Hyper-V 3 ready to take on VMware

With cloud computing gaining momentum in the market place will Microsoft be the virtualisation platform of choice? VMWare have built their empire doing just one thing, virtualising data centres. They have been a clear choice for most topping Citrix with a great range of products which have seen other vendors playing catch up. One of those has been Microsoft and until I saw the specifications for Hyper-V 3 I would have advised to steer clear of Microsofts' virtualisation technology in all but the smallest of environments.


Hyper-V 3

Released with Windows Server 2008 Microsoft's first attempt at following VMware into data center virtualisation with Hyper-V while innovative lacked many key features essential to success. Hyper-V 2 available with Windows Server 2008 R2 had caught up to VMWares offering but still missed some deal making features.
Let's review a few facts from the VMWare website:

Proven Efficiency:
VMware offers lower capital and operational costs than Microsoft due to VMware’s higher scalability and greater levels of administrative automation.
Third-party analysis (commissioned by VMware) shows that VMware can get 20% higher scalability and 91% lower operational costs.

Proven Business Value:
VMware uniquely solves customers’ business issues leading to greater business value, especially when moving to a private cloud, built on top of a proven foundation.
The result is greater business agility than most company’s enjoy today and reduced business risk by minimising application downtime and security and compliance risks.

While VMWare has certainly been able to claim the virtualisation crown up to this point, with Hyper-V 3 released for Windows Server 2012, we see a service coming of age and ready to take on the best in the industry. Lets look at a few key areas:

Scalability:
Hyper-V now supports twice the number of logical processors (320) and RAM (4TB) per host than VMWare, double the number of VM's (1024) per host and double the maximum clusters per node (64). Certainly on this statistic Hyper-V scales much higher.

Storage:
With Hyper-3.0 a new virtual disk format (VHDX) is introduced that is capable of supporting virtual disk upto 16 TB, against standard market support of around 2 TB, and it runs on Microsoft's SMB 2.2. It can leverage file shares as storage destinations with four-node active-active clustered file servers, providing simultaneous access to file shares. These enhancements fuel the virtualization of Tier 1 applications and are critical for an enterprise-class virtualization platform.

Networking:
Both Hyper-V and VMWare offer similar features, though the distributed switch offered by VMWare is an advantage for Cloud infrastructure as it ensures standard configuration of  virtual switches across all the servers in your cluster. However Hyper-V 3 supports policy-based, software-controlled network virtualization crucial in the cloud era because everything is about policy-driven automation and orchestration, all key enablers of infrastructure-as-a-service deployments. In addition Cisco supports Hyper-V on the Nexus 1000V.

Memory:
Though Microsoft has caught up with VMware memory management techniques

by introducing Dynamic memory, Ballooning and Memory over-commit similar to VMware, VMware offers TPS, Memory compression and resource sharing which all benefit larger environments. VMWare is still ahead in this area.

Clustering and Availability:

Hyper-V offers shared-nothing migration. But VMware offers Fault tolerance and Metro Live migration (migration across long distance with less latency). Share-nothing migration can be achieved , but for this the VM needs to be powered off.

Secondly, the cluster configuration process is simpler for VMware. But Microsoft now have Hyper-V Replica a new feature of Hyper-V 3 which is comparable to VMware Fault Tolerance. It will asynchronously replicate virtual machines from one Hyper-V host to another over an IP network. Additionally this process is configured at the VM level. Add to that Fail over clustering which is able to support 64 nodes and as many as 4,000 VMs and we have continuous availablilty.

Licensing:

Both licences are offered per processor, for Hyper-V it's $4,809 and for VMWare $3,495 (may vary). VMware imposes a 96 vRAM entitlement on its Enterprise Plus edition. Microsoft doesn’t place any restrictions but limits virtualisation rights. Datacenter can create unlimited VM’s. Standard allows only 2. An advantage of Datacenter licence is you can run an unlimited number of virtualized instances of Windows Server on processors without purchasing additional licenses.

Application:

VMware supports more than 85 guest Operating Systems while Microsoft supports around 25 and primarily their own platforms. ESXi 5 is around 144 mb vs Hyper-V's 9.6GB footprint and has a lower attack surface. Windows Server on the other hand being general purpose has a high attack surface, also Hyper-V is an added role to Server 2012 and not specifically designed for Virtualization purpose.

Microsoft have made huge leaps and in a short time scale but still have a way to go to take significant market from Vmware.

Remember VMWare have been virtualising Servers since 2001, Microsoft's first serious attempt wasn't until 2008, they have come a long way in that time and have the resources to throw a lot of development $'s at it if need be.

If you are a Microsoft shop then Hyper-V  may be be the better choice as it's designed for that ecosystem and it sits well with their cloud management tools such as System Center suite.
Also if you are a smaller organisation looking for a cost effective way to ease into the virtualisation space then Hyper-V is also the better choice.
For more diverse environments though, for now VMware is still the market leader but watch this space because Microsoft are accelerating much faster.