Well, I’ve finally gotten to testing out Hyper-V.  To be completely honest, I’ve had one hell of a bad experience with it at first, but now it’s ok and I like the product (Server 2008R2 with Hyper-V Role – Not Hyper-V core).  VMWare still has more of what I want, but I don’t think it will be long before it’s caught up.  Keep reading for the good, the bad, and some overall useful nuggets of information.

To start off, I’ll share my bad experiences:

The worst of all were the stability issues I had.  Everybody speaks up and down to how stable Hyper-V is..  That may be true, but it sure wasn’t the case for me.  The system I installed it on would constantly hard lock every time I tried to move some significant amount of data.  Whether it was a VHD, an ISO, or whatever..  In all my reading nobody had any suggestions to address the issues I was having.  All of my drivers were signed stock MS drivers that were native to the hardware.  I tried one BIOS tweak after another with no luck.  Finally, I hit the clear CMOS switch and re-installed the base OS fresh.  I can’t understand how, but once that was done, I was able to move stuff around without the damn thing freezing on me anymore.  (Mind you, I was running VMWare on that same box with no problems prior and made no BIOS tweaks whatsoever – so I can’t figure out why it two installs to get Hyper-V stable).

I thought all was well, that’s when the BSODs struck.  A quick search on the stop error I had in my event logs turned up an unofficial fix for the error.  It was a typical case of the blame game with Microsoft saying “It’s an Intel bug” followed by a procedure to get a Microsoft “Fix” to Intel’s bug…  Go figure.

The good news – After that last hot-fix, it’s stable and running my PBX happily in a VM.

 

What impressed me with Hyper-V:

iSCSI SAN connectivity – While there are caveats, it’s pretty much the same as adding a data-store in VMWare.  You connect the LUN to the OS with the MS iSCSI target then associate that physical disk the the VM.  The catch is to make sure the volume is offline on the host.  It’s extremely simple.

VHDs – As a Microsoft guy (most of the time), I must say I’m impressed with the flexibility of the latest virtual disk format MS offers.  There’s a nice free standalone utility at sysinternals that will even convert a live windows install to a VHD.  This allows for easy import and virtualization.  For as long as VMWare’s been around, I haven’t found nearly as much good stuff on managing VMDK files.

Performance – While my test Hyper-V system is fundamentally different in physical architecture from my VMWare powerhouse, I didn’t see any signs of bottlenecks.  Since I know they’re different systems, a speed comparison would be very unfair so I looked for anything I could perceive as a significant hiccup with no luck.  It’s a solid contender for performance reliability.

Value – Ok, for production environments, my review is useless as prices and licensing is very different, but for the tech enthusiast/IT experimentee crowd, you get EVERYTHING Hyper-V has to offer with a Technet Plus subscription ($250-$350/yr).  To get the VMWare equivalent, you have to pay full price for it no matter what (Tens of thousands of dollars for all features). 

 

VMWare still has some stronger points:

- VMWare allows more settings changes to a running host then Hyper-V does.  For example you can’t add a hard drive to a running VM in Hyper-V.

- What I found great about the iSCSI san connectivity was that I could attach both my VMWare install and Hyper-V install to the same iSCSI target and move the machine between two completely different hosts.  In fact, I’ll probably write a follow up post with more details on that later as there’s plenty of good that can come from that flexibility.  I suppose this could be a point for either, but I’m awarding it to VMWare (You can call it unprofessional favoritism if you want – or you can show some independent thought of your own and come to your own conclusion – Or both, I really don’t care as long as you don’t nag me about it).

- VMWare’s introductory product still has a better price for companies then Hyper-V (free).  Hyper-V Core is also free, but in terms of manageability it doesn’t compare.  I mean, using a completely command line driven windows interface is just plain unnatural.  Some would argue that both require a separate system to graphically manage them, but with VMWare that could be any system (even linux) - Hyper-V is limited to Vista and above.

- VMWare has an option to have the host create a VMDK abstract of even an iSCSI disk.  This means that at the cost of a little overhead (not perceivable in my tests), you can create snapshots and even clone disks at the host level.  You can’t do this with iSCSI targets in Hyper-V.  Snapshots are disabled with iSCSI targets.

 

In conclusion:

I’m still a VMWare guy by default.  I think the only thing I’m holding out for is the memory management though.  MS and VMWare seem to be constantly arguing over semantics and terms in this area (Over-commit vs Dynamic Memory allocation or whatever.. crap like that).  It simply boils down to how you manage the memory on your host.  I believe VMWare does a better job.  All the other features between the two are just different ways of doing essentially the same things.

I will admit, my dive into Hyper-V and VHDs introduced me to a new, faster, and easier way of backing up my windows VMs that I’m testing out, but that’s something for yet another topic.  I’ll just leave this as a teaser.

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