Hyper-V vs Nutanix AHV Virtualization comparison

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43,215 views|35,838 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 1, 2022

We performed a comparison between Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV Virtualization based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Reviewers find both solutions to be quick, easy, and straightforward to deploy.
  • Features: Users find Hyper-V easy to use and manage, robust, and very stable. It does not use too many resources so it will not cause any latency issues. The solution offers great replication features and is very easy to customize. The performance is great, and VMs can easily move across push servers seamlessly without incident. Many users suggest that some disaster recovery capabilities need improvement and that cloud integration should be expanded beyond the Azure ecosystem to make the solution more attractive to more users.

    Users feel Nutanix AHV Virtualization’s central management control is intuitive and easy to use, making the entire solution easy to manage. Many users would like to see better integrations with other third-party solutions. Nutanix AHV Virtualization can consume too many organizational resources and slow processes down.
  • Pricing: Users of both solutions feel that they are reasonably priced and cost-effective.
  • Service and Support: Users of both solutions share that the support and service they have received is very responsive and very good.

Comparison Results: Hyper-V came out on top in this comparison. It is easy to manage and customize, and has very low resource usage, resulting in very little downtime. It is robust, stable, and provides many desired next-generation features. As a Microsoft product, it integrates well with many solutions in the Microsoft ecosystem, in addition to many other popular third-party solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Hyper-V vs. Nutanix AHV Virtualization Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution is highly stable.""The solution is stable and the cost is reasonable.""It's good for what it does. If you have a small or medium-scale acclimatization, it's an excellent solution.""The solution is stable.""Live migration, SMB3.""The solution allows us to take advantage of our physical environment.""We appreciate how easy this solution is to implement on standalone severs.""The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."

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"The most valuable feature is the integration between storage and compute services.""Nutanix's customer support is good, one of its biggest selling points.""The most valuable part of Nutanix is its centralized management of everything.""The solution is stable.""The most valuable feature of Nutanix AHV Virtualization is the user-friendly environment. The integration, implementation, and training for the solution are good.""The setup is efficient.""The storage features and volume system are great.""Nutanix AHV's most valuable feature is NetFlow."

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Cons
"The cost and licensing can be improved.""The solution is heavily reliant on Microsoft's active directory for authentication, for coordination between nodes. Therefore, it inherits all the issues that are within the active directory.""It's not completely stable because your stack becomes bloated.""Storage via SMB3.""Sometimes there's a bit of slowness in the VMs.""Hyper-V's management platform falls short in terms of scalability, especially when handling multiple Hyper-V servers. VMware has a central console to pull in all your VM servers, so you can easily manage them all through one console. You can manage servers in Hyper-V's admin centers, but it's not as scalable. It's doable with a couple of Hyper-V servers, but it becomes harder to manage when you get over two or three Hyper-V servers.""The operating system is very, very heavy.""There are bugs, and this should be resolved by Microsoft."

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"Nutanix misses alerts sometimes.""In terms of improvement, I think that they could have more partnerships with providers.""My storage use is doubled; if I am creating a one TB virtual machine then my storage policy will take two TB from my cluster.""The solution is very expensive.""If we have to opt for a high level of capacity planning and need more analytics—like deciding on new purchases or budgeting, or if we need additional resources in the near future—we need to pay for Prism Central. I would suggest that Nutanix improve a bit on the analytics part of Prism Element so we can calculate those kinds of things within that flavor.""The technical support for this solution needs to be improved in terms of response time.""Some companies do not support AHV.""I would like to see better decompression or degrouping of the VMs so that we can use a single number of SQLs with two servers. We don't need a huge number of DXSPs."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's cheap, but not the best."
  • "Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately"
  • "It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else."
  • "We did not have to pay extra money for the Failover Clustering feature."
  • "We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product."
  • "I do not have any comments about pricing or licensing of the product."
  • "Microsoft recently tacked on a higher price for their software to use the storage migration in the Storage Spaces Direct array. That was just terrible."
  • "The pricing isn't too bad, because you can do the bare metal hypervisor, and it is pretty fair. Other competitors are more expensive."
  • More Hyper-V Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The most valuable feature of this solution is that there is no licensing fee."
  • "AHV is free, it's an open-source solution."
  • "Some of the features required additional licenses."
  • "We don't have to pay extra for Acropolis because it is built into Nutanix."
  • "The price of the solution is fair and if you want support there are additional fees."
  • "The price of the solution can always be lower. However, the price of the solution is reasonable."
  • "Nutanix AHV is free."
  • "The price of Nutanix AHV is reasonable."
  • More Nutanix AHV Virtualization Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to virtualize Server or Client OS as it is a feature on Windows Server since 2008 and… more »
    Top Answer:One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same features as with the more well-known products. Proxmox VE is very easy to deploy - it… more »
    Top Answer:The product is easy to manage. It improves our VM management.
    Top Answer:To understand which is better - Nutanix AHV or VMware vSphere - you need to do a product comparison. Both products support hypervisors. However, Nutanix supports some of the most popular ones and more… more »
    Top Answer:Integration is the most valuable feature of the product.
    Top Answer:The solution’s pricing is relatively fair. It could be improved, though.
    Ranking
    Views
    43,215
    Comparisons
    35,838
    Reviews
    23
    Average Words per Review
    363
    Rating
    7.8
    Views
    16,354
    Comparisons
    10,052
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    568
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Hyper-V is a hardware virtualization tool that allows users to create virtual computer environments with multiple operating systems on a single physical server. Each virtual machine has computer parts, such as memory, processor, storage, and networking, and acts like a standard computer - running its own operating system and software programs. Each component of the virtual machine can be configured to meet your specific requirements.

