-V R2 brings lots of new features that means it pretty much matches VMware's feature set.

But I guarantee that you won't find a balanced, unbiased answer! I've been looking at the pros and cons recently for a project and overall VMware seemed to be the better product. But in the end I went with Hyper-V R2 as it was easier to support for the specific customer's needs and had all the features they needed.

And don't forget that when comparing Hyper-V R2 to VMware, you need to include the Virtual Machine Manager R2 software as this provides lots of the features you need to match the VMware featrueset. (The Workgroup edition is under $1000 and lets you manage 3 physical servers)

jaymz

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#279408 4-Dec-2009 18:31

Agreed, it will be hard to find a good comparison chart out there.

I mainly put out VMWARE ESX 3.5 and vSphere (ESX4) hosts for virtualisation. I feel that as VMWARE have been in the market longer than Hyper-V that they provide a better service (that is my opinion so don't flame me)

VMWARE has some great features, if you are willing to pay for them. The coolest thing I have found is the High Avaliblity (HA) of Virtual Center, where as long as you have X number of identical hardware ESX hosts you can migrate guest OS's between them live, with clients connected and everything, so cool to watch. It also allows for if an ESX host fails it will automatically move the guest OS's over to the running ESX host (no downtime)

If price is an issue for you I would suggest looking at ESXi, it is VMWARE's free ESX software (free registration required from memory)
http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
It lacks some of the advanced features of vSphere but still perfect for low cost virtualisation setups.

What hardware have you got? Centralised storage (SAN)?

kris

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#279449 4-Dec-2009 22:32

hope this helps..

http://www.vdi.co.nz/2009/12/04/vmware-comparison/

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#279452 4-Dec-2009 22:37

jaymz: VMWARE has some great features, if you are willing to pay for them. The coolest thing I have found is the High Avaliblity (HA) of Virtual Center, where as long as you have X number of identical hardware ESX hosts you can migrate guest OS's between them live, with clients connected and everything, so cool to watch. It also allows for if an ESX host fails it will automatically move the guest OS's over to the running ESX host (no downtime)

I'll expand on the features that Jaymz is referring to... Both Microsoft and VMware have solutions for migrating virtual guests between physical hosts: (all of which require centraiised storage, i.e. a SAN)

VMware vMotion & Microsoft Live Migration: This is the ability to move a running virtual guest between physical hosts with no downtime. This can be used if you want to take down a physical server for maintenance, or if you want to move a virtual guest onto another host for performance reasons.

VMware High Availability & Microsoft Failover Clustering: In the event of an unplanned outage of a physical host, the virtual guests can will automatically be moved to another available host and restarted. There is some downtime involved with both VMware and Microsoft's solutions but they are both hands-free.

VMware Fault Tolerance: This is a VMware-only feature that is similar to High Availability but has no downtime. Effectively, what VMware are doing, is running the same virtual guest on two physical servers at the same time. They use their vLockstep technology to keep the two virtual guests in sync, and then in the event of an unplanned failure of one of the physical hosts, the virtual guests will seamlessly keep running on the available server.

VMware's Fault Tolerance sounds impressive, but it comes with a hefty price tag. Which brings me on to the next topic of pricing...

If you're running a small virtual environment of up to 3 physical servers, then you can buy VMware Essentials or VMware Essentials Plus which is a cost-effective bundle to run VMware's vSphere (ESX or ESXi) on up to 3 physical servers and vCenter Essentials (the management server). The main difference between Essentials and Essentials Plus is that the Plus version has the High Availability feature. From the VMware website, Essentials costs US$995 and Essentials Plus costs US$2995.

If you want the Fault Tolerance feature, you need to buy at least the Advanced version of vSphere which costs about US$2700 per processor plus you would need to buy vCenter Server which costs US$2000 for the Foundation edition (maximum of 3 hosts) or US$6000 for the Standard edition. So if you had a two server environment, each with dual processors, you would be looking at US$2700 x 4 + US$2000 = US$12800.

Microsoft's pricing is a bit easier... For starters, you can use the free version of Hyper-V called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, and you get Live Migrations and Failover Clustering included, for free. If you need/want a GUI on the servers, you can use Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (NZ$1345) or Enterprise (NZ$4370) and also get the Live Migration and Failover Clustering included. If you buy the Enterprise version, you get the added bonus of being to able to run four virtual copies of Windows Server as guests for free.

For further virtual machine management, you would need to purchase Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). This comes in two versions: Foundation edition provides all the licensing you need for a maximum of 5 host and costs NZ$936. If you need to manage more than 5 hosts, then you need to buy the Enterprise edition for NZ$1632 plus NZ$50 per virtual guest.

