This is the primary hypervisor in my organization. It runs our most critical workloads and supports all our branch offices.
Senior Manager of Infrastructure with 501-1,000 employees
Enabling a Virtual Machine for Replication
Replication is configured on a per virtual machine basis. Virtual machines running on Primary site Hyper-V servers (or Hyper-V Failover Clusters) are configured to replicate to Replica servers (or Replica Failover Clusters) at remote sites.
1. In Hyper-V Manager, in the Details pane, Click on a virtual machine
2. With a virtual machine selected, Right-click and choose Enable Replication. This starts the Enable Replication wizard
3. In the Specify Replica Server screen, enter either the NetBIOS or the Fully-Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) for the Replica Server in the Replica Server box. (Note: If the Replica server is a Failover Cluster, ensure the connection point for the Hyper-V Replica Broker is used). Click Next
4. If Remote WMI is enabled, then Hyper-V Replica automatically fills the port and authentication settings
5. In the Choose Replication VHDs screen, deselect the disk(s) you do not want to replicate for the virtual machine and then click Next
6. Replication changes are sent to a Replica server every 5 minutes. In the Configure Recovery History screen, make selections for the number and types of recovery points to be sent to the Replica server. If Only the latest point for recovery is chosen, then there will be only the parent VHD that is sent during Initial Replication and all changes are merged into that VHD. If Additional recovery points is chosen, set the number of desired additional recovery points (Standard Replicas) that will be saved on the Replica server. The final selection in this screen, Replicate incremental VSS copy every : (available only if Recovery History is enabled) can be used to save Application-consistent Replicas for the virtual machine on the Replica server. After completing the selections, Click Next
7. In the Choose Initial Replication Method screen, several methods can be used to perform an initial replication for the virtual machine to the Replica server. The default selection is to Send initial copy over the network. This starts replication immediately over the network to the Replica server. If immediate replication is not desired, it can be scheduled to occur at a specific time on a specific date. If the administrator does not want to consume the bandwidth due perhaps to the large amount of data that needs to be replicated, he can choose Send initial copy using external media. This method copies all the virtual machine data to a portable storage device that can then be sent to a Replica site and the initial replication can be completed there by importing the data. The final option available to an administrator is Use an existing virtual machine on the Replica server as the initial copy. A restored virtual machine or snapshot of a virtual machine on the Replica server will be used as the initial copy. Make a selection and then Click Next
8. In the Completing the Enable Replication Relationship Wizard, review the information in the Summary and then Click Finish
9. A pop-up dialog box is presented indicating replication was successfully enabled for the virtual machine. In the dialog box is a Settings button that can be used to configure the network the replica virtual machine will connect to on the Replica server. This can be useful because the replica virtual machine is not connected to any network on the Replica server by default
The Enabling Replication process will start and should complete successfully (i.e. a virtual machine is created on the Replica server and delta replication commences. If the Replica server is a Failover Cluster, the virtual machine is made highly available). If any errors occur, refer to the troubleshooting section later in this document.
Once the replication relationship is established and if Send initial copy over the network was selected (Default setting), the Status column for the configured virtual machine will indicate Sending Initial Replica. Progress as a percentage of the total replication is also displayed.
Note: If a virtual machine is being replicated to a Failover Cluster (using the Hyper-V Replica Broker), a highly available virtual machine is created in the cluster. This allows the replica to be migrated to other nodes in the cluster if needed.
If Send initial copy using external media was selected, the Status for the virtual machine will indicate an Initial Replication in Progress. In this case, the progress reflects the copying of the virtual machine files to a location other than the Replica Server (perhaps a portable storage device) so the files can be transported to the Replica server location and then the Initial Replication can be completed by importing the files on that server. Once the import process completes, the Replication State for the virtual machine in the Primary Site will reflect a new Replication State of Replication Enabled.
If Use existing restored virtual machine as initial copy was selected, the virtual machine files restored from a backup on the Replica server will be used for Initial Replication (IR). Before delta replication actually begins, a quick resynch is executed.
Hyper-V Replica implements the standard Hyper-V virtual machine folder structure on the Replica server in the location specified when the Replica server (Replica Failover Cluster) is configured. A Hyper-V Replica folder is created as the root folder in the specified location. Under the Hyper-V Replica folder is a series of subfolders as seen here -
NOTE: The Snapshots folder is not created unless Recovery History is configured for the virtual machine.
