VMware
Exploring Hyper-V from a VMware User’s Perspective
Exploring Hyper-V from a VMware User’s Perspective
#Exploring #HyperV #VMware #Users #Perspective
“2GuysTek”
Welcome to our third video, diving deep into VMware alternatives for your #homelab and your business. In this video, I boldly step into the world of Microsoft Hyper-V to uncover how it compares to VMware ESXi and evaluate it as a replacement from a VMware user’s perspective. It’s a long video,…
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To reminde you Hyper V core and Windows server both have option of Web based Gui Management called Windows Admin Center. Which need to installed to manage as single host or cluster.
What about ESXi vs say Debian libvirt, virt-manager? Its whats under Proxmox, and can be made awesome network wize by running Openvswitch instead of Linux kernel bridging. Openstack (available under Debian) also uses KVM under the hood, with openvswitch. KVM cn pretty much run anything, but IMHO nested virt is not high on my list of must haves at all.
It's pronounced Be"Oh Ess" not "be-ahs"
We run vmware, vmware and hyper-v. Removing hyper-v atm though and the new cost of vmware will means probably the only one left will be Nutanix. We are not a small business…
Isnāt Hyper-V being sunsetted? According to our MS rep itās not being developed on anymore
what do most people have against Microsoft ?
Hyper-v was often a cost cutting solution, which is fine for a lot of environments that don't have a lot of churn. If you have 2 or more hosts, best was iSCSI storage. Forget hyper-converged (Storage Spaces Direct, please don't, unless you have some experienced people on hand) or simple VM replication (set up monitoring, because it will break).
Would you try to compare with TrueNAS Scale too?
Remember you can run Hyper-V on nano which is very light weight as well. Last time I used it was in 2016, and it was around 700 meg. I am sure it is bigger but couldn't be much more. Nano is a great OS if you want to be very small. It works for file server, DNS, DHCP. The only thing it won't work for is AD because it uses a DB, which is a shame. It takes about 3 seconds to load a Nano.
Hyper-v is far from perfect. But it is easy to setup and to manage. But it basically needs MSFT AD to do anything real.
In your day to day operations as a HV admin , you spend very little time in Hyper-V manager . learn some PowerShell – you will never have to touch Hyper-V manager again .Your summary is correct ,its a cost thing . MS enterprises and MSPs have the licenses already . But it doesn't suck . its perfectly fine , especially if your already a windows admin . its 85% as good as VMware and its real from a real company with support and 3rd party apps and support and admins you can hire to work it, all which can be lacking on some other platforms . That's pretty good for the price.
Complexity always makes things tricky when it comes to performance. But to truly see thr power of Hyper-v u need the SCVMM Gui to expose it all to users use to the vCenter.
Microsoft is pushing towards hybrid management of on pharmacist resources using assure arc, etc.
HYPER-V equivalent vcenter tool is Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager. Just wanted to point that out.
Even if Hyper-v "sounds" like a solution, it is not. For small businesses running 10-15 vms one or two ESXi hosts, 3 Hyper-V hosts will be required to offer almost the same computing performance. Windows process scheduler, memory management and network stack all add up to a 20-30% in performance loss on the same hardware. You better pay up and stay with Broadcom/Vmware if you are eyeing hyper-v as a solution as you will pay more in troubleshooting and downtime then you ever had before.
XCP-ng and Proxmox are way better alternatives.
13 years of my IT career were in managed services. Hyper-V was pretty popular for our smaller clients and helped clients save cost by only having to have one well configured server running as their DC and the rest as VMs. It worked fine. It did its job and it was stable and reliable. So for those small clients, it was a good solution.
You're a true asset to the YouTube community.
And Microsoft is slowly killing Hyper-V as they push everyone to Azure. You'd be crazy to spin up a new Hyper-V instance now.
Now it would be awesome to have kind of a final round comparison of Proxmox next to Xcp-ng on your actual "doing things in it" pov āļø
Hyper-V supports Thick Provisioning just fine when creating the virtual disk, it just doesn't give the option when setting up a new VM and you use that window to specify the size. If you create a new virtual disk stand alone you can totally thick provision it.