Hopefully that's an unbiased and balanced comparison, but you should work out what requirements you're after and base you decisions on that.

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#279454 4-Dec-2009 22:46

kris: hope this helps..

http://www.vdi.co.nz/2009/12/04/vmware-comparison/

Those comparison charts will be out of date as they are based on Hyper-V and not Hyper-V R2. (and they are obviously VMware-biased...

)

kris

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#279461 4-Dec-2009 23:29

Hyper-V R2 delivers two main improvements over Hyper-V v.10

1. Microsoft’s first implementation of live migration.

2. Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), another Microsoft version 1.0 technology that finally allows multiple virtual machines to share a LUN – a critical enabling technology for live migration. (nothing new for anyone who has been running VMware ESX )

Beyond live migration and CSV, Hyper-V R2 includes other capabilities, but compared to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V R2 still lacks critical functionality necessary to support production workloads. As such, noted industry analysts, the Burton Group, recently declared that Hyper-V R2 was inadequate for use in a production datacenter.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/174204/with_hyperv_r2_microsoft_sets_its_sights_on_vmware.html

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#279463 4-Dec-2009 23:47

Jonski: We're in the process of spec'ing our shiny new virtual infrastructure, and it has been explained to me that one advantage of VMWare over Hyper-V is Hyper-V's reliance on a general purpose OS as the hypervisor in a parent partition, and that all (?) VM I/O goes through this, creating a single point of failure.

are you planning on running your virtualization on top of a fibrechanel or iscsi SAN solution, with multiple redundant paths to the storage and multiple controllers in the storage 'device'? If the answer to that question is "no" then you have a SPOF anyway, regardless of the capabilities of VMWare versus Hyper-V...

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#279465 4-Dec-2009 23:53

I'll read the report tomorrow but just wanted to mention that Hyper-V R2 can do live migration of guests with pass-through (raw) disks as well. They don't have to be stored on the CSV.

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#279467 5-Dec-2009 00:02

@kris - you're obviously VMware-biased as that report isn't as damning as you made it out to be. This is the quote I believe you were referring to:

In a study released in September, Burton Group said Hyper-V R2 is missing two of the 27 features it considers essential for running enterprise-class applications in production:the ability to assign run priority to each virtual machine on a server, which determines the order in which they are restarted after a hardware failure, and support for multiple virtual CPUs when running Linux and Windows 2000 as guest operating systems.

"These limitations prevent the platform from meeting the production requirements of the typical large enterprise," Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf wrote in a recent report.

As a result, Hyper-V R2 will be attractive primarily to small and medium-sized businesses and for use at the departmental level, the report said. However, large companies that have "long-standing technology, business, and strategic investments in Microsoft products" may be willing to accept the absence of key features in Hyper-V R2 to avoid the cost of switching to Microsoft from another virtualization platform later, he wrote.

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#279472 5-Dec-2009 00:14

"These limitations prevent the platform from meeting the production requirements of the typical large enterprise," Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf wrote in a recent report.

we also have to remember that these reports take into account the full implementation of the technologies available - many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars of software.

if you're not running a production data center or a large enterprise then you have to take them with a grain of salt.

also note, hyper-v r2 was more than just CSV and live migration. these were important, sure, but they also did a lot of work around other areas. the device driver implementations gettng better graphic performace, faster I/Os (huge speed improvement on dynamic disks, now negligable difference on virtual versus passthrough storage), hot add/remove of storage, better networking performance including implementations of new virtualisation networking features and also 'green' computing such as core parking etc.... (thats from memory, there is much more)

if you're a small shop then there are also other alternatives. Xen has live migration etc, and according to some reports it runs stuff faster than vmware or hyper-v. its more difficult to implement though as teh support is not as good.

I run both VMWare and Hyper-V on my network. I like them both for different reasons.

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#279688 6-Dec-2009 09:35

amanzi:
jaymz: VMWARE has some great features, if you are willing to pay for them. The coolest thing I have found is the High Avaliblity (HA) of Virtual Center, where as long as you have X number of identical hardware ESX hosts you can migrate guest OS's between them live, with clients connected and everything, so cool to watch. It also allows for if an ESX host fails it will automatically move the guest OS's over to the running ESX host (no downtime)

I'll expand on the features that Jaymz is referring to... Both Microsoft and VMware have solutions for migrating virtual guests between physical hosts: (all of which require centraiised storage, i.e. a SAN)

VMware vMotion & Microsoft Live Migration: This is the ability to move a running virtual guest between physical hosts with no downtime. This can be used if you want to take down a physical server for maintenance, or if you want to move a virtual guest onto another host for performance reasons.

