Hyper-V Reviews

We use Hyper-V for virtualization. 

Hyper-V helps to make a replica server between two machines. It is very easy to learn. 

Hyper-V needs to improve its support. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

My company has three users for Hyper-V. 

Hyper-V's deployment is easy. 

The tool's pricing is cheap. 

I rate Hyper-V an eight out of ten. 

Hybrid Cloud

The primary use case involves the creation and management of virtual machines. Within this framework, various types of virtual machines can be established, ranging from Windows-based systems to those dedicated to specific applications such as SQL servers.

I appreciate its stability and user-friendly management interface.

The area that requires attention is the noticeable slowdown in performance. A singular interface for administration control, allowing centralized management of all aspects, would be preferable. Enhanced visibility and reporting capabilities are desired for better insights and analysis.

I have been using it for more than fifteen years.

It offers good stability capabilities.

It provides high scalability.

I appreciate the technical support as it is prompt and highly efficient.

We still use Nutanix as well as Hyper-V.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Deployment was done in-house and it was completed in ten minutes.

The license is free.

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

On-premises

It's free minus initial licensing for the OS. You can centrally manage multiple Hyper-V hosts rather easy with no extra licensing fees vs VMware vCenter. Having used both I still have a preference for VMware (especially for P2V situations), but for home/small offices Hyper-V is a great alternative. Hyper-V is included in Windows 8 and Windows 10 with minimal loss to functionality (mainly no Hyper-V replica).

I use this in my home lab, and I am able to save space by running multiple Operating Systems and Services on only one physical device.

I have not gotten to configure virtual SANs, but I wish there were more solutions for storage options. Virtual SANs aside, Server 2012R2 does provide a rather easy way to setup iSCSI targets with local storage. I wish importing/exporting were more robust and more user-friendly. Creating templates would be nice. I will say Hyper-V replica for clustering/failover is pretty sweet. P2V situations are a little more convoluted than with VMware, but still relatively easy. You just have to create a VHD image of the physical machine then attach it to a new virtual machine.

I've used it for one or two years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

I run an i7 quad core with a total of 8 processing threads and 24GB of RAM. I have eight VMs on a Hyper-V host, but not all run at the same time. The most I’ve had run is five, and everything ran pretty smoothly.

Technical support is very limited. Knowledge-base articles on TechNet and public forums are all that is really available.

This is my first enterprise deployment of a virtual machine infrastructure. I used Hyper-V because it was already on my host OS.

Deployment is easy, enable the feature using the wizard, reboot, and access the management console to start making VMs. Implementation is easy, if you can’t set it up yourself, you don’t belong in IT.

It's free, minus the license for the host OS.

I like VMware ESXi, I am aware they offer a free version as well. When I have time and resources, I would like to implement a new infrastructure using that. I’m very familiar with ESXi because we use that in our work infrastructure.

It is an affordable platform than VMware for hosting older versions of Microsoft Windows like Windows XP and Windows NT.

They should include a few more hardware components for integration with servers. It would work great for the Hyper-V environment. Additionally, they should consider cloud virtualization features. 

We have been using Hyper-V since 2016.

The product worked well for hosting a few Microsoft solutions.

It is a scalable platform. We have 100 users for it.

We have used VMware before.

The initial setup process is easy. It takes about two or three hours to complete. We have to follow the installation documentation. It requires one person to maintain.

The product's price is low. We have to pay a one-time cost.

I rate Hyper-V an eight out of ten. I advise others to go for it if they have an interactive environment.

On-premises

Mainly, I use Hyper-V to analyze whether it fits the customer's needs as a solutions architect. First, we determine whether the customer is a Microsoft user. Then, we consider pricing and compare it against the features of VMware or AHV to determine which solution would be most helpful.

In terms of how the solution has helped the organization, I would say that cost-wise, it is a cheaper solution than VMware.

The virtualization aspect of the solution functions similar to VMware is one of its most valuable features. Even though it costs significantly less than VMware, it has enough features to compete with it, especially in terms of virtualizing VMs, data stores, NICs, and VNX.

Many vendors, such as Cisco and HPE, are discontinuing support for Hyper-V as they believe it does not have a significant market share. This poses a significant problem for our Hyper-V customers since several major vendors will no longer provide support for it.

Hyper-V doesn't need additional features. They just needed to be well-defined. So, people aren't using it as much as before, and so they need to market it better. Everybody knows VMware, but not a lot of people know Hyper-V.

I have been using Hyper-V for at least five years. Also, I don't remember the version of the solution I am using.

It is a stable product.

Even though Hyper-V is not as scalable as VMware, it can be considered scalable in general.

We don't have any plans in our organization to increase the usage of the solution. On the contrary, I see a decrease in its usage. Nowadays, we work with customers who are going to migrate to VMware from Hyper-V, even though we don't want them to do that. But there is nothing else we can do to stop them from our end. This downfall of Hyper-V is related directly to the fact that other vendors are not supporting Hyper-V anymore.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten since it is embedded with Microsoft support. So, their support is okay.

Positive

The initial setup process for Hyper-V was not that hard. If one knows about Microsoft and virtualization, it's not a hard product to manage or install.

I have experienced an ROI using the solution, especially when considering SLED customers.

It is one of the cheapest products in the market. So, even though Nutanix gives away AHV, one still has to pay for Nutanix home.

My suggestion to those planning to use the solution is that they use it in a smaller or simpler environment, and it'll easily do the job for them while being cost-effective at the same time. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

We use this product primarily for virtualization.

We can perform maintenance on equipment during the day because we can live migrate all of the machines from server A to server B, and then work on server A. This saves us a lot of time. It used to require working after hours for us to do this.

I think the management tools have room for improvement.

