Written by:
3/26/2012 

Both VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V Servers are great technologies to virtualize your servers and desktop computers. Under the hood, they are both using the same efficient second generation hypervisor technology. Lately, which product is superior for the small business is a subject of controversial debate. Your choice on which product to use has far reaching impact on your network infrastructure.

Our view is that Hyper-V is more appropriate for the small business market running mostly Microsoft Windows and Linux OS’s; on the other hand,VMWare is better for large datacentres in a heterogeneous OS environment that are not supported by Hyper-V. Our view happens to be supported by market studies in a recent Network World article:

[Hyper-V’s] flurry of improvements is in addition to progress Hyper-V has been making against ESX in licenses issued. Hyper-V grew 62% last year compared to ESX's 21% growth and Citrix's 25%, according to IDC. Separately, Gartner projects that by next year Hyper-V will account for 27% of the market, up from 11% two years ago. Within that projected 27%, Gartner says Microsoft will have captured 85% of all businesses with less than 1,000 employees that use virtual servers.

The virtual server market is growing rapidly and the dominance of the various players is shifting, so VMware's early lead is being chipped away, leaving customers with a lot to ponder, Gartner says, …

ECL had been a big proponent of virtualization for years. ECL supported both VMWare and Microsoft virtualization technologies since the introduction of server virtualization more than 10 years ago. Two years ago, ECL dropped all new sales of VMWare to the small business market and had converted existing VMWare clients to use the Hyper-V stack of technologies. Here are a few reasons why we did it:

1. VMWare is too restrictive on hardware. With VMWare, because of its closed and proprietary operating system, you are not able to use just any motherboard, network cards, RAID controllers, SSD, or other popular peripherals. On the other hand, with Hyper-V you can practically use any hardware including most laptops that are supported by 64 bit Windows 7/2008R2. This flexibility allows far better deployment, backup, and recovery abilities over VMWare.
2. VMWare is less efficient with RAM utilization. VMWare is arbitrarily limiting RAM utilization to small amounts. This make servers run slow. This prompted complaints from users and partners alike. Furthermore, Hyper-V is able to dynamically add RAM to the VM that needs it the most and reduce RAM on low priority VMs. This dynamic memory management allows our clients to not only have higher VM density but also run more real-time applications such as Terminal servers, soft PBXs, and video servers on VMs.
3. VMWare’s performance is much poorer. It is true that both products use hypervisor technologies, so one may infer that Hyper-V and VMWare run at similar speeds with minor differences. This is actually not true. At the time of this writing, the single fact alone that VMWare can’t support SSDs properly gives Hyper-V the performance advantage of at least double that of VMWare, in real-life applications; whereas Hyper-V had been able to support this new technology well for a number of years now. This performance difference is particularly apparent for large multiuser systems of 40 to 400 users on a single server.
4. VMWare is less reliable than Hyper-V. VMware’s drivers wreak havoc with applications. A number of VMWare drivers are not WHQL certified. You will see a glaring red warning when you install VMWare drivers. Over the years, we had seen application and OS crashes as a result of non-certified drivers causing intermittent problems. Even those VMWare drivers that are currently certified will expire a few years and there is no guarantee that they will be updated with Windows updates. Because Hyper-V is produced by Microsoft, all drivers are certified natively. We also feel that you will enjoy much better continued support by Microsoft, even after a number of years when you upgrade.
5. VMWare’s graphics performance is weaker. Using streaming video or animation will slow down your VMWare virtual machines to a crawl. Hyper-V, however, takes advantage of extremely high performance video card’s hardware for compression, while VMWare only uses software for graphics compression. This Hyper-V feature named RemoteFX even allows low-cost workstations and standardized smart Windows terminals to display videos or CAD drawings without slowing down or freezing the main CPU. Furthermore, unlike VMWare, video performance on Hyper-V can be easily increased by simply adding extra video cards into the server without having to overhaul or replace the host server.
6. VMWare is harder to automate programmatically. Hyper-V comes with a rich and very well defined set of APIs as part of Windows making automation of daily tasks and trouble-shooting easier and less costly. VMWare is quite primitive in this area by contrast. In fact, you can’t even write any scripts on the VMWare ESXi host; you must use an extra workstation to manage the Virtual Machines.
7. VMWare has poorer management tools, even if you were to pay for for the premium management tools. Hyper-V, on the other hand, are normally deployed with Windows 2008 R2 as a host, as it is comes free of charge. Windows 2008 R2 host alone is a more flexible and friendlier management tools that can handle volume shadow backups, remote management, and many peripherals on the host which are very difficult or not possible with VMware servers.
8. VMWare’s purchase price is much higher. The stand-alone Hyper-V server is free. It also comes with Windows 2008 which includes and additional free server host license. This basically allows one full fledged host operating system to manage the guest VMs. This free host Windows server is not applicable to VMWare servers. To get the equivalent full functionalities that Hyper-V offers for a typical company with 4 virtual servers, you will need to pay an additional $50K or more for VMWare licenses.

ECL had worked with both VMware and Hyper-V for years. VMWare has a place in the datacentre market where our clients have a lot of technical resources to support a large number of different guest operating systems. On the other hand, we feel that it is wiser for small businesses to invest in Hyper-V over VMWare in the long run. We are of the opinion that Hyper-V has greater potential for small businesses in the future. As it is, today, Hyper-V is already a simpler, faster, more reliable, and more versatile alternative to VMWare for small businesses with fewer than 1000 users. So we suggest that there is little point investing further in VMWare unless you have special needs that are not met by Hyper-V.

If you would like to see a demo or comparison between the 2 technologies, please call us and we can demonstrate physically how they are different.

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