Hyper-V Reviews and Pricing

Technical Support Specialist at PCMS Datafit

Mar 13, 2016

I'm able to save space by running multiple Operating Systems and Services on only one physical device, but I wish importing/exporting were more robust and more user-friendly.

What is most valuable?

It's free minus initial licensing for the OS. You can centrally manage multiple Hyper-V hosts rather easy with no extra licensing fees vs VMware vCenter. Having used both I still have a preference for VMware (especially for P2V situations), but for home/small offices Hyper-V is a great alternative. Hyper-V is included in Windows 8 and Windows 10 with minimal loss to functionality (mainly no Hyper-V replica).

How has it helped my organization?

I use this in my home lab, and I am able to save space by running multiple Operating Systems and Services on only one physical device.

What needs improvement?

I have not gotten to configure virtual SANs, but I wish there were more solutions for storage options. Virtual SANs aside, Server 2012R2 does provide a rather easy way to setup iSCSI targets with local storage. I wish importing/exporting were more robust and more user-friendly. Creating templates would be nice. I will say Hyper-V replica for clustering/failover is pretty sweet. P2V situations are a little more convoluted than with VMware, but still relatively easy. You just have to create a VHD image of the physical machine then attach it to a new virtual machine.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for one or two years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I run an i7 quad core with a total of 8 processing threads and 24GB of RAM. I have eight VMs on a Hyper-V host, but not all run at the same time. The most I’ve had run is five, and everything ran pretty smoothly.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is very limited. Knowledge-base articles on TechNet and public forums are all that is really available.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

This is my first enterprise deployment of a virtual machine infrastructure. I used Hyper-V because it was already on my host OS.

How was the initial setup?

Deployment is easy, enable the feature using the wizard, reboot, and access the management console to start making VMs. Implementation is easy, if you can’t set it up yourself, you don’t belong in IT.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It's free, minus the license for the host OS.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I like VMware ESXi, I am aware they offer a free version as well. When I have time and resources, I would like to implement a new infrastructure using that. I’m very familiar with ESXi because we use that in our work infrastructure.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user327432Technical Support Specialist at PCMS Datafit

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Mar 13, 2016

Sorry I have not had time to comment, I stay rather busy at my job and studies.

First, a little about my background.

I've only been in the IT field professionally for almost 2 years as of this comment. I graduated in May of 2013 with two Associate Degrees; Computer Network Management and Computer Network Engineering. I obtained my role of a Technical Support Specialist back in April of 2014, I started out with basic help desk support and quickly got thrown into the deep end of server management, virtualization, networking, and SAN technologies without warning or support. I may not be very experienced by most tech standards, but I certainly have a talent and aptitude for this career path. I have quite a few experienced techs who will attest to my abilities. My company's IT department consists of me and my boss. My boss handles high level infrastructure needs and planning where as my jobs consists of everything under the sun any my job constantly pushes my boundaries of experience.

I use Hyper-V at home to basically study for MCSA/MCSE certifications. I setup an AD infrastructure, DHCP, DNS, WDS, NPS, RRAS, as well as many other services and I have a virtual machine just for VPN connections to my office. I constantly use snapshots to test new services and I have a base VM that I exported and I copy when I need to setup a new one.

I was asked to write a review on Hyper-V so I did. I work with many software developers and I have turned them on to Hyper-V for home use on several occasions and have yet to hear anything bad about it. I do have a preference to VMware ESX and if asked to write a review on that, I would sing it praises. But as for Hyper-V goes, I think that it is viable alternative to VMware and best suited for home or small to medium business use, larger business could also use and would be complimented very well with the whole SCCM application suite.

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it_user216687

Microsoft System Engineer at Summit Technology Solution

Aug 13, 2015

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You can move from server to server without downtime with Live Migration in a VM.

Valuable Features:

1. Improved Windows stability

2. Hyper-V stability

3. Live migration

4. Enhanced session mode

5. Clustering

Improvements to My Organization:

Enhanced Session Mode is a feature thats allow you to copy and past inside the virtual machine.

Live Migration in a virtual machine where you can move across your Hyper-V physical servers with or without user interaction, and in a virtual machine you can move from server to server without downtime.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My company integrates Microsoft solutions for our customers.

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it_user221874

Manager IT at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 14, 2015

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I have less down time in case of a disaster and have saved on hardware and electricity costs.

