Hyper-V Reviews

We are partners with Microsoft. We install 50% of VMware and 50% the solution from Hyper-V, depending on the customer's request.

Mid-level businesses who want to create their own data center, and they are using other Microsoft systems. 

Hyper-V and VMware are similar. However, Hyper-V is less expensive. Hyper-V also has a tight integration with Azure. This means that you can have some VM on Azure and some VM on premises, and you can move a VM from Microsoft data center to a local data center on the customer's side.

Hyper-V could benefit with improvements to their management interface. Also, there are some features that are better on other solutions. For example, VMware is easier to create 3D acceleration than on Hyper-V.

Hyper-V is quite stable. I do not have any issues.

The biggest cluster we have in the field is a node cluster.

The initial setup of Hyper-V is far easier than VMware. You can deploy the solution in a matter of hours.

Our customers consider other options, however for mid-level businesses who want to create their own data center, Hyper-V is easier and less expensive than using both VMware and Microsoft Windows server for VMware for Veeam.

VMware has some features that are better. It is easier to create 3D acceleration, however the licensing model is not good.

I would rate Hyper-V an 8 out of 10.

What I understand from our people is that it's certainly better now than it was a few years ago. They keep improving. 

The pricing is pretty good. 

My understanding is it's easy to set up.

The only negative thing I heard was that the baseline price is very, very attractive relative to VMware, however, the vCenter counterpart, the thing that brings it all together, is quite pricey.

We could probably live without it since we are a relatively small operation, however, vCenter is very convenient. vMotion and so forth are nice to be able to do. However, in order to be able to do the counterpart to that in the HyperVision world, suddenly the cost differential diminishes dramatically. We're not considering a change anytime soon, yet things have changed even from the last two years ago when we last looked at this.

I don't have many insights on stability. I have read a few things, however, it's not really my space. 

Across all of our clients, we probably have a few hundred in use, however, the number of instances of our application that are operating on those virtual servers, I don't know. 

The only data point I have there in relation to the initial setup is a conversation with a guy who spends 90% of his time supporting VMware organizations. He's had some Hyper-V experience. He says, "It's straightforward and I see it growing." That's somebody who's in that who space telling me that just the last week.

The pricing is a function of how many cores you have or how many processors you have. Since we're a Microsoft partner and use tools to create and maintain the software that we sell subscriptions to, we get very attractive pricing. If whatever their counterpart to the vCenter licensing weren't an issue, it would probably be 20% of what we pay for VMware.

When you add the vCenter, counterpart back in, however, it comes to be probably 80%-85% of what you actually need. The last 10% or 15% is where it gets pricey. That's a lot to cover for us to do unless there's some other serious functional advantage - and our guys haven't seen that yet.

I'd rate Hyper-V a five out of ten. I'm not a user of it, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to rate it, however, the part of it that I was most interested in was the pricing notion. Microsoft does all sorts of interesting pricing things. I'm sure they have a good reason for doing it, however, to say, "We'll give you 80% of what you need for almost nothing and if you want the last 20%, you got to give us your left kidney" seems a little unusual.

We are mainly using Hyper-V for VMs. The primary business is biscuit manufacturing, so we have 70 different types of sales-related software, some Windows-based SAP, and VMs running on Hyper-V. All VMs are running on Hyper-V. So indirectly, everyone is using it because it's our primary production system. We have maybe 650 employees at the moment. About 200 of these are computer users who are connected with Hyper-V in one way or another. Either they are using some of its services in a virtual machine or they're the IT guys directly involved with it. The non-IT people are using finance software or SAP-related software that they access through the web. Some servers are standalone Hyper-V, and there are two clusters of Hyper-V.

We have a cluster with storage space direct in Hyper-V, and we have virtual networking as well, so we are using all of the features except for Credential Guard, Host Guardian, and a few other things. We are not using these types of Hyper-V solutions because we don't need them.