The folders support the necessary files for each virtual machine configured to replicate with the Replica server. The virtual machines are identified by Globally Unique Identifiers (GUID) as seen here -
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Manager of Infrastructure with 501-1,000 employees
Enhanced Session Mode on Hyper-V 2012 R2
One of the new features or improved feature on Windows Server 2012 R2 is the enhanced session mode through virtual machine connection. Hyper-V and the Virtual Machine Connection tool now support redirection of local resources to a virtual machine session. This feature provides similar type of device redirection to a virtual machine as you get with a Remote Desktop Connection session.
Enhanced Session Mode
In previous versions of Hyper-V the Virtual Machine Connection utility only provided redirection of the virtual machine screen, keyboard, and mouse along with limited copy / paste functionality. To get additional redirection abilities a Remote Desktop Connection to the virtual machine could be initiated, but this would require a network path to the virtual machine.
Starting with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview, Hyper-V can now redirect local resources to a virtual machine session through Virtual Machine Connection tool. The enhanced session mode connection uses a Remote Desktop Connection session via the virtual machine bus (VMBus), so no network connection to the virtual machine is required.
The following local resources can be redirected when using the Virtual Machine Connection tool.
· Display configuration
· Audio
· Printers
· Clipboard
· Smart cards
· USB devices
· Drives
· Supported Plug and Play devices
This feature is enabled by default in Client Hyper-V and is disabled by default on Hyper-V running on Windows Server.
The following guest operating systems support enhanced session mode connections:
· Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
· Windows 8.1 Preview
Practical applications
In previous versions of Hyper-V the way to copy files to and from a virtual machine was via a Remote Desktop Connection session or a network file copy, but these require a working network connection. When connecting to a virtual machine using the Virtual Machine Connection tool you could only copy and paste a limited amount of ASCII text to the virtual machine.
Enhanced session mode allows you to redirect local resources to the a virtual machine in the same way as you can with Remote Desktop Connection, but you do not need network connection to the virtual machine. You only need to be able to connect to the server running Hyper-V where the virtual machine is running.
Enhanced session mode can useful in the following scenarios:
· Troubleshooting a virtual machine without the need for a network connection to the virtual machine.
· Login to the virtual machine via smart card
· Printing from a virtual machine to a local printer
· Developers can now fully test and troubleshoot applications running in a virtual machine that require USB and sound redirection without the need to use Remote Desktop Connection.
Configuring Enhanced Session Mode
Configuration of enhanced session mode is done in the following areas:
· Server settings –Enhanced Session Mode Policy
· User setting –Enhanced Session Mode
· Guest operating system
Server settings – Enhanced Session Mode Policy
This setting affects all virtual machines running on the server running Hyper-V.
The Allow enhanced session mode setting will determine to allow or not allow enhanced session mode connections to virtual machines running on the server running Hyper-V. If this setting is enabled Hyper-V will allow enhanced session mode connections to a virtual machine when the following conditions are met:
· An enhanced session mode connection has been requested by the Virtual Machine Connection tool.
· The virtual machine is running an operating system which supports enhanced session mode.
· The Remote Desktop Service is running in the virtual machine.
When the Allow enhanced session mode setting is disabled, connections from the Virtual Machine Connection tool will use a basic session.
NOTE: The default setting for the Allow enhanced session mode is:
- Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview – Disabled
- Client Hyper-V – Enabled
User settings – Enhanced Session Mode
This setting will determine if the Virtual Machine Connection tool will attempt to use enhanced session mode when available in a guest operating system. When Use enhanced session mode is enable device redirection will take place when the following conditions are met:
· Allow enhanced session mode is enabled on the server running Hyper-V.
· The virtual machine is running an operating system which supports enhanced session mode.
· The Remote Desktop Service is running in the virtual machine.
Guest operating system
The following is a list of the guest operating systems that support enhanced session mode connections.
· Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview
· Windows 8.1 Preview
Additionally the Remote Desktop Service needs to be running and the user account you be using to log on to the virtual machine needs to be a member of the Remote Desktop Users local group or the local Administrators group.
NOTE: Remote Desktop Services group policy and local group policy settings are enforced for enhanced session mode connections. So if there is a policy in effect that does not allow the redirection of printers, printer redirection in a Virtual Machine Connection session will be blocked as it would be for regular Remote Desktop Connection sessions.
