Not so long ago (14th of December) Mohammed Fawzi posted a blogpost called Hyper-V vs VMWare. In this post he wanted to put together a comparison of Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMWare’s ESX (Enterprise). Although I don’t think he acco…

I also agree there are different strokes for different folks. Personally I work on Microsoft focused technologies (AD, Exchange, SQL), so I have a leaning towards Microsoft products. A lot of that has to do with what I like to call ‘play nice’ features such as VSS integration. Familiarity with product style and flow as well as shared scripting systems helps too. For other individuals other technologies are going to make much more sense. I can’t imagine a Linux/Unix heavy group deciding to roll with Hyper-V. Now in the storage market I am an iSCSI religious zealot, but that’s another topic

Of course, acquisition cost is only a component of total cost of ownership (TCO), which is really how organizations should go about evaluating virtualization solutions. For some organizations, Hyper-V may make a lot of sense–that’s fine. For other organizations, VMware ESX will make more sense–that’s fine, too. Only those getting embroiled in a “religious debate” insist that there’s only room for one or the other.

Even the no additional charge bit is important if you are a Microsoft shop. So you are going to run a bunch of VMs all windows. Well, you are going to buy Datacenter edition so you can run unlimited VMs on your host. You are gong to do that whether you run Hyper-V or ESX. Now if you run Hyper-V you are done spending. If you go ESX you are buying another piece.

I agree that feature checks are an important part of any live migration functionality. Given the approach that Microsoft and other vendors have taken with regards to relying upon the hardware extensions to support virtualization–for example, both Hyper-V and Xen REQUIRE AMD-V/Intel VT in order to run virtualized Windows guests–it’s not that far of a stretch to suppose that they will also require hardware extensions in order to support live migration.

As a side note, though, it’s important to point out that EVC–and AMD-V/Intel FlexMigration upon which it is built–only handle the CPUID feature check. Applications that don’t use the CPUID feature check could still cause problems, even with EVC enabled. At least, that’s my understanding; feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Identical servers are not required in order to support VMware HA. They are required for VMotion. I would strongly suspect that Hyper-V will have similar requirements or will require hardware support like AMD-V/Intel FlexMigration when it’s live migration feature arrives in 2010.

EVC makes identical servers for VMotion unnecessary, and VMware clearly states how it works. When “other” virtualization vendors say they support(or will support) live migration, it makes you wonder how reliable it would be. For example, Hyper-V’s quick migration has blatant disregard for VM or application stability.

Look at:
http://www.vmware.com/technology/whyvmware/resources/cpu-feature-migration-checks.html

Hmmm….there are many falsehoods posited here. Many people have already enumerated them.

Unfortunately, this blog’s technical inaccuracies come at the expense of your credibility. Instead of retaliating at the posters, it might be more credible to refute their points using technical information and fact (notwithstanding ad hominem attacks).

So here’s your chance:
1. How much experience do you have with installing, configuring and managing ESX.
2. How much experience do you have using Hyper-V in a production environment. (Experimental labs used at a company does not count)
3. Are there any differences in memory management between ESX and Hyper-V? If so, please explain their function and when they actually get implemented.
4. Are there any networking differences between Hyper-V and ESX. If so, please list them and please describe the advantage/disadvantage to both.
5. Describe how one would backup a Microsoft Hyper-V environment and how one would backup an ESX environment.

Assume the latest versions for both ESX and Hyper-V.

If you can technically answer these questions and sound and rational terms, you’ve got a shot at restoring credibility. I’m looking forward to your response.

The only thing makes 4500 drivers support in hyper-v is Microsoft is “making hyper-v” as client-side hypervisor as well. In that case, you really need those support! Are they doing this?

Sometime it is hard to argue with people when they are trashing ESX not running on their notebook. The real thing they (and their lab) need is VMware workstation.

Surely it is satire?

Reading through the rest of his blog, he’s basically a microsoft fanboy who doesn’t really understand the core technology (I don’t even think he really understands Hyper-V). It’s like when a child first finds out how something works and he is trying to poorly explain to the rest of the world for a pat on the back.