Hyper-V Reviews

The most valuable feature of this is the ability to provide a completely redundant hosted solution to our clients, no matter where they are. We have the ability to load balance a cluster of servers so that resources are evenly spread, providing the best experience. I also like the ability to live migrate machines if we have any issues with a host. The user experiences no degradation.

This solution allows us to use minimal resources to support a large number of clients.

One thing I would love to see with this product is the ability to provide an offline solution. It would be great if someone could do work when no network connection is available, then sync up when a connection is available. I would also like to see better performance with media. Right now, streaming any media within Hyper-V is just not feasible.

We have been using Hyper-V for over eight years now. We are currently using Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 to provide a fully hosted desktop solution for our clients. Our clients access their desktops through a gateway broker.

We do experience some instability with the platform. It usually happens if there is a lot of I/O happening on the volumes that hold the VMs. We also have some issues working with clustered servers not load balancing correctly.

No issues with scalability.

Technical support is 10/10. Well, it’s a Microsoft product, so the level of support has been great.

Before Hyper-V, we used VMware. At the time, VMware was difficult to manage, very expensive and not as reliable.

Hyper-V is very straightforward. It’s really just adding the appropriate roles and licenses to the servers. Once the brokers and gateways are set up, it’s really easy to just add hosting servers and VMs to those hosts.

I wasn’t involved in the pricing or licensing, so I can’t really comment on it.

Before using Hyper-V, we used VMware and Citrix. This solution gave us the most flexibility.

If you are looking for virtual technology, Hyper-V continues to grow and improve. Being a Microsoft product, it’s the most-compatible solution to implement into your environment. It’s also the most cost-effective solution and you really can’t beat Microsoft support.

We mostly use Microsoft Hyper-V in our production environment.

I find that most of the competition is more or less the same. However, Hyper-V is, when you compare it to the older platforms like VMware, a little bit more advanced at this stage. 

I like the System Center part of it, the System Center VMM, where you can manage all the stuff together in the orchestrator and those kinds of things. That was not really available when we looked at Proxmox and other options.

Microsoft's got the better deployment tools like MBT and conflict manager, which is not in the other platform.

For me, the initial setup was very easy.

The solution has been very stable.

The scalability on offer is good.

It's hard to compare it to other solutions. Everything has almost the same offering.

It's possible that more deployment tools might make it a bit better.

If a person has never implemented the solution before, they might find the process difficult. 

The next generation should at least include most of the tools of the next operating system.

I've been using the solution from the start. I likely started using it around 2006. It's been well over a decade. I've used it for many, many years at this point. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

The initial setup was very simple in my case. I've got a certification, so for me, it's almost like second nature. For someone with less experience, it's possible it may be a bit difficult.

I am able to handle the implementation myself. I do not need an integrator or consultant. 

We did look at Proxmox and Citrix Hypervisor, among other solutions. 

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'm using the 2012 and 2016 versions of the product.

I'm more familiar with Hyper-V and with Microsoft products. I've got certification in that as well. There are some management solutions out from Microsoft, which are not just for Hyper-V, but for a lot of things. With these, it's almost like an all-in-one product, which you don't really get when you look at your Linux-based virtualizers. For example, with Proxmox, there is not really management. You have these notes that you couple up and then you have a backup server, however, you don't really have something that you can orchestrate those things with. Citrix, I can't speak to as I didn't really work with Citrix that much.

If you run any kind of network solution, I would rather recommend Hyper-V over any other hypervisor at this moment - unless you are looking at it from a cost of ownership perspective.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. There's no such thing as a perfect product, however, I'm pretty happy with this.

The solution is server virtualization software. We're using it to create virtual servers on our hosts and assign roles to each server separately. That's basically what a virtualization server does.

The solution's ease of use is the most important feature. It is very easy to use and implement. 

It has very good fail-over features. You can have servers running in a fail-over cluster and whenever one server fails, you can migrate the workloads to the second one. This is also a very important feature to avoid service downtime or to minimize it at the very least.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward for the most part.

Microsoft has documentation that is easy to find, helpful, and readily available. 

The stability is pretty good.

The solution can scale.

The solution has already improved for us. We have the older version, which was released in 2012, or the end of 2012. There were two releases after that, however, we haven't updated due to the fact that the upgrade costs are too high, and therefore we've migrated to Hyperflex.

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.

If you have other virtualization solutions you have about 95% or 99% of the resources of the host available to you to assign to a virtual server. However, with Windows, that number is less than 95% and is more like 90%. There is a margin reserved for the server itself. That's a downside.

The solution needs to improve integration with hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, or SGI solutions. We were going with SGI for our next virtualization solution. I read reviews about the Hyper-V causing issues with SGI. When we decided to go with SGI, I decided against going with Hyper-V due to the integration issues that it had. 