Disclosure: The company I work with is partners with several vendors
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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January 2025
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IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
The Failover Clustering feature allows us to be able to make our most critical workload highly available
Pros and Cons
- "It runs our most critical workloads and supports all our branch offices."
- "The Failover Clustering feature allows us to be able to make our most critical workload highly available."
- "They can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else.
What is most valuable?
The Failover Clustering feature allows us to be able to make our most critical workload highly available. We did not have to pay extra money for it.
In Windows Servers 2016, there is Storage Spaces Direct. Although, it seems as if many of the local organizations where I live prefer to go for traditional SAN setups, I find Storage Spaces Direct to be very attractive, neat, and stable. We did not need to hire a separate storage expert to manage our storage as it was easy to manage and setup (many articles online). We did not have to invest a dollar more than what we paid for the server software.
What needs improvement?
I think Microsoft has answered most of the concerns of users with the release of Server 2016.
Now, they can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What was our ROI?
It has helped to keep the cost of IT spending low when compared to the cost of VMware.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
I was trying to find some article somewhere that stated Microsoft was going to begin supporting something other than password based authentication single-sign-on for server 2016. Many organizations have started using multi-factor authentication and that was the main reason my organization decided to stay with VMWare.
Microsoft System Engineer at Summit Technology Solution
You can move from server to server without downtime with Live Migration in a VM.
Valuable Features:
1. Improved Windows stability
2. Hyper-V stability
3. Live migration
4. Enhanced session mode
5. Clustering
Improvements to My Organization:
Enhanced Session Mode is a feature thats allow you to copy and past inside the virtual machine.
Live Migration in a virtual machine where you can move across your Hyper-V physical servers with or without user interaction, and in a virtual machine you can move from server to server without downtime.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My company integrates Microsoft solutions for our customers.
Technology Consultant, ASEAN at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Hyper-V 2012 R2 vs. VMware vSphere 5.5
I was won with Hyper-V 2012R2 recently and the table below based on customer RFP (edited). This articles all about technical, there is not related with TCO/ROI, licensing cost, “political”, etc. Another to noted is the Windows Server 2012 licenses is based on 2 socket CPU, meanwhile VMware vSphere is based on 1 socket CPU. With Windows 2012R2 Datacenter, you will eligible to have unlimited Guest OS licenses.
Also System Center 2012R2 licenses based on 2 socket CPU.
Enjoy it, and let me know if I missed something or need some updated.
Requirements | Hyper-V 2012R2 | VMware vSphere 5.5 |
Host Server Hardware Requirements • 32 Logical CPUs minimum • 128GB RAM or more |
Support: • 320 Logical Processor • 4TB RAM |
Support: • 320 Logical Processor • 4TB RAM |
VM Guest Hardware Specification • Up to 16vCPUs • Up to 64GB RAM • At least support for 2 vNICs • Virtual CPU per Host • Virtual Hard disk support for up to 10TB |
Support: • 64vCPUs • 1TB RAM • 12 vNIC supported • 2048 vCPU per Host • 64TB Virtual Disk |
Support: • 64vCPUs • 1TB RAM • 10 vNIC supported • 512 vCPU per Host • 62TB Virtual Disk |
Host clustering Support: • Support for at least 8 nodes • Support for at least 90 running VMs or more • VM Replication technology to enable DR scenarios |
Support: • 64 nodes per Cluster • 8,000 VMs per Cluster • Hyper-V Replica |
Support: • 32 nodes per Cluster • 4,000 VMs per Cluster • vSphere Replication |
• VM Failover priority and startup priority | • YES | • YES |
• Concurrent based migration without downtime of VMs | Live Migration with unlimited VMs | vMotion, 4VM (1GbE) and 10VM (10GbE) per Host |
• Storage migration without downtime of VMs | Live Storage Migration | Storage vMotion |
• No shared storage based migration without downtime of VMs | Shared Nothing Live Migration | vMotion |
• High Availability of VMs | Windows Server Failover Cluster | VMware HA |
• Dynamic Workload balancing across host cluster | • Hyper-V High Availability | • VMware DRS |
• Live merge of VM snapshots | • Intelligent Placement with System Center VMM | • Center Snapshot Manager |
• Supported with Hyper-V Backup | • Supported with vSphere Data Protection | |
Support for VM workload migration without downtime, VM workload storage migration without downtime and host clustering features | Intelligent Placement (VMM) for VM workload without downtime. And Storage Tiering by Windows Server 2012R2 for Storage Workload. | DRS and Storage DRS |
Support for VM Templates and automated VM creation of Windows Server OS workloads | YES | YES |
Support for managing multi Hypervisors – preferably VMware and Hyper-V | System Center 2012R2 support for managing multi hypervisor (Hyper-V, VMware and XenServer) | vCenter vCAC |
Granular administration model | Supported with Windows Server 2012R2 Active Directory | Supported with Windows Server 2012R2 Active Directory |
Monitoring and alerting of virtual infrastructure coving all components from the hardware level to the Hypervisor to the running VMs, VM OS health and Applications monitoring | Supported with System Center 2012R2 | vCenter Operations Manager |
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Vice President at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
Hyper-V can be run on this Dell PowerEdge
Hyper-V can be run on this Dell PowerEdge C6220.
