Hyper-V Reviews

I use Azure Monitor and other monitoring solutions to support clients in Accenture's managed services. We support multiple environments, primarily on cloud platforms like Azure and AWS, and also on-premises environments with operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Solaris, among others.

Microsoft Hyper-V is useful for maintaining workloads with smaller footprints, especially in remote or retail settings. Its cost-effectiveness is beneficial for clients.

I use Hyper-V primarily to create virtual machines (VMs).

I find the quick provision feature in Hyper-V to be extremely helpful. Additionally, the ease of setup since we have been using it for a long time also adds value. Hyper-V supports the creation of VMs efficiently.

I am using Hyper-V because it is easy, user-friendly, and offers high availability options. I use it to manage virtual machines and demonstrate Microsoft products to students. In my organization, Hyper-V is used on-premises rather than on the cloud.

Hyper-V is used on-premises, not in the cloud, because the cloud already has virtualization support. This eliminates the need to use Hyper-V on the cloud.

We use Hyper-V for our on-premise servers, and we have a couple of Hyper-V desktops that remote salespeople use to log in remotely. They have an on-premises station they can remote into and utilize everything at our other office. We replicate everything there, so if anything happens to our facility here, we can get spun up at our other location.

There are 40 people in our organization. We have sales engineers, technicians, and our standard office staff. Three servers are running off of Hyper-V, including our SQL server for our main CRM and QuickBooks databases, our central files storage server, and another files server that holds our backup domain controller. Then we have another domain controller that handles some other internal things. That is pretty much our organization in a nutshell.

We plan to expand usage of Hyper-V. For example, we have a terminal server that isn't on Hyper-V at the moment. It is session based, and we're working on transitioning over. Also, we got a brand new server two weeks ago, so we're transitioning everybody off of the terminal server to local Windows 10 and Hyper-V VMs. 

Everyone will have their own desktop environment versus having a session-based terminal. That way, if there's an emergency patch update or something like that for one person on the terminal server, we don't have to take the whole terminal server down. We can take down that person's desktop. We'll deploy as many as 12 additional Hyper-V desktops running in that. 

That will be our future deployment based on what we've seen in the Hyper-V desktop environment and its performance. It runs great. All users who have already transitioned to that environment are enjoying it compared to the old terminal server that we had.

We were running three servers, but Hyper-V enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server running NVMe drives in it. Using Hyper-V's virtualization, we can operate all our servers on one physical server. We're seeing better performance off of that thanks mainly to the NVMe drives. 

We've probably seen a 50 percent speed increase on our SQL server. Hyper-V has also significantly reduced our downtimes with faster boot-up and reboot. If we have to reboot a server, there is maybe two or three minutes of downtime. When we were on a bare-metal server, it could be five to ten minutes due to the total boot time.

We have a virtualization environment where we use Hyper-V on the ESXA cluster. We install Hyper-V, then we install virtual machines, and configure the virtual machines there. This setup does not require any license from Microsoft.

I use Hyper-V to create virtual machines on hardware. Hyper-V is an alternative solution to VMware. It is beneficial for those who need to set up virtual machines without licensing requirements. 

It is completely free, which is a significant advantage. 

Additionally, it is easy to set up, scoring eight out of ten for setup ease. The product is stable, although it requires improvement in automation features for better functionality.

Hyper-V is utilized across various resources. For example, Azure utilizes Hyper-V as its hypervisor in the backend, so essentially, Azure's cloud services run on Hyper-V. Thus, Hyper-V plays a crucial role in cloud computing environments.

Hyper-V functions as a feature within Windows Server editions, like Windows Server 2012 Standard, where it's included by default. With the purchase of the operating system, you gain access to multiple services such as software-defined storage, Hyper-V for virtualization, cluster computing, containerization with Docker and Kubernetes, and data deduplication, among others. 

Hyper-V allows for secure, isolated virtual environments for running applications, offering scalability, portability, and the ability to configure network settings, making it a significant asset for virtualization.

So, virtualization with Hyper-V is crucial. Consider Azure Stack HCI, which relies exclusively on Hyper-V for operation, hosting all workloads on virtual machines. Without Hyper-V, Azure Stack HCI wouldn't function. Hyper-V's importance extends to Azure cloud as well; it's fundamental from Microsoft's perspective. 

When we look beyond Microsoft to other cloud services like those offered by AWS or VMware, it's clear they depend on their own hypervisors to deliver similar services. Therefore, hypervisors, including Hyper-V, play a crucial role in today's cloud infrastructure.

However, I also faced a challenge with Hyper-V. One challenge is related to VM configuration files. In earlier Hyper-V versions, these files were in XML format, which allowed easy editing if there were any parameter mismatches or errors. However, the newer format, BCM, doesn't have any external tools available for editing the configuration file. 

So, if a customer encounters an issue with the configuration file, they might need to create a support ticket with Microsoft. Microsoft can then use an internal tool to analyze the BCM file and identify the problem. This can be a bit inconvenient for users, but overall, Hyper-V remains user-friendly and functional in most operational areas. I wouldn't say there are many challenges otherwise.

The first benefit for the customer and myself is the ease of management. It's not complicated, and it operates smoothly when the architecture is properly set up for the customer. It functions highly efficiently and streamlined, making it optimal for daily operations.

Microsoft's market is improving because it's becoming more open to open-source technologies. It's becoming more open and stable, and a significant advantage is the strong performance of Linux and Linux Cloud on its platforms. The integration with Azure is excellent, providing seamless performance. If customers want to create a hybrid cloud, it's easy to configure and integrate with Azure. Active Directory integration is straightforward to set up.

We use the tool for virtualization. We have virtual servers so that we do not have to have individual servers for every service. We use it to create mirrors of the primary server. We can deploy a number of services on one server.

The restore function of the virtual server is valuable to me. It cuts down the time of redeploying a service that is down.