I've been using the solution for about five years or so at this point, give or take. It's been a while. I'm currently using it now as well.

The solution is basically stable. There are not many faults happening in the four or so years that we had it running. Whatever happened was basically either due to the active directory or due to environments like the server itself that had power loss one time. It shut down and we needed to restart it. However, basically, that's an environment issue, not an issue inherent to Hyper-V itself. Otherwise, Hyper-V runs smoothly.

There is a small overhead of resources reserved for the server itself. Other virtualization solutions have less overhead than that. However, due to the fact that Hyper-V is running on Windows Server, there is a margin of overhead reserved for the server itself. 

For the most part, however, it's reliable. 

The solution is quite scalable. If a company needs to expand, it can do so with relative ease.

Due to the fact that it's a virtualization solution, our IT team of three is managing it. However, as an ISP, we host some very important client services as well on the same solution. That means the number of users can go up to 100,000. From a management perspective, the management is just the three of us in the IT department.

We do not plan to increase usage at this time. Currently, with our version, we're planning to phase it out in our company within the next few years. That's mostly due to the fact that upgrade costs are too high and the solution is already an older generation, and we have decided to buy a fully new solution on new hardware. It will be Hyperflex.

We haven't contacted Microsoft for support. We've worked with several Microsoft partners for support and they were responsive. However, we haven't reached out to Microsoft directly.

There is good documentation from Microsoft and this can help with troubleshooting as well. 

Windows support in general is available online. It's as easy as Googling the issue that you have and you'll readily find solutions. It's not complicated. That part is positive. Other solutions are either too complicated or not very popular. In other products, if you need any support, you must either contact the vendor themselves or look for professional support.

The solution is straightforward if you know how to use Windows Server. Hyper-V is basically a role on Windows Server. Therefore, you can use Windows Server for many roles on networking, on the active directory. Hyper-V is just one of them. You can just install the role and enable it and that's it. Basically, it's up.

The deployment is quite quick. It's a part of the server.

Initial setup process:

after installing the Windows Server, you select 'Add Roles & Features' from the 'Manage' Menu on the 'Server Manager' Window.

then you step through the wizard, selecting the 'Hyper-V' Role along with any features Windows requires for that role. a restart is recommended even if it's not required.

to implement a solution with redundancy, you can install the 'Failover Cluster' Role with the Hyper-V Role on 2 (or more) identical servers, and create a Failover Cluster out of the servers where VMs would "Fail Over" between servers.

then you need to set up a virtual switch to connect the VMs. you should set up at least 1 external switch to enable internet access and remote reachability for the VMs.

then you can create VMs and run them.

The costs in regards to upgrading the solution are quite high and it deters customers from changing versions.

The old solution in 2012 was charging at a cost per server and the pricing was good at the time. In 2016, Microsoft upgraded the licensing, or changed the licensing scheme to per CPU within the server. Basically, if we wanted to upgrade to 2016, we would have had to pay double again for the same software. Therefore, we decided to go with another solution.

The solution offers perpetual licensing.

We are just a customer or end-user.

We're using the version that is on Windows Server 2012 R2.

I'd advise other companies that this solution is to be considered, compared to other solutions. That said, there are solutions that are better and it depends on the scenario. It depends on the scenario, the scale you have, the implementation, et cetera. Companies should compare it to other solutions. Maybe the cost is high and performance isn't as good for them. I would suggest companies go with the VMware solution. That said, again, it depends on the scenario. In some scenarios, where a company is heavily dependent on Microsoft and Windows, it would be a better solution for them.

If most of your workloads are Windows Server, then buying a server host would give you free licensing for those workloads. The licensing would be included. Otherwise, if you buy another solution then you have to pay separately for each Windows license. The cost would be again, very high. For us, I can say maybe 70% or 80% of our workloads are Linux and other OS's, not Windows. It wouldn't make sense for us to go with Hyper-V. The cost would be too high. If you are implementing heavily into Windows Server, go for Hyper-V. If you have a different application or different type of application, then you'd be better off going with another solution. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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).

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.

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.

I've used it for one or two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I am a solution provider and Hyper-V is one of the products that I implement for my customers.

There are two very good things about this product including licensing and stability. 

If you have a lot of Hyper-V servers then you will need an additional product, which is the System Center Virtual Machine Manager, so that you can control the host environments of all of your virtual machines. It would be nice if they provided a free management console that we could use to manage all of the hosts for no additional fee.

There should be a way to restart the services and not the whole station, which would minimize downtime, especially when updating the operating system. This is a feature that everybody needs.

I started working with Hyper-V in 2012, between eight and nine years ago.

The product is very stable, in particular with the most recent version of Windows Server. This is true even in a cluster environment, and I have never found an issue with stability.