Valuable Features:

- One-window management of servers

- Less down time in case of a disaster

- Easy to use and manage

Improvements to My Organization:

After deploying this, we have saved hardware and electricity costs.

Room for Improvement:

Not yet rectified.

Use of Solution:

I've used this technology since 2010. It is a really amazing product. By shifting almost my all physical servers into one Box "Host Machine", I am relaxed now.

Deployment Issues:

Not yet

What needs improvement?

They need to make the initial configuration more straightforward, as the networking part is confusing.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

I find out that for smaller shops, that have under 50VMs with a 1gb network, you don't need separate iSCSI traffic for your data. I know that all the best practices tell you to separate the traffic, but what I am seeing, is a much better Hyper-V performance if you keep ISCSI traffic with your data traffic. If you can use CIFS instead of the iSCSI, go with CIFS, HyperV loves CIFS.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We did have problems, and you need to make sure that the LUNs have enough space. If you run out of space, you will need to spend a few hours to bring the VMs up.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If you know what you are doing, you can automate the deployment of a new Hyper-V host with a PXE boot and VMM.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

5/10.

Technical Support:

It's 5/10 as it is like a lotto, you never know who you will get on other side. Sometimes you get an expert, and sometimes you get a beginner.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used VMware. The primary reason to switch to Hyper-V was the cost, as Hyper-V is for free.

How was the initial setup?

The networking part is confusing for the beginners

What about the implementation team?

We did it in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Hyper-V is free, however if you build clusters, you should get a manager to centralize the management. If you are big enough and you have some money, I strongly recommend System Center, which includes VMM and other great tools like Orchestrator. You can automate building your VMs and even your application tiers. Also with VMM, you can automate spinning up new Hyper-V hosts with PXE boot. I configured, I used it, and it works perfectly.

If you are small shop go with a third party Hyper-V manager like 5nine. It is cheap, they even have a free version, and also a converter from VMware is free. I am using it right now and it works great. It includes alerting.

If for some reason you cant get either, you can manage your clusters directly from fail over cluster manager. It is just more manual work than with the tools above.

What other advice do I have?

For the cost, it has almost the same features as VMware. If you are a Microsoft shop, then get Hyper-V with System Center to connect to Windows Azure and you are all set.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user240039

Lead Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

May 17, 2015

Not equal or superior to VMware’s ESXi

“We are 4x cheaper with better technology versus VMware.”

I’ve been fairly open in my opinion against the latest round of Microsoft FUD coming out of their Worldwide Partner Conference this week but I felt strongly enough by the utter crap coming out of their mouths to respond in a post.

It’s not so much about the claim to be 4x cheaper than the VMware Cloud Suite…but more the outright incorrect claims that their technology is somehow superior to that of VMware’s.

I’ve found myself in the position to have been exposed to both Hyper-V and ESXi (not counting the Management and Orchestration suites) and in fact I cut my teeth in the Virtualization world on Hyper-V…so unlike others out there who see things only through the rose colored glasses Microsoft seem to sew onto peoples faces… I go by a real world operational perspective that’s not blinkered.

So here it is…Microsoft Hyper-V is not the equal or superior to VMware’s ESXi! And rather than go through feature by feature..In the interest of keeping this post short and to the point, I would challenge anybody to sit someone who has had zero exposure to the Virtualization market to evaluate both Hyper-V and ESXi side by side…without bias or without prejudice there is no doubt in anyone's mind that no logical person would choose Hyper-V as the better hypervisor platform over ESXi. To reinforce that…ESXi will come out on top.

It’s that simple!

Of course I now fall firmly with the side of VMware and some will argue that my own view is blurred but I can tell you that my current opinions are based on fact and experience…not desperate attempts to discredit otherwise far far superior technology…but then again…Microsoft have made a habit of this so it doesn’t surprise me.

Kevin Turner you are a disgrace!

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user361485Product Engineer at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Dec 24, 2015

To keep it short; when working with VMM I found some tasks to be too cumbersome compared to vSphere and vCenter. Setting access rights was a nightmare in VMM, a dream in ESXi and vCenter. However, I liked the IP pools concept in VMM. vCenter also has IP pools, but they are designed for usage with virtual appliances and can't as easily be used for auto assigning static IP-adresses to auto-deployed virtual machines like in VMM. Automation worked better with VMM and Microsofts Orhestrator, then with Microsofts Orhestrator and VMWare.

