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Explore the differences between VMware and Hyper-V virtualization platforms in terms of leadership, value, scalability, business critical app support, and more.
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Vmware VS Hyper-Child Westnet 2013 Dave Packham UofU
Fact #1: • VMware is the proven, undisputed leader.
This is absolutely true: • VMware is the leader in the virtualization space. Remember ‘Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.’ IBM nearly disappeared because first they did not see the competition such as Digital as a threat in the mainframe market, and then again by thinking that nobody else could make an Intel x86-based PC that would run Microsoft DOS and applications, and that people would continue to pay a 40% premium for the privilege of those three coveted letters. • If VMware continues to ignore Hyper-V as a threat, their future at the top of the heap is far from guaranteed.
Some FUD • VMware vSphere’s architecture is purpose-built with the industry’s smallest disk footprint • Microsoft Hyper-V R3 will still have a large disk footprint, burdened with general-purpose Windows code that has nothing to do with virtualization. • This may be true… but who is that disk footprint (still under 10GB) hurting?
uhhhh • Analysts estimate that over 80% of all virtual machines in the world run on VMware. • Again, who cares?
Fact #2: • VMware delivers greater value and lower TCO. • This may have been true once, but no longer, and certainly not in Hyper-V 3. • Let’s look at their points:
Da Elmer FUD continues • VMware offers lower capital and operational costs than Microsoft due to VMware’s higher scalability and greater levels of administrative automation. • This is a complete falsehood if comparing apples to apples – ESXi 5.1 and vCenter Server versus Hyper-V 3.0 and System Center 2012. • With Hyper-V 3 you can put double the number of running virtual machines per host, and double the number of hosts per cluster. • With these numbers I would ask who really offers greater scalability?
Fact #3: • VMware is proven to support business critical apps. • This is a comment about the maturity of Hyper-V
Host/Cluster Scalability • Microsoft made a huge investment in WS2012 Hyper-V and R2 to achieve these scale up/out numbers • It wasn’t just a matter of editing some spreadsheet • For example, you can’t just let a VM have lots of vCPUs; you need to make the VM’s guest OS aware of the NUMA of the underlying hardware
More scale • Hyper-V scales out to over twice the cluster size/capacity of vSphere. • A host can have twice the number of VMs and physical RAM. • That makes Hyper-V much more scalable for public/hosting and private clouds. • And remember that ESXi free does not include Failover Clustering; you must have vSphere to have failover
Spec sheets and glossy’s are fact… ish • Expect some FUD that goes like “having 133 VMs on a host is too risky”. • I dare VMware to reduce their max specs down to a max of 20 VMs per host. • The fact is that you save money (hardware, licensing, power, space) by scaling up first, and then out.
Guest Clusters • You minimize risk by using guest clusters. • Speaking of which, Hyper-V supports guest clusters with up to 64 nodes with iSCSI, SMB 3.0, and Fibre Channel storage. • vSpheremaxes out at 2 nodes in a quest cluster that uses Fibre Channel storage.
Bumps on the –V road • We’re also seeing a few other issues: • The Hypervisor tends to “lock” files related to deleted vms. This means that we’re not always able to completely cleanup a removed VM right away. • When attaching vhdx files to a vm’sscsi port, from time to time I get the error that the disk is already connected, although it isn’t. • We’ve been getting this lately on vms with a highi number of virtual scsi devices connected (like 10+). The workaround is to delete the vhdx and recreate it.
What we don’t have • Apart from those small bumps, the thing that hurts the most is the lack of management tools available • Hyper-V without System Center just doesn’t scale • We are lucky enough to have a relatively static vm count, and if we needed to create multiple vms every day the lack of tools would hurt us big-time • For now, we count on System Center Operations Manager 2012 to give us some basic metrics on the performance of the cluster nodes, and it kind of works • our VMware admins chuckle at me when I show them the crude Failover Manager compared to vSphere.
Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V • Gen2 VMs • The basic architecture of the virtual machine has not changed in a long time. • Because operating systems were built to operate physical devices, all VMs emulate broadly supported hardware, such as a specific NIC card or IDE disk controller. • Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2 supports the concept of a totally new architecture based on modern hardware with no emulated devices. • This makes it possible to add a number of new features, such as secure boot for VMs and booting off of virtual SCSI or virtual network adapters. The catch is that guest support is limited to 64-bit versions of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
VM Direct Connect • Connecting to a running VM over RDP requires an active network connection, which you can't always count on. • In addition to an active network connection, the VM must have an IP address reachable by the system attempting to connect, a requirement with potential management and security issues depending on the environment in which you're running. • All this changes in Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V with the addition of VM Direct Connect. • This feature allows a direct remote desktop connection to any running VM over what's now called the VM bus. It's also integrated into the Hyper-V management experience.
Extend replication to a third site • Hyper-V Replica in Windows Server 2012 is currently limited to a single replication target. • This makes it difficult to support scenarios like a service provider wanting to act both as a target for a customer to replicate and a source to replicate to another offsite facility. • Windows Server 2012 R2 and Hyper-V now provide a tertiary replication capability to support just such a scenario. • By the same token, enterprises can now save one replica in-house and push a second replica off-site.
Compression for faster migration • Two new options in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V help improve the performance of live migrations. • The first is the ability to enable compression on the data to reduce the total number of bytes transmitted over the wire. • The obvious caveat is that tapping CPU resources for data compression could potentially impact other operations, so you'll need to take that into consideration. • The second option, SMB Direct, requires network adapters that support RDMA. Microsoft's advice: If you have 10Gb available, use RDMA (10x improvement); otherwise, use compression (2x improvement). • Compression is the default choice and it works for the large majority of use cases.
Online VM exporting and cloning • One of the downsides of Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 is the need to stop a running VM before you can export or clone it. In production environments, this is simply not an option. • Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V removes this restriction. It's now possible to export or clone a running VM from System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 with a few mouse clicks. • As with pretty much anything related to managing Windows Server 2012, you can accomplish the same task using Windows PowerShell.
Online VHDX resizing • In Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, it is not possible to resize a virtual hard disk attached to a running VM. • Windows Server 2012 R2 removes this restriction, making it possible to not only expand but even reduce the size of the virtual disk (VHDX format only) without stopping the running VM. • What you can't do with this feature: Compress an online VHD. You can make these adjustments from System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2, Hyper-V Manager, or the command line using PowerShell. • You can use PowerShell to set the disk size to the current disk consumption if you want to reduce it to the absolute minimum.
Storage QoS • Windows Server 2012 R2 includes the ability to limit individual VMs to a specific level of I/O throughput. • You can see the two settings for minimum and maximum IOPS. In the initial release of Windows Server 2012 R2, the only number that really makes a difference is the maximum limit. • The IOPS are measured by monitoring the actual disk rate to and from the attached virtual hard drives. If you have applications capable of consuming large amounts of I/O, you'll want to consider this setting to ensure that a single I/O-hungry VM won't starve neighbor VMs or take down the entire host.
Dynamic Memory support for Linux • Microsoft continues to improve support for Linux VMs. In the Windows Server 2012 R2 release, • Hyper-V gains the ability to dynamically expand the amount of memory available to a running VM. • This capability is especially handy for any Linux workload (notably Web servers) where the amount of memory needed by the VM changes over time. • In environments with many Linux VMs, dynamic memory becomes even more critical to efficiently manage the total memory used by all running VMs. Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V also brings Windows Server backups to Linux guests.
Is Microsoft better than VMware? • No, at least not when it comes to server virtualization. • Is Microsoft close enough to VMware that the huge price difference is not worth the money? Yes. • Does VMware offer features that Microsoft does not? Yes. • Does Microsoft offer features that VMware does not? Yes. • Do both solutions in their latest versions (Server 2012 RC is currently being tested by companies around the world, as is vSphere 5.1) offer customer the same base features that the vast majority of companies want and need? Yes. • Should you take my word for it? No. • Nor should you take VMware’s word for it. Install both in a test environment and run your own comparative tests, and then decide!
