Gabe from “Gabes Virtual World” is on a roll lately. He wrote three great articles which describe why he wouldn’t want to use Hyper-V in his Datacenter at this moment. I linked to his blog articles and grabbed a quote from each article that sets the tone in my opinion:
In fact, I think you will come up with a smaller number of supported nics for Hyper-V, because ESX does the VLAN trunking and teaming independent of any drivers. In ESX you can easily create a virtual switch that has an HP, Intel, Broadcom and whatever nic combined and still do VLAN trunking and teaming. Have a look at the VMware I/O HCL and learn which nics are supported. Please try to find as many nics for Hyper-V.
Part 2 Guest OS and memory Overcommit:
Looking at this environment, there is quite a number of systems that would not be supported on Hyper-V. Big deal you say? Actually, yes it is a big deal. Wasn’t cost saving by getting rid of a lot of physical hardware one of the main drivers to go virtual? Leaving a bunch of servers (around 130 in our case) run physical is quite a lot, especially because these will probably be somewhat older servers that are getting more expensive in their support contract and more vulnerable to failure.
While searching for more info on Hyper-V QuickMigration, I found a rather disturbing video by VMware. Now, it is fair to say that VMware which is the biggest competitor of Hyper-V, but somehow I do believe the video is 100% accurate. Should it not be, please let me know. The video shows then when a QuickMigration is performed between hosts with different CPU features, Hyper-V does not check the compatibility between these features. The implications here is that you could have applications crash because the application is using CPU features on host-A that are not available when running on host-B.
I think Gabe did an excellent job on these blog posts. Not only did he take time to actually discover what is and what isn’t possible he also questions himself on objectivity.
For me personally Hyper-V isn’t an enterprise solution like ESX/Virtual Infrastructure is. But I also have the feeling that Microsoft isn’t after the Enterprise market at this point in time. They try to win the SMB market and than climb their way up. Just like they tried with for instance MS SQL vs Oracle. I said tried cause I still don’t think they succeeded and probably never will.
If you want to know why I don’t think that Hyper-V is an Enterprise Solution, just read Gabrie’s blogs. Especially the section on Storage, Motions, Hardware(Nic teaming) and memory overcommitment should give you an idea why.
Great job Gabe, and keep them coming!