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it_user234735

Technology Consultant, ASEAN at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

May 10, 2015

Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5

I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile VMware vSphere is based on 1 socket CPU. With Windows 2012R2 Datacenter, you will eligible to have unlimited Guest OS licenses.

Also System Center 2012R2 licenses based on 2 socket CPU.

Enjoy it, and let me know if I missed something or need some updated.

Requirements	Hyper-V 2012R2	VMware vSphere 5.5
Host Server Hardware Requirements • 32 Logical CPUs minimum • 128GB RAM or more	Support: • 320 Logical Processor • 4TB RAM	Support: • 320 Logical Processor • 4TB RAM
VM Guest Hardware Specification • Up to 16vCPUs • Up to 64GB RAM • At least support for 2 vNICs • Virtual CPU per Host • Virtual Hard disk support for up to 10TB	Support: • 64vCPUs • 1TB RAM • 12 vNIC supported • 2048 vCPU per Host • 64TB Virtual Disk	Support: • 64vCPUs • 1TB RAM • 10 vNIC supported • 512 vCPU per Host • 62TB Virtual Disk
Host clustering Support: • Support for at least 8 nodes • Support for at least 90 running VMs or more • VM Replication technology to enable DR scenarios	Support: • 64 nodes per Cluster • 8,000 VMs per Cluster • Hyper-V Replica	Support: • 32 nodes per Cluster • 4,000 VMs per Cluster • vSphere Replication
• VM Failover priority and startup priority	• YES	• YES
• Concurrent based migration without downtime of VMs	Live Migration with unlimited VMs	vMotion, 4VM (1GbE) and 10VM (10GbE) per Host
• Storage migration without downtime of VMs	Live Storage Migration	Storage vMotion
• No shared storage based migration without downtime of VMs	Shared Nothing Live Migration	vMotion
• High Availability of VMs	Windows Server Failover Cluster	VMware HA
• Dynamic Workload balancing across host cluster	• Hyper-V High Availability	• VMware DRS
• Live merge of VM snapshots	• Intelligent Placement with System Center VMM	• Center Snapshot Manager
• Supported with Hyper-V Backup	• Supported with vSphere Data Protection
Support for VM workload migration without downtime, VM workload storage migration without downtime and host clustering features	Intelligent Placement (VMM) for VM workload without downtime. And Storage Tiering by Windows Server 2012R2 for Storage Workload.	DRS and Storage DRS
Support for VM Templates and automated VM creation of Windows Server OS workloads	YES	YES
Support for managing multi Hypervisors – preferably VMware and Hyper-V	System Center 2012R2 support for managing multi hypervisor (Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer)	vCenter vCAC
Granular administration model	Supported with Windows Server 2012R2 Active Directory	Supported with Windows Server 2012R2 Active Directory
Monitoring and alerting of virtual infrastructure coving all components from the hardware level to the Hypervisor to the running VMs, VM OS health and Applications monitoring	Supported with System Center 2012R2	vCenter Operations Manager

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user249174IT Engineer at a tech services company

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Aug 3, 2015

Good Compare and Artikel , Next Vsphere 6.0 With MS Server

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it_user6318

System Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Sep 14, 2014

Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 from a vSphere lover's perspective.

Microsoft is making claims that Windows Hyper-V Server 2012 is the best virtualization platform for Windows. I have to say that they have caught my interest with Windows Server 2012, Hyper-V version 3 and Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2012. So I have been hard at work getting deep into the products, first by updating all my lab systems. Unfortunately Windows Server 2012 is not in general release yet so all my setup and testing is being done with the release candidate and/or technical preview software. In saying this, you can’t really compare the software solutions to the current release versions of VMware vSphere, vCenter Server, etc as I may tend to do. And if you don’t know, VMWorld 2012 is right around the corner and I expect there to be additional product updates. Especially since VMware has been an industry leader and innovator in this space for many years now.

Let’s skip past the details of the features that one or the other offers and outline my findings and my opinions of Hyper-V. The first thing most people will ask is whether Hyper-V better than vSphere' Well the answer is “Yes” and “No”. I would still say that I like vSphere better but that’s because I’m a bit bias having used it for so long. But I do see the great potential that is to be had by implementing Hyper-V and System Center VMM, especially for enterprise clients that are primarily using Microsoft Windows Server along with System Center solutions.