Here is a brief upbeat compelling video overview of the Dell PowerEdge C6220 and C6220 II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJZs2EUy9Vg
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Hello,
Yes Hyper-V works and is supported on Dell PowerEdge C6220.
This is confirmed by Dell.
Good luck!
Regards,
Charbel
Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Even better than before
Last time I wrote a review on Hyper V for 2008 R2, which is the product I was using at the time. Having had experience with Hyper V "3.0", the version included in 2012, I figured it was time to update my review.
Pro's
Hyper-V definitely has its pros!
- This version of Hyper-V is even more in depth than before, bringing it up to par with and even surpassing vSphere in some ways.
- PowerShell scripting has been greatly expanded upon, allowing for more automation and centralized management.
- Exporting a VM and importing it into a new server, or setting up fail-over clustering is easier than ever!
- The integration with the new server manager and the existing MMC substructure is superb.
Cons:
The cons are the same as the last time.
- Individual licensing costs for each server.
- If you aren't using Hyper-V Core and are running Hyper-V on top of the full Server 2008 R2 platform, then you have less resources to allocate to your Virtual Machines.
- Except through RDP or SCVMM, there is no way to access the VM's on alternative platforms (like Mac or Linux).
All in all, Microsoft Hyper-V is an excellent platform and a great competitor for VMWare, and it keeps improving with each iteration!
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Engineer at a outsourcing company with 51-200 employees
Hyper-V As An Enterprise Solution: Are We There Yet?
For my first post here on Hypervisor Agnostic, I thought it would be appropriate to open up with a debate that I’ve been sucked into as of late due to a project I’ve been involved with at work. Has Hyper-V finally reached the point that it can go toe to toe with VMware as an enterprise hypervisor product? Or is Hyper-V merely an entry level solution for small businesses that lack the budget to invest in VMware? My answer is yes, Hyper-V is an enterprise product, but is it right for your enterprise? The answer to that is a little more complicated.
To appreciate where Hyper-V is today, you have to understand where it began. Microsoft first entered the virtualization market when MS bought the Virtual PC product line from Connectix back in in 2003. Virtual PC was originally a virtualization program for Apple Macintosh computers that ran various x86 versions of Windows (and other x86 OSes) on MacOS. Today, that doesn’t seem like anything special, because modern Macs can dual boot Windows with no problem. But back in those days, Macs and “IBM clones” were based on entirely different processor architectures, and getting Windows to run on a Mac was no small feat. To be fair, getting Windows to run stable on any hardware in the 90s was a minor miracle, but I digress. The point is, Connectix had a pretty decent little virtualization engine for the time, and MS wanted it for their own. From Virtual PC came Virtual Server, which was designed to run on Windows Server platforms, and run other server operating systems. It was designed to compete with VMware Server, another Type 2 hypervisor (a virtualization engine that runs as a program within a conventional operating system). But Type 1 baremetal hypervisors like VMware’s ESX were starting to become affordable, viable solutions, and Type 2 platforms started to become relegated to desktops rather than data centers.
So in order to get in on the baremetal hypervisor party, Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2008 would include Hyper-V – a free, baremetal hypervisor system that offered better performance than Virtual Server. Hyper-V ended up being a separate download from the RTM version of Server 2008, and it was somewhat underwhelming when it was released, being years behind what ESX and Citrix Xen were capable of. There was no way to migrate a VM from one node to another without downtime, VMs in a failover cluster had to be placed on their own LUNs, guest operating system support was very limited, as were the specs of virtual machines. 2008 R2′s release of Hyper-V improved in many of these areas, offering clustered storage, live migration of VMs, and a slightly expanded list of guest operating systems supported.