Microsoft has developed a Windows Admin Center to manage its servers. I would like Microsoft to put more effort into the Admin Center interface and make it much easier. It is customizable, but you have to be a PowerShell expert to customize these things. That is a limitation. Microsoft could also do more modules related to servers and add administration features for that. I like Admin Center, and I want to deploy it in my organization, but the role-based access control feature is limited as we have to give a complete administrative right to other users as well. So these are some limitations that are blocking us. The Admin Center needs to provide a consolidated management interface that is easy to configure and provide a role-based access control so that we can give certain rights to our other users enabling them to administer the servers.

I joined the organization where I currently work in the last year, and the organization has deployed Hyper-V since 2012. So, in this organization, I have used Hyper-V for one year. But before that, I was a Microsoft instructor teaching about Microsoft products, including Hyper-V.

I would say that Hyper-V is pretty stable. But when it updates, we must restart all Windows systems. So if Microsoft can fix this thing so that the packages install restarting, then everything would be heaven for us. This means some downtime on our business side.

Yeah. It's easy to scale cluster features like Microsoft or Hyper-V. We can add as many servers—a maximum of 64—so it can handle a lot and it's easy for us to add to it. But there is one requirement, which is that the servers have to be identical in hardware specs. So that is one of the limitations.

Technical support was good. We didn't require Hyper-V technical support, but we have some issues with our Exchange online and email. So, for that, we opened a ticket with Microsoft, and they provided us with good and excellent support.

The initial setup is simple. There's not much to do. We input one command or just one or two clicks on the UI. Initial setup in the Windows environment for any software is not that difficult. Installing Hyper-V takes five to 10 minutes, including two server restarts. And then, we have to make the VMs, so that depends on how many we are making. That's the other factor, not the initial deployment. Migrating VMs is easy. It does not require any specific configurations because it runs on most hardware. And Windows Update comes with automatic updates. We use the WSUS server to update our servers to have controlled update patches. We keep our servers up to date, so it's easier, and it does not require any specialized hardware.

I rate it eight out of 10. I recommend Hyper-V because it's easy to install and supports most hardware. It runs on almost everything. I'm also recommending my company go for Azure Stack because it also uses Hyper-V, so we will not have to convert our VMs. But the top management in our organization is considering Nutanix or VMware solutions. I don't know why they're doing this. 

The solution is used as a hosting database. 

The solution is highly scalable. 

The pricing and technical support can be improved. 

I have been using Hyper-V for a few months. 

The stability of the solution is satisfactory. 

The solution is highly scalable. Fifty eight users are using the solution. 

The technical support is moderate. 

Neutral

Hyper-V's initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes a day. 

The solution can be implemented in-house. 

Hyper-V is expensive. 

I rate the overall solution a seven out of ten. 

I work in an environment where we are required to use them, as well as for DevOps and a few other things like Helios and similar things. As a result, I use it for DevOps testing, infrastructure, and implementation within the product areas of my clients.

The replication, creation, and import wizard, as well as the integration with reporting tools, are the most useful features.

The WSUS could stand to improve a little bit. It is also foggy at times. Again, I use a wide variety of products and services, but going through each one would take much longer, but WSUS is an awesome Microsoft product that could use some improvement in terms of reporting tools and such. Even the additions and servers work is more difficult. Even the manual add is difficult, and reporting occasionally breaks into the endpoints, but that could be one to five servers when I'm checking a hundred to 200 servers.  I suppose it's insignificant, but when it causes problems with those minor details, it can be difficult. But, aside from that, it works well.

It does what it needs to do and is adequate for the time being. It completes tasks such as replication cycles and other similar tasks. That's probably the only way it can be. In my opinion, it would have been better to truncate the site-to-site replication. If it could have been a simpler process, or if there was another way they could have done it, it would be beneficial. For example, if I'm doing site-to-site replication, I would normally have to do that in terms of bandwidth; Cisco has some, and they have some different tools that would enable the packages to be smaller and faster, but maybe just Microsoft takes a while to do the site-to-site replication.