Here’s what I think so far about what Microsoft is bringing to bare for virtualization.

CONS:

I found Hyper-V to be a bit more complex to configure some of the features that vSphere seems to make really simple like High Availability (HA) which requires the Failover Clustering feature.
There are features that I haven’t found yet in Hyper-V like Enhanced vMotion to aid in dong Live Migrations between different processor families.
I did not see a comparable solution to Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) or Storage DRS. These are two features that yield great returns by automatically balancing VM workloads across multiple host resources using vMotion and Storage vMotion.
There’s a lot going on with SCVMM which mean you have a bit to wrap your head around. But some may say the same thing about vCenter.

PROS:

My first Pro is the last Con. There is a lot going on with SCVMM. While it was a little overwhelming once you do get your head wrap around it you’ll see that you can do more than just server virtualization. You can build a private cloud with self service and all. VMware offers vCloud Director which is a separate solution with additional licensing and cost.
With Datacenter Edition of Windows Server gives you can virtualize an unlimited number of virtual machines. This also includes the virtual machines operating system licenses if your running Windows Server. VMware can’t even offer that since Microsoft owns the OS.
If your already licensed to use System Center 2012 you will get SCVMM and more at no additional cost. This is because Microsoft has decided to bundle many of the management products and change their licensing model. More details can be found here. If you have a previous version of the management software an upgrade path could be available and worth it giving the additional software you’ll gain.
Oh and I can’t forget the fact that SCVMM will let you use Hyper-V, vSphere, and Citrix virtualization host servers as platforms to build on. This is not available with vCenter since it only supports managing VMware virtualization hosts.

The new version of Windows Hyper-V does not have 100% feature parity with VMware vSphere 5 and vCenter combo but you get so much those additional features might not matter much. Microsoft is clearly going to give VMware some serious competition when it’s released.

Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 from a vSphere lovers perspective. originally appeared on theHyperadvisor by Antone Heyward

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user221874Manager IT at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees

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Jul 10, 2015

kapilmalik1983 ... there are different versions and their prices.... if you go with unlimited VMs then it will cost you around 5000 UDS

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it_user142614

Datacenter and Cloud Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 27, 2014

If you don't have a need for complex apps then Hyper-V is the correct solution to choose

I've used Hyper-V 2012 for 6 months for deployment of new VM's. The speed of the VM's has improved the way we function, although the storage features could use some improvement. Overall, I gave Hyper-V 4 stars although we did encounter issues with deployment and there were times when it was not stable which caused the VM to reboot without notice.

Before implementing Hyper-V, we also evaluated options from VMware. If you don't have a need for complex apps then Hyper-V is the correct solution to choose. We chose to implement in-house and our setup cost was $4,100.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user8178Product Manager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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Jul 28, 2014

DO look for an alternative backup software such as Acronis:
www.acronis.com

Protect your entire Citrix XenServer environment with one-step backups, flexible storage, and ultra-fast data recovery—all managed from one easy-to-use dashboard.

Keeping virtual data safe can be a complex undertaking that demands smart, efficient solutions that simplify rather than complicate critical tasks. Keep it simple with Acronis Backup Advanced—the fastest, most efficient way to protect your entire Citrix XenServer environment.

Full backups. Acronis Backup Advanced combines patented image-based backups with seamless Citrix XenServer integration to capture your entire setup quickly and easily.

Application support. Acronis Backup Advanced includes the ability to capture application data for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory, and SharePoint running on Citrix XenServer VMs.

Hybrid Protection. For complete peace of mind, Acronis Backup Advanced can create and send multiple backup copies to both local storage and the Acronis cloud—without any additional steps!

Fast, flexible recovery. Our near-instant recovery technology allows you to restore individual files, application data, or an entire VM—all from the same backup! We also offer the flexibility of restoring data to its original location or to an entirely new one (even a completely different hypervisor platform).

All Acronis Backup Advanced products are designed to work as stand-alone solutions, or in combination with each other under one unified management console. This includes Acronis Backup Advanced for Citrix XenServer, which you can seamlessly combine with other Acronis products to create the ideal solution for your specific needs.

Current Version: Acronis Backup Advanced for Citrix XenServer Version 11.5

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