More than five years.

I find that this solution is very stable.

It is very scalable. We used four staff members for deployment, and that was sufficient for our needs.

We infrequently have a need for technical support help. 

The initial setup was very straightforward for our organization. Once we understood it in the lab, it took maybe two weeks to completely understand it and document it. Then, we could send it out to our global branches.

We are a not-for-profit, so I do not see any ROI for us.

Microsoft should have not required a data center license for the new feature of Storage Spaces Direct. There is a new feature that comes with Hyper-V called "Storage Spaces Direct"  What that storage does, it allows you to use the storage in host A and use the storage in host B, and make them work together like they're one shared storage array. The computers don't know that they're putting data on server A or B. To them, it looks like one big pool of disks. Before, we used to have to buy a separate storage array, external to the servers, and tie the servers to that array. But this new feature that comes with Hyper-V let's us use the storage inside the servers, it saves money. But Microsoft tacked on a higher price for their software to use that feature, and that was just terrible. We would be using that feature more if it did not demand a data center license.

We do also use VMware vSphere. But, we use Hyper-V more. Some people have different desires. Some people want a Lexus, and other people are happy with a Honda. Both are great cars, but one is a lot more expensive.

I would like to see deduplication and compression in a future roll-out of the product.

There are a few features that make the product stand out:

1. Replica: We have Replica running in our NY & London datacenters and can (and on a couple of occasions, have) fail over servers quickly and cleanly. Failback also worked like a charm.
2. Cost: It’s no secret that H-V is much less expensive than VMware; we are saving many thousands a year in licensing & support. It also sets up for future costs savings as the business grows.
3. Stability: Since we implemented the H-V solution we have reported outstanding uptimes.

The prime example is the simplicity and cost savings of our new DR/BCP solution. By consolidating our two disparate corporate AD2008/VMWare domains into a single Hyper-V/AD 2012 domain we have:

1. Drastically reduced the complexity of the environment. NO more kludges or 3rd-party software to get systems like Exchange, Lync or AD Users conversing seamlessly.
2. About $150K a year in colocation costs. With our private cloud we have a built-in DR/BCP solution on existing infrastructure, no need to farm out to a colo provider.

To be determine – we will be conducting a review of the R2 release in the second quarter of 2014.

We’ve had the system in place since January 2013 and it went into full production in May 2013.

Not outside the usual challenges in learning a new application. We had 4 months to design, install and run the new domain in parallel to former environments.

Outside of needing to keep the VM hosts patched (we did have an issue with a driver related to storage), no.

Zero – we have a pretty robust infrastructure in place for the number of staff. Clustered DL385’s & EMC VNXe at each datacenter will allow us to scale out and up easily (we are using around 12% of capacity on the VNXe and can drop additional servers into the cluster if there’s a spike in use or we make acquisitions).

Customer Service: Good.Technical Support: Average. I say that as my experience with MSFT Support in general has proven to be hit-or-miss with the first-level support. The second-level support is much better and I haven’t had to go beyond them for solutions.

We had VMware/AD 2008 in place at the two companies; the US infrastructure was already built out with SAN and meshed networking so we had to play catch-up with the UK datacenter. The switch was made at the behest of the group CEO – what the boss wants the boss gets!

Pretty straightforward without any major surprises. The online documentation written up by MSFT and the legion of fans proved to be invaluable. The setup of Replica proved to be very easy.

Implementation was done mostly by in-house staff (2 of us) and we needed a hand from a VAR for some of the clustering setup.

Between the additional hardware/software and consultant costs we spent around $80K.

No – we felt the two best solutions were VMware & MSFT as we had been using VMware and had many years of experience with MSFT products.

1. Do not be afraid to work $$$ into the budget in case you need assistance from a 3rd-party.
2. Test in parallel and do not be a hero and try to do it whole-hog at once.
3. Do not postpone the DR/BCP part of the project. If you are building out a new infrastructure DO THIS FIRST. We were forced to push this to the back of the project and it bit us for a few days; in the end you do what the executives say but having file/application/server/site disaster recovery is an absolute must before you migrate production data.
4. If you haven’t gone too far with it do a review of R2; it provides many improvements in the VM & Replica features.

I value the simplicity of configuration because it has worked as expected for my client.

The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols. I had a bad experience with iSCSI, but that is storage not from Microsoft and is a very particular storage option that I chose long ago.

I would like to see a more granular configuration of the iSCSI protocol without going to the registry to configure it. Instead, there should be a user interface to quickly configure the parameters of iSCSI communication.

I've used Hyper-V since 2012.

The product is stable.

The product is scalable with respect to the client. But maybe, in absolute terms, it might not be scalable at all.

I think their support is quite good. I had the opportunity to open a few tickets with them and was satisfied.

Positive

The initial setup for Hyper-V was straightforward. It took about one week to set up the infrastructure from zero. The implementation strategy was to virtualize a number of roles in the virtual machine but also consolidate all the roles in case of migration. The virtual machine is already clear with all the roles, and I just have to upgrade the single role on the virtual machine.

Hyper-V's price is a good point because it's within the overall license cost. I don't have to pay extra for Hyper-V, And that's a good point. Hyper-V's price is essentially zero because it's a feature of the operating system that I can enable and disable at will.

Whether I would recommend this product for enterprise companies is a good question. The simplicity is a point in favor of the solution. But the performance could be better to compete with solutions like VMware. I'm working with technical partners now, and I tend to accept what they suggest to me and forward it to the final customer. I'm a professional freelance consultant, so I don't have much power for the final customer. But if it was up to me, I would keep Hyper-V.

Hyper-V's advantages over its competitors are its simplicity and fast implementation. I rate Hyper-V a nine out of ten.