I have been working with Hyper-V for approximately 15 years.

This solution is used by 10 administrators, and the product itself has 500,000, or 600,000 users.

We have pretty good in-house expertise, we haven't needed to reach out for actual technical support.

I test products ranging from VOIP to Microsoft to virtualization, VMware, and Hyper-V. I am always testing products and then deciding whether to put them into production for use or scale operations.

In the last year, I would say it has been a voice over IP products as well as a couple of SBC products. This is also true for VM testing and Microsoft products, such as Hyper-V, and a couple of software for voice over IP integration.

Microsoft, as well as perhaps eight or nine others.

I also work with DevOps.

We haven't used the VMware solution to its full potential, and the reason for that is that the software that is currently used on that platform lacks certain features that would allow us to use VMware to its full potential, but it resides on the VMware platform.

In order to obtain the products, we must go through a third-party vendor. We can't go directly to Microsoft.

I would rate Hyper-V an eight out of ten.

Hyper-V doesn't have a lot of features and is limited compared to other virtualization software.

I've been working with Hyper-V for more than ten years.

Hyper-V is not stable - we've had many errors and have had to do a lot of patch fixes for it.

Hyper-V is scalable.

The initial setup was very easy.

Hyper-V is free-of-charge.

Hyper-V is affordable, but if you have the budget, I recommend going with VMware. I'd rate Hyper-V as five out of ten.

We basically use it to virtualize a service for email on-premise. We also use it to virtualize the apps, but it is mainly for virtualizing servers, such as SQL Server, Exchange Server, SharePoint, and CRM.

It has cut down the management role on the actual service itself because we only have four Hyper-V hosts. Recently we had two, but we've put in two all-flash Hyper-V hosts. We have all-flash storage. It is good storage with loads of RAM. Most of them have got three-quarters of a terabyte of RAM, and they all are dual 32-core processors. There is no lack of power or anything in them. Because our servers are virtualized, it means that we do have four rack servers.

It really reduces the load. By using replication, we can separate out the servers and put them at different locations. We have them attached to the 10 gig fiber. With the replication facility, even if we do lose a server, we can be up and running within seconds or minutes at worst.

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.

The Hyper-V management console could be improved to make it easier. It should be a little bit more granular. Various virtual switches could also be improved to make virtual desk management slightly better. 

The replication could be improved slightly. The checkpoints or snapshots could be improved to make it a bit more transparent to the user.

I have been using this solution for around 15 years.

It is very stable and very reliable. I never had any failures of any description with it, which is amazing. We might have had hardware failures on the host, but everything is redundant, so there is plenty of resilience there.

I haven't come across any scalability issues, but you need a fairly powerful host machine. 

Nearly all users are using Hyper-V in some way, but they're not aware that it is Hyper-V that they're using while logging in to the servers. The servers are all virtualized, except for the physical servers that are hosting Hyper-V. We have quite a lot of virtual servers. The gateway that they use is a virtualized gateway server. Email servers are all virtualized. All sorts of services and filling servers are all virtualized. Virtualization reduces the physical footprint.

I never had to use Hyper-V technical support from Microsoft. It has been pretty stable.

It is very straightforward, very simple, and very quick. It is very quick to set up a virtual machine. You can set it up in minutes.

Because we're an NGO or a charity, we get discount rates from Microsoft. The costs are not astronomical for us. To give you an example, Office 2019 would only cost 30 or 45 for us. We tend to use the on-premises version rather than the cloud version. The reason is that the subscription service works out more expensive after a few years than the on-premise version. We're not worried about having the bleeding edge stuff. We just want it to be functional.

I would advise making sure that you have the hardware that is up to the job. You should also have a clear plan of what you want to virtualize. Make sure that there is room for growth in terms of the physical hardware for the host, which is the server hosting Hyper-V. 

It is very robust. It doesn't consume as many resources as VMware, for instance. It is fairly slick. It is very functional and doesn't really present great challenges.

I would definitely rate Hyper-V a ten out of ten.