Hyper-V Reviews

We primarily use the product for multiple servers and for Dynamics AX, for example, the routing server, the load balancer, the application server, and stuff like that.

The initial setup is very easy.

The scalability is okay.

The performance of VMware was better, which is why I've moved away from Hyper-V.

The operating system is very, very heavy. Sometimes the system is pretty slow. Basically, the iOS performance is very slow, as compared to VMware. They must make the OS as simple and as smooth as they can to make it more user-friendly and faster.

The product is quite expensive.

I've been using the solution for about one year. 

The performance isn't that great. If can be slow. 

The stability is okay. I'd describe it as between 50 to 60% stable. 

The scalability is decent. I'd say that it can scale to 60 to 70%.

We've had so many issues, however, we didn't really ask for help from Microsoft. We mostly did a lot of googling and worked to figure things out on our end. 

I've recently moved over to vSphere. 

The product is not difficult to set up. It's not overly complex. It's pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't have any problems with its implementation.

The first time I did an implementation, I needed help from Microsoft. They assisted us originally.

The solution is quite expensive when you compare it to other products. Microsoft solutions aren't cheap. 

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

I have used the Hyper-V for Dynamics AX for a while, however, recently I moved to a virtual machine, VM.

I'd rate the solution at a five out of ten. It's not the worst, however, it certainly is not the best either. 

I would recommend Hyper-V to users, especially if they are dealing with a Microsoft OS.

I have been making solutions around the Hyper-V bundles for my clients. For example, hyper-converged infrastructure, such as in vSAN and Vsphere for company data centers.

The solution is very powerful, easy to use, user-friendly, and integrates well with Windows. If you are looking for a hundred percent Microsoft environment it would be a good idea to go with Hyper-V. They work wonderfully together.

There are a lot more features and is easier to use compared to previous releases. They were using PowerCLI for the management but now it is all GUI-based which has made it a lot easier to use.

Hyper-V is not a type one hypervisor, such as vSphere. When it comes to Hyper-V, it is a role in Windows Server. Hyper-V could have been much leaner and much more powerful, but it becomes only the Hyper-V part of it. There should be some distribution or limit to Hyper-V, such as in vSphere.

The missing factor or parameter, in Hyper-V and all of the functionality, is a role it plays inside the Windows operating system. You have to enable those roles. That is something not appreciated in a data center because Windows is a general-purpose operating system, not for the sole purpose of doing these types of operations. They could skim down the version of the operating system and have it customized for virtualization, not as a general-purpose operating system.

In an upcoming release, they can improve by having better cloud integration. We are all moving towards the clouds and the integration is only through the Azure Stack, there should be tools built in to move the VMs natively to the cloud and infrastructure. Additionally, they could provide some form of multi-cloud integration.

I have been involved with Hyper-V for approximately two years.

The solution is stable in my experience.

The technical support is good because there are a lot of administrators out there in the market who are well-versed in Microsoft technologies.

The installation is straightforward. The installation time can vary depending on if you have preloaded configurations. If you were to do it from scratch then it would take approximately 20 minutes.

Hyper-V is cost-effective and is a one-time purchase. Microsoft has multiple licensing options available, such as a subscription model and an outside purchase model that customers can choose as per their requirements.

I have evaluated VMware vSphere.

Hyper-V is very popular in the market for data centers and most of my clients are using Microsoft in some form or another but it might not be their core ERP.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Hyper-V a seven out of ten.

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.

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. 

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 are an IT service company. We understand the technology and we provide Microsoft solutions, Linux, and Cisco solutions. We have a 360-degree relationship with Microsoft, Cisco, and two other companies. We are a premium partner with Microsoft. We use Hyper-V for virtualization and the consolidation of infrastructures. It is a cost-saving solution. We currently use 25% physical, and 75% virtual resources via Hyper-V, i.e. a ratio of 2.5 to 7.5. So we are using the virtual aspect to a greater extent.

It has provided a good cost-saving from the management perspective. It's easy to use, and understand. It's definitively great working on Microsoft Hyper-V. It was a great opportunity to really contribute while cutting down our company costs.

I would say that it's easy to use, and cost-effective. These are the two major factors why we like Hyper-V. I would say VMware ESX is the best, but Microsoft Hyper-V also is very good. It's easy to use and it's cost-effective compared to ESX.

Disaster recovery capabilities are the primary choice for improvement. There could also be improvements in virtualization, performance, management, monitoring, reporting, recommendations, integration, customization, and technical support. Performance and up-scaling are the most important areas in need of improvement.

We have experience with Hyper-V for about 10 to 12 years. I'm an IT manager who manages multiples things, like virtualization and email.

It's about 90% stable.

We would give it a scalability rating of 4 out of 5, compared to VMware ESX which in terms of scalability is excellent.

The support is not excellent, but it is very good. It could be improved.

The initial setup is straightforward, it's easy. I did it on my own without assistance.

We are a team of five to six members, who work on this product in-house. 

Microsoft Hyper-V is not expensive and is easy to set up.

We considered App-V for publishing, but it is a costly solution and is not for virtualization technology but as an end-user solution. It is for application publishing. We have also considered VMware ESX. The main difference between VMware virtualization and Microsoft Hyper-V is the VR capabilities of VMware ESX are better, but both are good.

We are very satisfied with Hyper-V. I would rate Hyper-V as 7 out of 10.

I use the Hyper-V for migration for the machines. We move our systems to Hyper-V and then from physical to virtual. I currently run on the physical server. I'm migrating this server from the physical to the Hyper-V virtual machine.

The solution has an easy setup.

The pricing is pretty good.

There are usability issues with Hyper-V's manager. VMware has a much better system, but it's a much more expensive solution.

The interface is not uniform at all, which makes the manager difficult to use. It's not very convenient and isn't smartly designed. They need to reimagine it to make it more effective.

There needs to be more functionality overall in the Hyper-V manager.

It might be helpful if Microsoft could recommend the use of STV. Then, at least you can use Nano products to manage the Hyper-V server. Currently, I don't use STV. I'm not too familiar with this product. It would be helpful if Microsoft could provide some guidance as to its usage and the options available and why users might opt for them so that we have a better understanding of what we can do and how we can use the services on offer effectively.

I've been using the solution for five to six years now.

The solution is very stable. It doesn't crash. There aren't bugs and glitches that affect its functionality. It's a reliable product.

There's a team of us working with the solution. We have about five or six people who work with it regularly. We use it weekly.

The solution is very scalable. You just need to use the default function and it can build on the high reliability fro there. If a company needs to expand the solution, they can do so quite easily.

Microsoft's technical support is very good. Their team is very responsive and kind. We're more than satisfied with the level of service they provide. They're excellent.

I'm also familiar with VMware, however, I find it to be much more expensive than Hyper-V, even though I believe their interface is far better.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's easy. It's not complex at all.

Deployment doesn't take long at all. You just need to download the Hyper-V system. In some cases, you may need to install Windows onto the server. I can get it up and running and start using it almost immediately. It's that simple.

You only need one person to handle maintenance.

I can install and deploy the Hyper-V and the virtual machine by myself. I'm a systems administrator. I don't need the help of consultants or systems integrators. I have enough knowledge to manage everything on my own.

The solution is not as expensive as other options, for example, specifically VMware.

We're just Microsoft customers. We aren't partners and don't have a special relationship with the company and we don't sell Microsoft products. I focus on server virtualization. I work with both VMware and Hyper-V.

We're working with the 2019 and 2017 versions on Windows.

I'd recommend the solution. It's very good. I'd rate it eight out of ten overall.

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.