Hyper-V RC1 has hit the market a few days ago. Microsoft is working on making the biggest fuzz out of their newest product as usual. Although Hyper-V RC1 is in its final stages before being released as RTM, I believe Microsoft have to spend more time on the development of Hyper-V before releasing it. Hyper-V is still lagging behind the competitors on many fronts below are only few examples of it:
* Hyper-V still does not support Live Migration, and quick migration is not a downtime free Operation. VMware & Citrix Xen have already achieved this goal long back.
* Hyper-V has a very limited support for Linux Operating systems. Currently it only supports SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP1. In the other hand, Citrix Xen & VMware support most commercial distros.
* Hyper-V performance for Windows prior to Windows 2008 is not even comparable to them running under VMware. Its due to the face Hyper-V needs the guest OS to support Para-Virtualization to perform well. All Windows versions prior to Windows 2008 do not support Para-Virtualization.
* Getting Supported Linux versions to run with an acceptable performance on Hyper-V is a complicated task. A step-by-step example of how to do so is available at
http://www.itcomparison.com/blg/virtualization/hyper-v-suse-linux-enterprise-10-and-component-integration.html
* Hyper-V does not support memory over-Commitment which highly limits the number of virtual machines Hyper-V can run on a physical host when compared to VMware.
Due to the above reasons and many more, you should intensely study your virtualization options before you decide on implementing Hyper-V as your main Virtualization solution.
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A good comparison between Hyper-V & VMware VI3 can be found at http://itcomparison.com/Virtualization/MShypervvsvi35/HyperVvsvmware35esx.htm I hope this article will help you in deciding on the right Virtualization choice for your environment. |