But it was Hyper-V 2012 that Microsoft really came out swinging, offering specs that (on paper at least) out-scale VMware, improved live migration, along with storage migration (previously only available with System Center Virtual Machine Manager), a completely rebuilt networking stack, and several other features that helped to close the gap between Hyper-V and VMware.
But the gap is still there, and that is the the point of this initial blog post. I’ve spent the better part of this past year working with Hyper-V 2012, and there are some things I absolutely love about it, and some things I loathe. Here’s my run down of what’s good, and what’s bad.
Scalabiltiy
MS advertises that Hyper-V can support 64 nodes in a cluster, as compared to VMware’s 32 nodes. They also claim Hyper-V nodes can support 4TB of RAM, 320 logicial processors, and can support VMs with 1TB of RAM. To me, speccing out a hypervisor like that seems somewhat ridiculous. I’m much more of a fan of “scale out” than “scale up” – I’d rather have 12 nodes in a cluster with 256GB of RAM than 3 nodes with 1TB each. Sure, Hyper-V can support 64 of those nodes with 1TB of RAM. I don’t, however, want to be the guy who has to handle maintenance on that cluster, and wait on all the VMs filling up that 1TB of RAM to migrate from node to node when I want to install Windows updates.
Still, it is great that Hyper-V finally supports VMs with decent specs. I don’t foresee myself ever needing to give a VM one terabyte of memory, but it’s a lot better than 32 or 64GB, and the ability to add more than 4 virtual CPUs is a much needed improvement. Combine that with a new virtual hard disk format that offers much larger sizes, and Hyper-V VMs can be built to a decent scale. That does, however, leave the door open for a lot of overbuilt VMs, but that’s another rant for another day.
Clustering
This is one area where Hyper-V is really positioned to eat VMware’s lunch. If we compare apples to apples, ie free product vs free product, Hyper-V has one significant advantage over VMware’s free ESXi offering: free Hyper-V can be part of a Windows fail over cluster. Free ESXi is standalone only – and has a pretty limited RAM cap to boot.
So if you want a cheap, highly available virutalization solution, Hyper-V is the way to go. The freebie version of Hyper-V (meaning the standalone, downloadable version – not enabling the Hyper-V role in Windows 2012) is not feature limited compared to its Windows Server brethren. To get HA/fail over capability in VMware’s product, you’re going to spend several thousands of dollars.
But the drawback to this is that it’s built around Windows Failover Clustering, which has it’s own set of issues. First of all, let’s not forget Windows cluster’s reliance on Active Directory.
If you virtualize all your domain controllers, and have some kind of network issue that prevents a node from finding a domain controller, hilarity will ensue, and by hilarity, I mean a bunch of VMs dying/failing over. Second, management of many clustered nodes is possible without System Center Virtual Machine Manager, but it is controlled chaos at best. Once Hyper-V nodes are clustered, you should generally do all node & VM management from the Windows Failover Cluster management console if you’re not using SCVMM. However, MS didn’t include a way to manage Hyper-V networks from the Failover Cluster manager, so you still have to do that through the standalone Hyper-V management console, and do it one by one. Yes, you can script it through PowerShell, and from what I can see, PowerShell seems to be the only “one stop shop” for dealing with Hyper-V. Without PowerShell, you’ll find your self bouncing back and forth between Windows control panel, Hyper-V manager, and Failover cluster manager in order to handle most day to day tasks. It’s do-able, but it’s ugly. VMware’s management is much more streamlined and intuitive.
Live Migration vs. vMotion
vMotion is the feature that allowed VMware to take over the virtualization world – the ability to move VMs from node to node with no downtime was huge, and no one else ever figured out how do it quite as well, or as fast. But there are some limitations – you can only do 4 concurrent vMotion operations per host in 5.1 on anything less than 10GB network links. With a 10GB NIC, you can do up to 8 per host. MS took the “let the administrator decide” approach with Hyper-V 2012, and you can now set the concurrent number of live migrations to whatever you want. Off the top of my head, I believe Hyper-V 2008 R2 only allowed on live migration at a time, so this is a huge improvement.