VMware High Availability & Microsoft Failover Clustering: In the event of an unplanned outage of a physical host, the virtual guests can will automatically be moved to another available host and restarted. There is some downtime involved with both VMware and Microsoft's solutions but they are both hands-free.

VMware Fault Tolerance: This is a VMware-only feature that is similar to High Availability but has no downtime. Effectively, what VMware are doing, is running the same virtual guest on two physical servers at the same time. They use their vLockstep technology to keep the two virtual guests in sync, and then in the event of an unplanned failure of one of the physical hosts, the virtual guests will seamlessly keep running on the available server.

VMware's Fault Tolerance sounds impressive, but it comes with a hefty price tag. Which brings me on to the next topic of pricing...

If you're running a small virtual environment of up to 3 physical servers, then you can buy VMware Essentials or VMware Essentials Plus which is a cost-effective bundle to run VMware's vSphere (ESX or ESXi) on up to 3 physical servers and vCenter Essentials (the management server). The main difference between Essentials and Essentials Plus is that the Plus version has the High Availability feature. From the VMware website, Essentials costs US$995 and Essentials Plus costs US$2995.

If you want the Fault Tolerance feature, you need to buy at least the Advanced version of vSphere which costs about US$2700 per processor plus you would need to buy vCenter Server which costs US$2000 for the Foundation edition (maximum of 3 hosts) or US$6000 for the Standard edition. So if you had a two server environment, each with dual processors, you would be looking at US$2700 x 4 + US$2000 = US$12800.

Microsoft's pricing is a bit easier... For starters, you can use the free version of Hyper-V called Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, and you get Live Migrations and Failover Clustering included, for free. If you need/want a GUI on the servers, you can use Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard (NZ$1345) or Enterprise (NZ$4370) and also get the Live Migration and Failover Clustering included. If you buy the Enterprise version, you get the added bonus of being to able to run four virtual copies of Windows Server as guests for free.

For further virtual machine management, you would need to purchase Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). This comes in two versions: Foundation edition provides all the licensing you need for a maximum of 5 host and costs NZ$936. If you need to manage more than 5 hosts, then you need to buy the Enterprise edition for NZ$1632 plus NZ$50 per virtual guest.

Hopefully that's an unbiased and balanced comparison, but you should work out what requirements you're after and base you decisions on that.

ESXi is also free. The difference being is that it doesn't come with vMotion (live migrations) or clustering.
Personally I think VMware is a more mature product, but Hyper-V seems to be catching up in terms of features.

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VEB

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#280895 9-Dec-2009 16:42

Let me add my 2 cents.

When choosing an infrastructure solution, we should consider 3 aspects:
1. requirements-features coverage;
2. price;
3. TCO.

Let's consider each.
1. After Hyper-V 2008 R2 launch, VMWare and Microsoft virtualisation solutions are mostly equal, except for very specific features that VMWare has, and that one must 1) really need and 2) have an established budget for. So in most(!) cases features of either solution will cover you needs.
2. I wouldn't talk confidently about which solution will have lower cost. It's so because the final cost will significantly depend on what will be the workload (guest systems) and how you want to manage the virtual environment. The final cost may ... hm... vary. The VMWare solution cost will depend on the feature set and total cost of the guests. The Microsoft solution cost will depend on guests' total cost and whether you want to use VMM. (VMM is pricy, but you can use free Hyper-V Manager). When using MS solution, you have an option of using free and lightweight Hyper-V Server R2, but pay for each Windows VM; or buy WinSrv2008R2 with Hyper-V and have up to 4 free licences for Windows VMs (1 for Standard Edtn., 4 for Eterprise). Without knowing of what you final infrustructure should be, it's impossible to say which vendor's solution would be cheaper. The only way to determine is to carefully calculate each option for each solution.
3. There's one more aspect that is missed in this thread - TCO. We are free to choose a technology for just ourselves, but when working for a business, we should consider business environment and circumstances. The good is that which is good for business. In this particular case, we should consider not only price of the solution, but the cost of its design, implementation and maintenance. This means, even if a certain vendor's solution has lower price, but you and your staff are well-experienced in other vendor's solution, it will be more profitable for business to choose the second one. "Hyper-V which I don't think is right for our setup" - is not a good argument for a business people, whereas "using well-known solution instead of equal-featured but unknown, which would require training" seems to be convincing.

Cheers,
VEB.