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Hyper-V pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.0 out of 5

139 reviews
86% willing to recommend

5,490 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Hyper-V offers seamless live migration, high availability, and integration with Microsoft solutions, making it ideal for Windows environments. Its scalability and cost-effectiveness are suitable for small to medium installations, though it faces challenges with third-party compatibility, cloud integration, storage limitations, and disaster recovery. Despite resource management and flexibility enhancing efficiency, issues with centralized management and Microsoft support hinder its scalability and user satisfaction.

Buyer's Guide

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Hyper-V provides stable performance, supporting critical workloads and offering high availability features like Failover Clustering and live migration, ensuring minimal downtime during maintenance.

Hyper-V's simplicity and ease of use make it a cost-effective virtualization option with straightforward setup and simple configuration for easy management and scalability.

Hyper-V integrates well with other Microsoft solutions, offering seamless Windows integration, making it ideal for enterprises using Microsoft environments.

Hyper-V offers substantial flexibility with features such as storage expansion and virtual machine replication, allowing dynamic allocation of resources without service interruption.

Hyper-V delivers reliable technical support, with responsive service ensuring issues are handled quickly, further enhancing its appeal as a stable virtualization platform.

CONS

Hyper-V lacks flexibility and doesn't match the feature set of competitors like VMware, especially in scalability and network flexibility.

There are significant challenges with managing large Hyper-V deployments, and the administration and monitoring capabilities require improvements.

Live migration and replication features need enhancements, with frequent issues in performance and error messaging.

Storage management and integration with public cloud solutions have room for significant improvement in Hyper-V.

There are issues with cloning functionalities, VLAN configuration, and compatibility with different systems, making it less robust than other options.

Hyper-V Pros review quotes

KE

IT Director at HOMELAND TECHNOLOGY GROUP, LLC

Dec 21, 2021

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.

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AA

IT Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

May 25, 2021

Microsoft has documentation that is easy to find, helpful, and readily available.

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VM

Cloud solution architect at 0

Feb 20, 2024

Hyper-V deployment is very user-friendly. It supports partial scripting and offers a UI for a smooth experience. There's also PowerShell scripting available for advanced users.

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LL

Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 28, 2021

It is actually very low on resources. It doesn't use many resources. It is also very easy to tailor. You can change things like the amount of memory and storage on the fly. It is very stable and reliable. I like its replication feature, which is very good. It is also very easy to move the virtual machines across push servers without any difficulty. Its performance is also very good. Now with this pandemic, a lot of workers are working from home. A lot of workers have been using laptops as their desktop computers, and they would remote into a virtual PC. There is no difficulty, and they can't tell the difference between this and the real one. It is much easier to manage.

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SA

Engineer, System Admin at ebm

Sep 28, 2021

The initial setup is simple. There's not much to do. We input one command or just one or two clicks on the UI. Initial setup in the Windows environment for any software is not that difficult.

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Technology Systems Analyst with 1-10 employees

Oct 3, 2017

The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization.

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EU

IT infrastructure lead at 0

Feb 2, 2024

Hyper-V can expand storage. For instance, if I have a VM running on NetApp or another platform, I can expand the storage without interrupting operations. It is useful when I need to quickly allocate more storage without causing downtime or performing maintenance tasks.

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AG

PreSales Manager at UC-Solutions

Apr 7, 2021

There are two very good things about this product including licensing and stability.

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Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

Nov 23, 2022

It's a stable product.

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SK

Senior System Engineer at avian Technologies (pvt) ltd

Aug 10, 2021

I like that Hyper-V is like a virtual environment. I like to use VMware because of the resource requirements. In Sri Lanka, most of the customers use the Hyper-V GUI. When installing the interface with the Windows version, we also install the Hyper-V feature on the server. This is because they require more features and memory. There are so many features that they have embedded in Hyper-V that are useful.