That said, before you think you’re going to team a couple of 1GB NIC ports in your Hyper-V host and crank the max number of migrations up to 10, 15, 20, or beyond, keep in mind that there’s a very good reason VMware sets the limits they do on vMotion. There’s more to the equation than just the network here – host memory, storage I/O, andCPU usage on host are all impacted during migrations. So, take a cautious approach to this, and steadily increase the live migration count on your Hyper-V hosts rather than deciding right off the bat that 12 is a great number to start off with.
That said, if you have a dedicated live migration network with decent bandwidth, and your hosts can handle it, 10 simultaneous live migrations at a time can significantly decrease your cluster maintenance times.
Resource Handling
This is one of those Coke vs Pepsi, Ford vs Chevy, Mac vs PC type debates. VMware zealots absolutely hate the fact that Hyper-V does not allow memory over commitment, and view it as a sign of Hyper-V’s inferiority. Hyper-V fanboys think that handing out resources you don’t have is a bad thing, and that Hyper-V’s dynamic memory is the way to handle fluctuating memory demands. This is one thing I am 100% on the Hyper-V side of the fence on. Look, it’s great that VMware doesn’t have any hard and fast limits on resource assignment. It’s great that DRS can see that a host is getting low on memory, and can move a memory hungry VM to a host with more free memory. But sometimes, the the cluster ends up over committed, a node goes down, and there’s no hosts with resources to satisfy those now homeless VMs. Or, an admin set the cluster to allow VMs to power on even if the resources aren’t there. If the memory isn’t there, and VMware can’t find any VMs that are hoarding memory they’re not actually using, then you end up with VMs swapping their RAM to disk. Outside of a critical productions system being down, a critical production system swapping RAM to disk is pretty much my worst case scenario. It’s ugly.
Hyper-V allows you to assign a startup value for a VM’s RAM, as well as a minimum/maximum value. When a VM reaches a defined threshold, it will request more memory from the host, until it reaches the maximum value. When it’s not using the RAM, it will release it until it reaches the minimum value. Yes, this requires a bit more management overhead. But this is one of those things I’d rather have some degree of control over than just leaving the hypervisor to its own devices.
Guest Operating System Support
This is one area where VMware runs away with. If you’re a primarily Windows shop running current versions of Windows, then Hyper-V’s got you covered. But if you’re running any Unix-like servers other than a very narrowly defined subset of popular Linux distros, Hyper-V can’t do much for you. And, of those supported Linux distros, you’d find some features like dynamic memory, are Windows exclusive.
And if you want to run archaic versions of Windows, you’re out of luck on Hyper-V as well – you’re limited to what MS currently provides support for, which is generally 2 versions behind whatever the latest version is. But if you feel the need to run Windows 3.1, Windows 98, or Windows 2000, the VMware’s got your hookup.
I know, surprise surprise – the Windows based hypervisor is geared toward Windows guest OSes. But if Microsoft really wants Hyper-V to make a dent in the enterprise, they need to come to grips with the fact that some companies run other operating systems that are not Red Hat, CentOS, SuSe or Ubuntu.
Wrapping It All Up
So as of September 2012, with the release of Windows 2012 R2 next month, Hyper-V has supplanted Citrix Xen as the clear number 2 hypervisor platform. in my mind. It can do at least 90% of what VMware can do, at a fraction of the cost. But is that last 10% worth the price?
For small businesses, and smaller enterprise customers that are running primarily Windows in their server rooms and data centers, Hyper-V is priced to move, even if you tack on the cost of SCVMM to manage it – pretty much a must for larger clusters. At the high end of the scale in heterogeneous environments, VMware is still the king of high availability and load balancing, and management is much more streamlined. Even with SCVMM (which brings an entirely new set of headaches, but again, more on that at another time) the thought of trying to manage a 64 node Hyper-V cluster makes my head spin.
So yes, Hyper-V is there. But VMware’s not going anywhere any time soon.
Disclosure: The company I work for is partners with several vendors - http://www.latisys.com/partners/strategic_partnerships.html
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Pleae review the link listed below, this would be a good frame of reference - www.virtualizationmatrix.com
But to answer your question, what is the intended purpose of the server or its use, that will help to determine how much memory you will need? Is it a clustered server or is it a standalone server for virtualization purposes? What applications do you have running on the various server(s)?
Todd
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Hello Marcos
Will the enhanced feature of Hyper-V 2012 R2 save on any costs? If yes would you kindly elaborate on that (how it will actually save on costs)?
Thank you