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Hyper-V pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.0 out of 5

138 reviews
86% willing to recommend

5,482 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Hyper-V offers live migration, failover clustering, and efficient deployment, ensuring high availability and adaptability. It integrates well with Microsoft systems, though cloud integration needs improvement. It is praised for performance, scalability, and data management features like replication and virtual SAN. However, handling large files has limitations, and SCVMM complexity poses challenges. Increased costs with new features and security vulnerabilities are concerns for tech buyers, while streamlined system expansion minimizes significant hardware investments.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Hyper-V features live migration, allowing maintenance during business hours without service disruption.

It supports a wide range of business-critical applications with failover clustering to ensure high availability.

Hyper-V enables efficient use of data center space, and reduces costs on power and cooling through its virtualization capabilities.

It provides flexibility with API integration, making it easier to push and manage data across different systems.

Hyper-V is recognized for its stability and reliability, which is crucial for running essential workloads with minimal downtime.

CONS

Hyper-V has limitations in storage handling, particularly for large and high-load systems.

Price increases with features like Storage Spaces Direct make Hyper-V less cost-effective.

Improves management tools and scalability to compete with VMware.

Technical support could be faster and more helpful, especially with troubleshooting and updates.

Issues with disaster recovery and high availability need addressing for better reliability.

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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Shashika Rathnayaka

Technical Manager at OAK integrated System Pvt Ltd

Jun 17, 2022

The implementation process is simple.

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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: November 2024.

816,406 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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Shashika Rathnayaka

Technical Manager at OAK integrated System Pvt Ltd

Jun 17, 2022

Sometimes there's a bit of slowness in the VMs.

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Proxmox VE vs Hyper-V

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