Hyper-V Reviews

This solution is mostly being used to deliver flexibility, high availability, and redundancy to accommodate production demand on an as-needed basis.

The main driver is consolidation, which is then complemented with the above-mentioned items. Hyper-V is a cost-effective platform that helped many companies I've been involved with to reduce data center administration and licensing costs drastically.

Once the platform is in place, it helps to control resources more accurately and on a consumption basis. By using the VMM (Virtual Machine Manager) you have full control of the fabric, workloads, templates and many more resources. Running Hyper-V Core also increases security and reduces update time-frames, which also helped us to increase our uptime and overall service delivery expectations. 

Hyper-V improved the infrastructure drastically, not only from a performance perspective but from a control/administration view as well. This directly affects the products and services offered on the platform. Our customers can increase or decrease resources on their workloads at any given time, which means we give them more control. That positively affects costs, reducing them for the customers. 

In most recent times, the live migration that is available for non-clustered environments was a massive benefit. Microsoft Storage Spaces can be used as an iSCSI provider for Hyper-V, which can help for a cost-effective cluster. Dynamic resource allocation is a great benefit that helps service providers to reduce costs and increase host density. 

I believe further improvement can be made on the cluster manager side, not specifically Hyper-V related. There are some storage problems which do occur in high load systems, especially SQL workloads. These do not necessarily affect uptime, but it can evolve into a larger problem if not attended to. Otherwise, the product is fantastic.

It is very stable. There are some minor problems, as there is with all software applications, but they are not problems that affect the platform in such a way that your customers are affected. If managed properly according to standards and Microsoft's recommendations, it works. It stays online and is very reliable.

Hyper-V is easily scalable. Adding additional hosts, storage or event sharing workloads between clusters (Not sharing the same cluster nodes) is made possible with the recent versions of Windows Server.

I have used Hyper-V since it was launched and upgrading to the newer versions is purely a matter of staying up to date with the latest features to help our customers benefit.

Do not immediately think of massive SANs and expensive servers. Instead, start small then evaluate and test properly to understand how workloads are treated. Microsoft, with Server 2019, gives you a massive number of tools to do this cost-effectively. 

We did evaluate other options before choosing this solution. VMware has always been a good platform but in terms of costs, it is very expensive. The other 'freeware' options are also great but did not tick our boxes in terms of features and contractual agreements.

We are currently using this solution for Exchange, as a demo controller and an antivirus, as well. We have lots of servers on our Hyper-V.

I think the cluster environment is a good feature of Hyper-V because, if something happens, then it will automatically move to some other mode. This is a great feature of the solution.

Sometimes it is a mess, and it should be something that could be easily fixed. It made us have to deal with fixing the bugs. 

We have over 80 servers on our Hyper-V with one guy handling the deployment. We do have plans to increase our usage in the future. 

The setup was straightforward and easy for our company. The deployment was fast. 

The pricing is not much. We have a very big environment, and pricing is no problem. We did not spend much time looking at other products, though.

Due to our needs, we installed Hyper-V and VMware. It would be nice if there was a link between the HYper-V and the VMware for a test environment. When we cannot keep the two together, everything becomes a problem for the site.

It is a consolidation of Microsoft services that we have on premise.

It saves us money because we did not have much in terms of this type of service before using this solution. 

It is easy to use, and it is stable. It is a good solution. 

The stability of the solution is very good. 

It can scale. We have 20 users of the solution who are in various positions at our office. We have two staff members to maintain the solution for our organization. 

We have not used technical support. 

The setup was straightforward. It took us around a day to deploy. It was a manual installation which was not hard. 

The pricing and licensing is pretty good. 

We looked at Oracle, but it did not fit our hardware, so we did not choose it.

In my opinion, read the documentation carefully. If you do not, you will have problems.

The features I find most valuable are utilizing the hardware so there is multiple applications running on one hypervisor. This actually saves money for the user. 

I think there is room for improvement in terms of the cloud solutions. 

The stability of the product is fine. There is no problem. The only issues we have is with stability of the operating system. 

It is scalable. 

The setup was initially not easy, but Microsoft has made a lot of improvements and upgrades, and the integration is supposedly more simple. 

I think it is expensive. I think if they want it to be more competitive, they should lower the price. 

We can illustrate all of the infrastructure very easily.

There are bugs, and this should be resolved by Microsoft. In the future, I would like to see how the hyper-converged infrastructure works with the technology.

It is a stable product. 

The initial setup was easy. It took approximately 25 minutes to deploy.

The pricing and licensing is fine.

I use this solution for some of my virtual machines.

It allowed us to add on servers and fix things in an expedient manner.

I find the hardware and the cost reduction most valuable.

The backup has room for improvement. 

It is a pretty stable solution. 

I have not scaled it because I am not running it in a cluster environment anymore. I do know that the clusters work and that Hyper-V can easily scale for an organization's greater needs.

Microsoft tech support is horrible.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took a day to deploy. 

The Hyper-V pricing and licensing are very good. 

I looked at Hyper-V vs AHV, which is a Nutanix product. Nutanix Acropolis is a hyperconverged product that does a lot of next-level type of virtualization software. 

There is an ease of use, and it is able to deploy it because there are people throughout my country of South Africa that all understand Microsoft. They can easily fire up a virtual environment because they are familiar with Microsoft. 

The flexibility and API are the most valuable features. It helps us be able to integrate with other systems and then push data easily. It has 100% functionality and speed. 

The interface could be more user friendly. In addition, the documentation and security could use improvement.

Some customers have been complaining of running into Immobility Licensing Restrictions. They were running on an ELA, and there was no flexibility with a volume license agreement. 

In addition, it would be nice to have the ability to assign more dynamically, like VM-ware does. Furthermore, it would be nice to return the SRM feature back into Hyper-V so that you're not looking at a virtual box which is a cheap version, but that you're looking at enterprise, you're looking at VM-ware. If this could be placed into a one-button feature, that would be very attractive.

It is scalable. For me, it's all about getting the right architecture approval before even looking at Hyper-V layer and then virtualizing where we can, but if not, we go physical. At the same time, it'll all be on a Microsoft platform, hence why I have Hyper-V.

The initial setup was complex. When compared to firing up a virtual box, there are too many prompts.

The pricing is not an issue for us because we have a licensing agreement with Microsoft. So we are given an 80% discount. 

If I was going to a demo, and somebody had given me an iPhone and I had to quickly gut it, my first choice would not be Hyper-V. It is not a user-friendly solution. 

I would say the ability to assign more dynamically, like VM-ware does. And the SRM feature to be brought back into Hyper-V so that you're not looking at virtual box which is a cheap version, but that you're looking at enterprise, you're looking at VM-ware. But if there was one button to move everything over to the new system, if that could be put in as a feature
then it would be very attractive.

I build servers using this solution.

It needs to improve compatibility with third party software.

We previously used VMware. 

I was not involved in the setup of the product.

I do not have experience with pricing or licensing of the product.