The biggest issue we run into on a daily basis is in VMware we can easily add a USB Controller and map any USB device through to a VM, but in Hyper-V you cannot pass through just any USB device. You can set an external hard drive to "Offline" and pass through the physical hard drive, but if you have a USB security key that a program living inside a VM requires, then you're looking at a product like USB Network Gate and sharing it from the host or another device.
I used hyper-V for 20 Years without system center in domain setup with replica's
The thing I like with Hyper-V is that it runs on my win10 laptop and is good to test various things without my sysadmins knowing :3 V-switch are not bad at all.
Hyper-V on a "simple" win10/Win11 pro host is understated in my opinion.
You are WRONG, or BIAS!
– As i told you already, i switched from ESXi to hyper-v for performance reason. Cost has nothing to do with it!
– Hyper-v uses M.2 SSDs more efficient and the speed of SSD + IOPS can be dubled in hyper-v! using ESXi, you need more failure points + more SSDs for greater speed, because you can't use the full speed of an M.2 SSD.
– Flexibility! With hyper-v, you can switch, add, remove, manage disks more easy than ESXi. Whatever happens with your host, is easier to fix it with windows interface than CLI, plus debuging the OS and restore it, is also more easy.
– The hyper-v interface is simplier and it simply does the job. you create your networks, you create your vms and that's it. no need for very complex services or tasks to manage.
– Hyper-v is more stable and easier to patch/update. I have hosts running for 3 years without any downtime nor error.
I use hyper-v in my house on a workstation + other 30 hosts on my datacenter at hyper-v it really fits.
I used ESXi in the past and slowly transitioned to hyper-v for more performance and flexibility.
i wouldn't switch to currently ESXi even if it was for free. ESXi is too complicated these days and lack of performance per VM, while hyper-v is simple, flexible and supports the full speed of your hardware + overclickings.
If we talk about money, just consider that if you buy a 20$ windows 10/11 license, or a 50$ windows server license from ebay, it has the same support and is legal too.
So for 50$ for life, you get a complete license, which translates in basically FREE.
Is true, ESXi has more features and statistics than hyper-v, but would you trade the having some charts which you don't really need, because you set your limits for each vm and can see the resourcess without the need of these charts; for the lack of resourcess or flexibility?
Would you care to install 24SSDs on your server, instead of 2s M.2 highspeed ssds? because this is the tradeoff using ESXi. You need more hardware resourcess, to achieve performance on your VM.
If you run a mysql server/database with high traffic, which requires high count of IOPS and low latency, you need to pair 4 ssds on ESXi to achieve the same performance of one in hyper-v.
And this is why hyper-v is better for some people. and not the cost.
if you add the cost too, ESXI becomes irelevant.
It seems hyperv was something micrsoft wanted when they started, but when they decided to go all in for azure, hyperv became their ugly keed they didnt want and they are just hoping it dies without they have to kill it
It would be nice to see a comparison of VMware to Azure and AWS. Lots of small to medium businesses might be better served by moving to one of the public cloud offerings and could use this as the opportunity to make the jump. I've been a VMware admin for 14+ years and I know we are really taking a long hard look at moving to the public cloud and not having to pay down the large capital expense for Server / Storage / Network hardware every 5-7 years.
As someone who has professionally been a Windows engineer and later a VMWare engineer, I agree with your analysis almost completely. I never understood why Microsoft didn't come up with a specific vCenter-esque system to manage Hyper-V. SCVMM never seemed like a good replacement to me (really focusing on management + automation instead of just management and became too complicated because of it), and Windows Admin Center is really more of remote Windows manager than a true VM platform.
A couple things to note, however, is that Windows Admin Center will now allow you to add cluster roles and configure clusters completely within the latest version of WAC. That makes it better, but still too Windows-focused in my mind for a vCenter replacement.
Likewise, Microsoft is promoting Azure Stack as their new on-prem answer to vCenter and as a quasi-replacement for SCVMM. I know this because the multi-national corp I worked for recently had decided to go the Hyper-V + Azure stack as the internal replacement for ESXi + vCenter due to Broadcom.
I've used HyperV in my homelab for quite some time now. Mainly due to issues with ESXi not liking my hardware and I moved away as it was just eating through disks for fun – I didn't have sever-grade hardware and ESXi just constantly (as in every few months) fell over due to disks failing which brought down ESXi and so, after a few lost VMs I gave up and went with HyperV
The lack of a web GUI is not a deal breaker for me as I find that I can manage most functions well enough from the Console and Powershell.