    Hyper-V creates a cost-effective, stable, and productive server virtualization environment by running multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and more, in parallel on one machine or server. Each virtual machine runs in its own isolated space, which means you can run many virtual machines simultaneously but independently of each other. This helps prevent problems such as a crash affecting the other workloads and enables different users to separately access various systems.

    Benefits of Hyper-V

    • Simplify application testing: With Hyper-V you can easily add and remove operating systems from your virtual machines, enabling you to run and test your applications on each of them all from one single computer.

    • Minimize resource usage and scalability: Virtual machines are easier to manage than physical hardware and less expensive. You can also maximize your server use by allocating its resources more efficiently than you can with physical hardware alone.

    Hyper-V key features:.

    • Replication and migration: Hyper-V can replicate virtual machines for backups onto different sites. Hyper-V also provides a migration tool for moving a virtual machine from one Hyper-V host to another without causing any downtime.

    • Remote connection: Hyper-V’s remote connectivity tool allows administrators to remotely access a virtual machine.

    • Security: Hyper-V keeps virtual machines secure from malware attacks, unauthorized access, and data breaching attempts.

     Reviews from Real Users

    Hyper-V stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its flexibility, its replication capabilities, and the fact that its virtual machines utilize a small amount of resources..

    Liam L., the owner of a tech services company, writes, “It is actually very low on resources. It doesn't use many resources. It is also very easy to tailor. You can change things like the amount of memory and storage on the fly. It is very stable and reliable. I like its replication feature, which is very good. It is also very easy to move the virtual machines across push servers without any difficulty. Its performance is also very good. Now with this pandemic, a lot of workers are working from home. A lot of workers have been using laptops as their desktop computers, and they would remote into a virtual PC. There is no difficulty, and they can't tell the difference between this and the real one. It is much easier to manage.”

    Kevin E. an IT director at Homeland Technology Group, LLC, notes, “We've probably seen a 50 percent speed increase on our SQL server. Hyper-V has also significantly reduced our downtimes with faster boot-up and reboot. If we have to reboot a server, there is maybe two or three minutes of downtime. When we were on a bare-metal server, it could be five to ten minutes due to the total boot time.”

    Nutanix AHV is a secure, enterprise-grade solution for intuitive virtualization and container management. It streamlines operations and simplifies management for all your workloads and environments.
    Sample Customers
    Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
    JetBlue, International Speedway Corporation, SAIC Volkswagen
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Outsourcing Company8%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization29%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Retailer10%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization27%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business47%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise37%
    Large Enterprise42%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise36%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise37%
    Large Enterprise45%
    Buyer's Guide
    Hyper-V vs. Nutanix AHV Virtualization
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Hyper-V vs. Nutanix AHV Virtualization and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Hyper-V is ranked 3rd in Server Virtualization Software with 132 reviews while Nutanix AHV Virtualization is ranked 6th in Server Virtualization Software with 44 reviews. Hyper-V is rated 8.0, while Nutanix AHV Virtualization is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Hyper-V writes "It's a low-cost solution that enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Nutanix AHV Virtualization writes "Lightweight, integrates well, and the technical support is responsive". Hyper-V is most compared with VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Citrix Hypervisor, whereas Nutanix AHV Virtualization is most compared with Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, KVM, Citrix Hypervisor and Oracle VM. See our Hyper-V vs. Nutanix AHV Virtualization report.

    See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.

    We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.