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Hyper-V Cons review quotes

KE

IT Director at HOMELAND TECHNOLOGY GROUP, LLC

Dec 21, 2021

Hyper-V's management platform falls short in terms of scalability, especially when handling multiple Hyper-V servers. VMware has a central console to pull in all your VM servers, so you can easily manage them all through one console. You can manage servers in Hyper-V's admin centers, but it's not as scalable. It's doable with a couple of Hyper-V servers, but it becomes harder to manage when you get over two or three Hyper-V servers.

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AA

IT Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

May 25, 2021

The solution is heavily reliant on Microsoft's active directory for authentication, for coordination between nodes. Therefore, it inherits all the issues that are within the active directory.

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VM

Cloud solution architect at 0

Feb 20, 2024

There's room for improvement in Hyper-V. One area I've personally encountered issues with is live migration. Sometimes during live migrations, the process gets stuck in a certain state. This can happen with replication as well. It's not necessarily a major problem, but at times, the error messages aren't very informative. They don't clearly explain why the migration failed.

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Learn what your peers think about Hyper-V. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

LL

Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 28, 2021

The Hyper-V management console could be improved to make it easier. It should be a little bit more granular. Various virtual switches could also be improved to make virtual desk management slightly better. The replication could be improved slightly. The checkpoints or snapshots could be improved to make it a bit more transparent to the user.

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SA

Engineer, System Admin at ebm

Sep 28, 2021

I would like Microsoft to put more effort into the Admin Center interface and make it much easier. It is customizable, but you have to be a PowerShell expert to customize these things. That is a limitation.

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Technology Systems Analyst with 1-10 employees

Oct 3, 2017

There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable.

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EU

IT infrastructure lead at 0

Feb 2, 2024

Hyper-V serves its purpose, but some areas may not be as feature-rich as alternatives like VMware ESXi.

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AG

PreSales Manager at UC-Solutions

Apr 7, 2021

It would be nice if they provided a free management console that we could use to manage all of the hosts for no additional fee.

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Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

Nov 23, 2022

We'd like a template feature to help deploy VMs quickly.

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SK

Senior System Engineer at avian Technologies (pvt) ltd

Aug 10, 2021

It would be better if it demanded less memory. Once you have allocated those memory spaces for the installed server, fewer resources are left to allocate for the Hyper-V virtual environment. That's the drawback with that. For example, once you install Windows 10, and let's say Windows 2019, Windows 2019 will take at least 10 GB of memory. If a customer has only 16 GB of RAM on the system, they think of installing Hyper-V. Because when you have windows 2019 or something else, they give two free Hyper-V virtual licenses. But we can't because there's not enough memory. We can, however, install this as a VMS. But this UI isn't that user-friendly for most customers. They like to have a user interface with VMI, and it's not easy when you install VMI. It would also be better if they can improve their core Hyper-V version to be a bit more familiar and user-friendly with its interface. I think it would be much easier. We had a few issues with the VM Hyper-V virtual network. Once you have such issues, it's very difficult to find out where they came from. They had such issues, and we had to resolve the system again. But other than that, if it's useful and keeps working nicely, it will work very nicely even if something happens. But it's very hectic and challenging to find out where it's happening. In the next release, it would be better to control this data store part in a manageable way. This is because once we install and create a Hyper-V machine, it goes everywhere. It would be better if it had a single location and a single folder with a heartbeat and virtual machine information. You can just go forward, and the data store and everything are going into one place like the C drive. But something always goes fast, or everything gets lost if the customer doesn't manually change the direction of where the virtual hard drive routes, the more serious the problem. It would be better if they could merge all that together. This includes the virtual machine and the virtual hard drive in the same folder when creating the virtual machine. I think that it would be much easier to manage and in case something happens. Technical support also could be better.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Server Virtualization Software

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Proxmox VE vs Hyper-V

VMware vSphere vs Hyper-V

Oracle VM VirtualBox vs Hyper-V

Oracle VM vs Hyper-V

Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs Hyper-V

Citrix XenServer vs Hyper-V

RHEV vs Hyper-V

IBM PowerVM vs Hyper-V

oVirt vs Hyper-V

OpenVZ vs Hyper-V

XCP-ng virtualization platform vs Hyper-V

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