Obviously, when you are using Windows Server update, it will restart the server occasionally and you will have downtime, but it will be minimal. If you don't want to have any downtime then you will need multiple hosts in a cluster environment. You can move your virtual machines from one host to another, which means that you can restart the server and not affect the service. This can be important because sometimes, the restart process takes too much time to complete.

It is very easy to scale Hyper-V. However, it depends on the version that you have because if you have the Standard Edition then you only have three hosts. If you want more than three hosts then you will need a Datacenter version.

I have experience with VMware and one of the nice features is that you can restart a service after an update and everything goes live in seconds, rather than minutes.

These two technologies compete with each other, and in deciding which to use, I speak with users about their needs. I also speak with them about the knowledge of their technical team and the budget. These are all factors in the decision because I want to provide the best solution from both a technical and budget perspective.

The initial setup is very easy. All you have to do is watch a 10-minute YouTube video and you can deploy the hardware.

It can be deployed in different ways. If you need to have a virtual environment then it will be hosted on Microsoft Azure. If instead, you have your own private cloud then it will be hosted on-premises, on your physical servers.

The tricky part about this field is not the deployment. It's troubleshooting and finding solutions for issues. For just about any software, you can deploy anything. Even if you don't understand anything about the product, you can deploy anything from scratch and there is no issue with it. The problem is figuring how to solve issues and find solutions outside of the box. Almost all Microsoft issues are solved in this way. It's not about what you find online or in the documentation. Rather, you need to think outside the box. It's the hardest part about this field.

If you have the standard edition of Windows server then with each copy of the operating system, you have two virtual machines for free.

If you have a Windows Datacenter license then you have unlimited virtual machines for free. This is much better compared to ESXi or VMware, where each virtual machine requires its own license. In the Windows Datacenter, you can have as many as you want.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We were using Hyper-V as a part of our ERP system, proxy servers, and some very minimalistic workstations.

If I want to create a cluster of around five to 10 physical servers Hyper-V does not get integrated with any kind of virtual sense, such as vSense.

I have been using Hyper-V for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

I rate the stability of Hyper-V a ten out of ten.

I am not able to scale the solution the way I want and that is why we are migrating to VMware.

I rate the scalability of Hyper-V a four out of ten.

I have used the support one or two times for post-implementations and they're very helpful and skilled.

The initial setup of Hyper-V is easy compared to vScaler. It did not take more than two or three days for setting up the vendor cluster.

Our in-house team did the deployment of the solution.

We have received a return on investment. However, we had a better result with vScaler.

We evaluated Citrix solutions and Open Linux with our integration team. We choose Hyper-V because we have Microsoft Windows systems.

I recommend this solution to others if they have a cluster of around four or less than 10 servers. However, if they want to have higher-level clusters and integrated service solutions, they will have to look at other options.

I rateHyper-V a seven out of ten.

We use Hyper-V for data center virtualization. We initially set up 54 servers and three SANs.

The virtual SAN feature is helpful. 

Some of the interfaces need improvements, like the virtual switch or virtual VLAN interfaces.

I have been using Hyper-V for almost six months.

Hyper-V is stable.

Hyper-V is scalable.

Microsoft support is good. 

Hyper-V is a simple product overall, but it's complex to set up. If you want to configure a VLAN, you have to configure all the prerequisites. About 15 people are working with this solution, but you need only three for maintenance. 

We had help from a reseller. 

We pay an annual license for Hyper-V, and it's on the expensive side. 

I rate Hyper-V eight out of 10. The first time you deploy Hyper-V, you need to do a test scenario before moving into a production environment. 

Hyper-V is a virtualization layer. We use it for all of our applications.

The performance is very good.

Failure capabilities are insufficient for disaster recovery. Better disaster recovery is required.

The technical support is adequate but it could be better.

We have been using Hyper-V for 11 years.

We are working with the 2019 version. Version 2022 has been released, and we intend to update it next year.

Hyper-V is a stable product.

In our organization, this solution is used by more than 1,200 people, and that number will increase to more than 1,500 users next month.

It's a scalable solution.

In my experience, support is normal. If I were to rate them, I would give them an eight out of ten. 

When you contact technical support, you will speak with a level one representative, who has less knowledge than level two and level three representatives.

Previously, I was using VMware, but it was a bit costly compared to Hyper-V.

I also question why I should pay for the virtualization when I was getting it for free with Hyper-V. 

With a Data Center license, such as the Windows Data Center license, Hyper-V is essentially free. That is why I switched to Hyper-V; it met 90 percent of our requirements.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is very easy to install.

It took me two to three days to complete the design and installation.

We only need one administrator to keep this solution running.

I completed the installation myself.

We purchase the license from Microsoft.

We renew the software assurance every three years.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution.

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