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Hyper-V pros and cons

Vendor: Microsoft

4.0 out of 5

145 reviews
86% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Hyper-V offers live migration, Failover Clustering, and seamless management with straightforward replication, providing cost-effective virtualization within Windows Server. Despite stable performance and fast deployment, it faces issues like difficulties in cloud storage scaling, limited public cloud integration, and potential replication process failures. Dependency on Windows Server can result in frequent reboots and potential security risks, while competing solutions like VMware are gaining market preference due to support limitations and slower performance of Hyper-V.

Buyer's Guide

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

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Hyper-V provides live migration and Failover Clustering, allowing critical workloads to be highly available.

Hyper-V is cost-effective and included with Windows Server, eliminating additional licensing costs.

Replicating and creating virtual environments with Hyper-V is straightforward, enabling seamless management and testing.

Hyper-V offers stable performance, and fast server setup and deployment, significantly reducing downtime.

The integration with other Microsoft solutions and ease of use enhance overall efficiency and management.

CONS

Hyper-V has a hard limitation on file sizes utilizing cloud storage systems like Dropbox, requiring file splitting for larger files.

It lacks seamless integration with other public cloud solutions, limiting flexibility and scalability.

The replication and live migration processes can encounter issues, causing failures without clear error explanations.

Hyper-V's reliance on Windows Server for virtualization introduces frequent reboots and security vulnerabilities.

Many vendors are reducing support for Hyper-V due to its limited market presence and slower performance compared to VMware.

Hyper-V Pros review quotes

Systems Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 13, 2017

Live migration, SMB3.

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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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IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Jan 30, 2018

It runs our most critical workloads and supports all our branch offices.

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ST

Shabarinath Thekkemeppully Ramadasan

Systems Architect at UST Global

Apr 4, 2018

The organization has realized the benefits on smaller data center space, power, cooling, etc. apart from the benefit that the virtualization layer brings in.

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Head of IT Architecture and Design at Alterna Bank

May 15, 2018

Hyper-V provided freedom to spin up development and test environments. As projects were created, an environment could be created and applied.

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Works at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

Sep 14, 2018

It works very well. Its performance, stability, and redundancy are all very dependable.

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Interim Director of Technology at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 15, 2018

This solution helps us with production of our office business needs.

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System Administrator at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

Nov 18, 2018

We can perform maintenance on equipment during the day because we can live migrate all of the machines from one server to another.

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SS

Manager, Business Unit at hadafq8

Nov 18, 2018

With each update, the security of this solution just gets better and better. It is very stable.

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MA

System Administrator at Abdullah Al-Othaim Markets

Apr 20, 2019

I think the cluster environment is a good feature of Hyper-V because, if something happens, then it will automatically move to some other mode. This is a great feature of the solution.

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Hyper-V Cons review quotes

Systems Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 13, 2017

Storage via SMB3.

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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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IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Jan 30, 2018

They can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs.

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Free Report: Hyper-V Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Hyper-V. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

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ST

Shabarinath Thekkemeppully Ramadasan

Systems Architect at UST Global

Apr 4, 2018

SCVMM needs to be more user-friendly. Without SCVMM, automating is not easy to use and we look forward to the upcoming versions of SCVMM becoming simpler and more admin friendly.

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Head of IT Architecture and Design at Alterna Bank

May 15, 2018

It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities.

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Works at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

Sep 14, 2018

I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage.

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Interim Director of Technology at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Nov 15, 2018

It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage.

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System Administrator at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees

Nov 18, 2018

Microsoft increased the price for this solution when adding the Storage Spaces Direct feature.

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SS

Manager, Business Unit at hadafq8

Nov 18, 2018

The the only challenge for us was moving existing physical machines to virtual machines.

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MA

System Administrator at Abdullah Al-Othaim Markets

Apr 20, 2019

Sometimes it is a mess, and it is getting hanged. It should be something that could be easily fixed. It made us have to deal with fixing the bugs.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Server Virtualization Software

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

VMware vSphere vs Hyper-V

Proxmox VE vs Hyper-V

Red Hat OpenShift vs Hyper-V

Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs Hyper-V

Oracle VM VirtualBox vs Hyper-V

Oracle VM vs Hyper-V

Citrix XenServer vs Hyper-V

RHEV vs Hyper-V

oVirt vs Hyper-V

XCP-ng virtualization platform vs Hyper-V

IBM PowerVM vs Hyper-V

VMware ESXi vs Hyper-V

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