A quick note is that Hyper-V has 3 options for Disk sizes – Fixed Size (Thick), Dynamically expanding (Thin) and Differencing (mainly used with Checkpoints)
Another feature I like with HyperV is that VHDX's can be mounted directly into Windows – meaning it is a lot easier to copy files to and from a virtual disk when not attached to a VM
The EOL of the "free" version of Hyper-V is an issue, but from my own experience with ESXi – I am firmly in the HyperV camp now.
We have both VMWare and Hyper-V, the number of VMs is about the same on both. Hyper-V is "ok" as a solution.
I prefer VMWare, but we're going to need to move.
My biggest problem with Hyper-V is the UI. It's lacking in every conceivable way.
The second issue is the virtual networking. It's too minimum viable for me, and more difficult to deal with VLANs.
My final issue is that Microsoft is on the rampage for changing (to subscription) and increasing their license cost across the board, and they are breaking out features and charging more for them, or hiding them in much higher cost SKUs, putting them out of reach for a small business.
With the exception of Software SA, I'm fairly certain that Microsoft will push Hyper-V into some subscription type system to match what Broadcom did with VMWare. Per core per year subscription. But it's just a hypothesis.
Lucky you, you don't have to manage A Azure Stack HCI Cluster. It's utter trash.
shouldnt you be able to use vcenter in your comparisons since on the new cost structure everything comes with a copy of vcenter?
You're running BeOS?? Oh man, I loved that one. The error's and warnings were awesome. Trying to get an SB AWE64 running on BeOS "Your computer doesn't have any audio devices attached….. Bummer"
Im not a fan of the MS bloat, but in a business environment, Hyper-V can be a safer choice than some mutt and jeff thing downloaded from the Internet. I like the fact that most Hyper-V features work without the server being joined to a domain. I run multiple Linux workloads on HV, even features like replication and the shutdown button work flawlessly.
vSphere charges extra for vSan – HyperV can be uses converged for free.
The mmc flavoured console is pretty much deprecated, you should be looking at using WAC, or SCVMM… Throw PowerShell on top of that and it's quite capable. It's no vCenter, but it's still a nice option if you're primarily a WindowsLinux environment.
I usually say I do not want to use Hyper-Ventilate. and that is what it looked like you did when talking about the GUI š
I run hyper-v with Acronis cloud manager on the front end. I agree that the build in gui is painful but itās free with the hypervisor so thatās why I paid for a 3rd party gui. All the other hypervisors outside of VMware have either support issues or not a large pool of people know them when you need to hire an admin.
The vCenter equivalent is Windows Admin Center, you mention in the video its introduction, but then forget about it when discussing how Hyper-V is managed.
WAC is a web portal and can be managed in a similar way to vCenter.
Okay… A lot to unpack here. I'll try to summarize though.
Preface: I am vmware (6) certified bu thave been running Hyper-V and now SCVMM at an Enterprise for the last 5 years. Yes, I chose to work somewhere with a massive hyper-v presence. However, I am actively moving my Datacenter and the associated DR to VMWare Vsphere+ because of a laundry list of issues, complaints and utterly horrible approach Microsoft has had towards Hyper-V. My ROBO locations I'm – for now – leaving hyper-v simply because for a stand alone host, Hyper-v is "Fine" – not great, and I'd prefer them under one vCenter – but it's 'included' in the cost so it is what it is; and most of my issues are around clustering and performance issues which are Datacenter specific.
The three main things I want to address on this video are SCVMM/WAC, Performance, and Microsoft's approach.
