Hyper-V

[Lazybones]

Since someone pointed out they had never head of Hyper-V I thought I would put up a little post of some interesting info.

1. Almost all of the features of Hyper-V server are included in Windows 8 desktop, making it easy to run a few different virtual machines in the background with a really good hyper visor.
2. Much like VMwares EXi server you can now get Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 FREE as a stand alone product
3. Feature breakdown of most of the current TOP Enterprise Hyper-visors http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Hypervisor-comparison.pdf


Hyper-V home page
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/hyper-v-server/default.aspx

Personally I still prefer some things about VMWare however you can't deny Hyper-V as an attractive package.

[Melbosa]

Being in Education you can't beat M$ deal on EDU software.  As such, we are heavily considering Hyper-V after my visit to TechEd 2011 last year, even though NAIT has primarily been a VMware shop.  Hyper-V has come a long way, and as Lazy said, probably not all the way to VMware standards but they are catching up.

I've also used XenServer and I must say Hyper-V surpasses them easily in Server guest hosting.  Now in the VDI Market you can't beat Citrix, as their XenApp combination with XenServer is unparalleled.  In fact I would wager that M$ Remote FX might be ahead of VMware View in terms of performance, but neither can compare to a Citrix VDI experience.

So yeah, if you've never playing with Virtualization or Microsoft XP Mode, you'll be able to get a chance with Windows 8 very easily!

[Lazybones]

The biggest drawback to hyper-v for me seem to be OS support.
VMware supports nearly every windows and Linux version where Hyper-V is very limited .

Hyper-v supports windows 2k3 and higher. For Linux it only officially supports RedHat 6 and SUSE 11. That is a very narrow list vs VMWare.

[Melbosa]

Yeah, although TechEd did indicate by this TechEd that list should be a lot larger... time will tell.  But yeah we have that issue as well.

[Darren Dirt]

Since someone pointed out they had never heard of ...

Was me. Again.

Seems most of the time a new thread is created in response to someone being the "out of touch" guy, it's yours truly... man I sure have changed from the guy who happily (and competently?) did all 3 tiers of CS at NAIT... Now I'll gladly buy a preloaded-with-crap lappy or PC from Walmart if it's a fair price for my needs, not even bothering to check MemoryExpress to see what's the recommend tech for mid-level computers nowadays...

Do I gotta hand in my ITguy badge now?

[Mr. Analog]

Darren don't fall on your sword like that...

Anyway, I haven't really played around with Hyper-V very much, we had it set up at a former contract as we were going through the process of virtualizing our Windows dev servers and it was very easy to work with. Personally speaking I have a lot more experience with VMWare and I have seen some of its limitations (max of 4 guest CPUs!) I don't know if there are similar limits in Hyper-V though...

[Lazybones]

Was me. Again.
... Snip ...
Do I gotta hand in my ITguy badge now?

Well in this case yes, it was you, don't feel offended I figured if you had not heard of it others might not as well, thus making for a very good opportunity to share some info.

You need to hand in your ITguy badge if you take the crappy pc to the store and pay their geek squad to do basic pc maintenance or repairs for you.

I don't keep track of everything anymore, I could not tell you what an intel processor was by its number anymore without looking it up, however I do understand the basic i3,i5,i7 tiers.

[Melbosa]

Personally speaking I have a lot more experience with VMWare and I have seen some of its limitations (max of 4 guest CPUs!) I don't know if there are similar limits in Hyper-V though...

Yeah 4.x of VMware had a CPU limit like that, but its gone in 5.x.  There are differences between Hyper-V and VMware in guest OS hardware, but nothing most of us would ever encounter in our IT Environments.  Maybe RAM limits if you really congest your hosts.  The one we used to hit at NAIT was the VMFS (VMware File System) size and virtual disk size limitations.  Not so much any more.

[Mr. Analog]

Ooh very cool, I'm glad to hear that actually, it wasn't something that was apparent when we first started using it but started to get painful as things rolled on.

[Tom]

Ooh very cool, I'm glad to hear that actually, it wasn't something that was apparent when we first started using it but started to get painful as things rolled on.

People were /pissed/ and started migrating in droves. People are still migrating away, so even though VMWare changed the licensing, they lost a lot of mindshare/goodwill.

[Melbosa]

You guys are talking 2 different things.  The CPU limit wasn't because of Licensing, but yes Tom is right, the Licensing model they just rescinded did indeed have VMware loose some customers.  Not sure in droves, as it isn't easy to migrate large Virtualization structures to between manufacturers, especially in the time frame between VMwares new license model and its rescinding, but they definitely lost business in some areas.  I know some small businesses that were able to make the move without too much trouble.  NAIT... well we have huge incentive to move to Hyper-V in terms of costing, but it will take us a few years to even finish a move once we get started (not even there yet as we were waiting for Windows 2012 to be mainstream for a while).

[Thorin]

I'd heard of Hyper-V before but never used it or even read up on it.  I've been sold on VMware for a long time, and I've had to use the free version of VirtualBox (not bad, but if you have a problem there's no support available unless you buy a non-free version and it has some artificial limitations imposed in the free version).

Thanks for the comparison chart there, Lazy, that's pretty useful.  The lack of Linux support seems like a dealbreaker, except if you're working in an all-Windows shop (like so many are).

And I haven't built my own computer since 1997.  Turns out Dells work good enough for my purposes.  But I still know what plugs in where and how the different pieces work together, just as I'm sure you do, Darren.  Nevertheless, it's good to keep up a general knowledge of new stuff, and I appreciate that Lazy started this thread.

So...  Where does Lab Management fit into this?

[Lazybones]

Personally speaking I have a lot more experience with VMWare and I have seen some of its limitations (max of 4 guest CPUs!) I don't know if there are similar limits in Hyper-V though...

Unless your application depends on its own thread management based on how many logical processors it sees this isn't truly an issue for later versions of VMWare. 2 vCPU to kick the OS in to SMP mode should be enough as VMWare should actually be scheduling all the thread work among the host cores underneath.. There is a white paper on VMware about this.

Hyper-V and VMware ESXi handle memory and CPU sharing very differently so for each platform you need to know how they behave to get the most out of them.

[Mr. Analog]

We had a number of services that ran in parallel with their own thread pool management, it was one of the worst designs I've ever seen but it did the job (barely).

We started running into issues when we had high volume requests (as well, we were basically accessing a file store repository like a database), we didn't clue into the problem until late in the game but by then it was all over for that project anyway.

[Melbosa]

VMware has had issues in the past with Multi-CPU Guest OSs and scheduling.  This has supposedly been resolved since 5.x release, but in 4.x it was still possible to actually cause harm to performance by adding an additional vCPU.