Hyper-V

[JoJoGabor]

Is anyone implementing Microsfot Hyper-V? I am a virtualisation consultant and from what I've seen Hyper-V is years behind VMware and even XenServer. I'd be interested to hear about the demand for Hyper-V and any feedback from implementing it.

As things stand currently I just cant see why a customer would implement Hyper-V over Vmware.

[spoons]

Cost perhaps

Do you not get it free as part of licensing for Windows 2008, including the management (Virtual Center costs if I rememebr correctly).

It will also only run on 64bit compliant hardware.

[JoJoGabor]

Yeah its practically free, it works out around £25 per host. If it were a pure consolidation exercise then yes it works out cheaper, but even then there are some things to consider. Vmware allows memory overcommitment which results in more VMs per host, so for the equivlanet consolidation ratios for Hyper-V you would need more memory. The high availability features and manageability of VMware makes it well worth the money in my opinion. For a cost of around £3000 per two processors works out at £75 per VM assuming 5 VMs per processing core. For that price you get live migration of running VMs between hosts, Dynamic load-balancing, Live migration between storage silos, dynamic power management, VSS-aware integrated backups. For an additional cost of around £100 per VM you can buy Site recovery manager for fully-automated DR between datacenters. I would definitely pay that kind of money for these features.

I've got to present to Hyper-V consultants the virtues of VMware and why I believe its a better proposition. I'd be interested to hear any real-world experiences with Hyper-V, good or bad, some reasons why Hyper-V is a better proposition so I can try to counter-argument them. I know I'm going to have a real argument on my hands!