Gabrie from GabesVirtualWorld uploaded his Hyper-V versus ESX presentation. I think it is a nice condense overview of the pro’s and con’s of both solutions.
Read the full post here: http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=374
Gabrie from GabesVirtualWorld uploaded his Hyper-V versus ESX presentation. I think it is a nice condense overview of the pro’s and con’s of both solutions.
Read the full post here: http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=374
Last Friday I attended a Microsoft Hyper-V training. It was not the full course with hands-on labs but there was some interesting discussion between presenter and attendees and some attendees already had experience with running Hyper-V in production situations. At the end of the session I had several pages of notes that I have summarized below. As Hyper-V is based on a licensed Xen hypervisor it has an established pedigree but as with all things the quality of the hypervisor alone is not the whole story.
Update: Note the comments from Matt McSpirit in the comments section (I have made some changes to the post to reflect the comments):
Hyper-V pricing was also discussed and I learned some interesting things again. The main thing being that if you want to use the VMware DRS-like “intelligent placement” functionality that you need System Center Operations manager and System Center Virtual Machine Manager. It also turned out that while you get “free” licenses (one with Standard Edition, four with Enterprise Edition and unlimited for Datacenter Edition) to run virtual machines on Hyper-V that this only applies to VM’s that use Server 2008 as their OS. Everything else you still need to have a license for. Which means that if you want to save on licenses that you also need to plan for a migration to Server 2008 for all the servers that you want to virtualize. Edit: As mentioned by Matt it is possible to downgrade a license. I had not found that earlier. There seems to be one issue and that is the versioning of the user CAL’s. Hopefully Matt can clear it up.
Apart from the licensing these are the main points I jotted down during the meeting:
As far as an idea about the practical use of Hyper-V in a production environment you will find a number of potential disqualifiers in the list above. There were two attendees already using Hyper-V in production environments and these were both IT firms that handled server management for clients. One of those mentioned that the network issues in Hyper-V prevented them from deploying it further.
If you are planning a Hyper-V deployment or are making a comparison between different virtualization vendors this information will hopefully help you in making the decision.
Because I want to know more about Hyper-V I decided to download and read the official Planning and Deployment Guide. The current version is from August 2008. Here’s what interested me about the document (combined with information from the Microsoft website):
Regarding enterprise virtualization deployments:
I am still looking into the differences between Hyper-V on a Server Core installation and Hyper-V on a full servers installation. More on that in a follow-up post probably.