Starting with Microsoft's Approach: They don't care about you. Not saying Broadcom does, but Microsoft doesn't even offer training for SCVMM/Hyper-V, and they don't want you to keep things on premise – they want you in Azure. All of their push is to get everyone to move everything into Azure. Not the cloud, not IaaS, not Virtual Colo – Azure. Want support? GLHF – it's either Unified Support (aka Premier support re-branded) which costs a LOT of money – or you deal with a nightmare of a time trying to get help even if you pay SA. On Premise enhancements? Nope – they haven't updated any core functionality of on premise systems in years and won't unless it specifically ties in with enhancing their ability to get you into Azure. Period. Further proof? What did they release with 2022: Oh yeah, Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition. An on-premise install of Hyper-V with a tighter integration to Azure. What's that? Broadcom is only in it for the money? What's that? You don't like their subscriptions? Sure, go to microsoft and pay a capex for the software and opex for SA, and a huge opex for Unified Support — but what's that? You don't actually get EVERYTHING when you buy that? No – because they want you to also pay for Azure. Azure update manager, Azure Monitor (vastly better than SCOM), Azure Arc, Azure Money, Azure Cloudy Days, Azure owns your soul.
Next up is SCVMM/WAC: SCVMM is "Required" if you want anything close to vCenter, but it's not vCenter by a long shot. Zero training available so good luck even figuring it out, because it's not intuitive and the documentation on it is horrible. SCVMM is also not even the source of truth – nor can it do everything once integrated with Hyper-V or clusters – it's at best a wrapper for powershell commands, and buggy on top of it. As a small example: When telling it to remove a node from a cluster, it looked at the underlying storage API it is 'certified' to work with, and instead of removing the connections to that node from the SAN, it just ripped out the connections of all disks to all nodes in the cluster. Why? Because it's Microsoft and it doesn't make sense. Another example: Patching – SCVMM can integrate with WSUS, but you can't actually integrate it with SCCM (which is how you would normally patch 'windows' machines in a large environment) – and I have found SCVMM patching to be buggy to an extreme. Sometimes it puts servers into maintenance mode, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it patches, sometimes it just spins. Cluster Aware Updating is better, but at that point why would you pay for SCVMM — because SCVMM isn't free, you have to pay for System Center licensing for all your hosts/VMs to use it.
WAC/Windows Admin Center is somewhat better but unpolished and doesn't have feature-parity anywhere with anything. However I have it on good authority that anything MMC related (i.e. hyper-v manager) is not having ANY R&D put into it and is going to be phased out; remember our Azure conversation? Yeah, they want you to get used to systems they can easily move to Azure; indeed WAC has tight integration with Azure.
Finally, Performance: Oh boy. I'll keep this one brief: It's not feature complete compared to VMWare. I know because I'm going from top of the line R650 Dell servers running Hyper-V on 2x32gb FC between two PCI cards (each on a socket so 100% ideal bandwidth) connecting to NVME SANs, to actually a generation older Intel Chipset servers with 2x32gb on a single PCI card – and I in real world situation and benchmarks have seen significant performance improvements of the VMs especially SQL VMs, despite identical or possibly lower hardware. The Hyper-V environment even went through a 'validation' with a Microsoft SME (not 3rd party a literal Microsoft SCVMM/Hyper-V Engineer who has written books on Microsoft software) to ensure everything was tuned tweaked and optimized; heck we even found a CSV(VMFS) setting that they recommended was in fact wrong, and we got performance increases on hyper-v by disabling it.
I could probably record an entire half hour video on the failings of Hyper-V and SCVMM. I legitimately am sad to see so many people going to Hyper-V with their 100s or 1000s of servers – they are going to find the grass is not always greener.
Now — does this excuse Broadcom? NO. I am ANGRY at how Broadcom is handling the entire situation, and I 100% believe that they are only looking for a profit; I also know that VMWare remains the absolute best hypervisor out there, and I will protest even while running it.
I'm using Hyper-V since Server 2008 and used ESXi for a few years too. My take on this: You should only take Hyper-V into consuderation if you are using Microsoft OS and products on most of your VMs anyway. If you do then you have probably a skill in PowerShell too. Don' t believe the myth you can manage everything with a GUI. Advanced configuration is only possible with PS. Hyper-V Server 2022 can be done in the same way as the free Hyper-V Server 2019 as the GUI is optional. All GUI management apps can be used remotely. If you are a Linux guy you better use a solution from that world. Remark: You can do thick provisioning for virtual hd if you want.
actualy there is Switch Embedded Teaming, but you need to configure it with powershell
If you just need to knock up a couple of M$ VM, Hyper-V will do it, but then you might just as well install one of the other free environments onto Windows- same effort.