Comments on: NEW Enterprise Hypervisor comparison

By: Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:23:00 +0000

I has been a while but I finally found some time to add RHEV.
Check out the new comaprison here: http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/2012/12/enterprise-hypervisor-feature-comparison/

By: gsa-toolbox

gsa-toolbox — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Thank you very much Erik.
I noted your proposal to swap XenServer and RHEV, I leave it up to you and fully understand the extra work it would be to add another hypervisor. However, I would recommend keeping XenServer when you add RHEV as it would permit to have a more complete vision of the available solutions (at least for now).
Like I said, you might be dealing essentially with VDI oriented customers but stay open for server virtualization and note as well that SPICE is a very interesting option for VDI, especially for the indirect rendering/Acceleration to dramatically reduce the transport protocol bandwidth. A new section or line dedicated to VDI could be a great addition by the way…

By: Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 09:23:00 +0000

Good point, I will take it into consideration. Maybe I will swap XenServer for RHEV, I’ve not come across any XS implementations/customers in the last year.

By: gsa-toolbox

gsa-toolbox — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 07:43:00 +0000

Dear Erik,
If VMware ESXi has a dominant position today followed by Microsoft Hyper-V and XenServer (market share wise), you seem to under estimate the position of KVM in the server virtualization.
Unless what you call “Enterprise environments” refers to “Desktop only virtualization”, I sense that RHEV is catching up XenServer, especially for server infrastructure virtualization.
I’m pretty sure that any “VM guru” has seen this year’s Nexenta’s Hypervisor survey ( http://nexenta.com/corp/nexenta-hypervisor-survey ) and if those results have to be interpreted and used with caution (they certainly not reflect a total market share but more usage statistics for a certain population of users), they clearly show at least one thing: an increasing interest in Red Hat’s KVM based solution, becoming equal or greater to that of XenServer.
I find this compelling enough to include RHEV in your comparison and hope to be able to convince you.

By: Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 12:07:00 +0000

I’ve received a comparison with RHEV 3.1 from a reader but I’m still in doubt if I want to include it. When I include it I have to maintain it and this takes a lot of work. Besides that I’ve never encountered it in enterprise environments.

By: gsa-toolbox

gsa-toolbox — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 11:59:00 +0000

Hi there, thanks for the interesting and up-to-date comparison.
Do you have any plans to include RHEV (KVM) ?

By: Stu Fox

Stu Fox — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:53:00 +0000

Couple of minor points on the update:
1. Thin provisioning does not require System Center
2. Third party distributed switch does not require System Center – it can certainly use it, but it does not require it.
3. FreeBSD 8.2 is supported on Hyper-V http://blogs.technet.com/b/openness/archive/2012/08/09/available-today-freebsd-support-for-windows-server-hyper-v.aspx

Cheers

Stu

By: Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 05:41:00 +0000

Those features which require SCCM 2012 SP1, which is needed to manage Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts. Due to Microsoft’s strange release schedule you can now install Windows Server 2012 server but you can’t manage them yet. It is not supported to use SCCM 2012 (non SP1). Due to the rumor on twitter and in my mailbox I added MS Windows Server 2012 to the comparison but with a side note regarding the availability of SCCM 2012 SP1 (expected release end Q4 2012 or Q1 2013)

By: Erik Scholten

Erik Scholten — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:11:00 +0000

Stu, thanks you for the extensive message. I processed your feedback in a new version of the comparison, v4.2. Kudos

By: Stu Fox

Stu Fox — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 22:48:00 +0000

Reposting this reply, since Disqus seems to have eaten my other one.

1. Bandwidth management is via QoS (part of the Windows Server 2012 platform, but explicitly exposed in the Hyper-V UI): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831511.aspx
2. VMM 2012 supports OVF import/export: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29309
3. Maximum Storage IO is > 1,000,000 IOPS http://blogs.technet.com/b/schadinio/archive/2012/07/07/over-1-million-iops-from-a-single-vm.aspx
4. DR/Site Recovery can be via MSCS as you mention, but can also be via Hyper-V Replica (built-in to the platform): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831716.aspx. I suspect there is more to come on this front with VMM 2012 SP1.
5. Cloud extension & cloud integration is via System Center 2012 (SPF in SP1 provides the API).
6. Distributed switch is also coming in System Center 2012 SP1 (it’s a management construct in VMM)
7. The latest Linux Integration Services for Hyper-V (3.4, available here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34603 ) have this in the release notes:
“Supported Linux distributions can use multiple virtual processors per virtual machine. The actual number of virtual processors that can be allocated to a virtual machine is only limited by the underlying hypervisor”.
The underlying hypervisor in the Windows Server 2012 case supports 64 virtual processors per VM, so Linux support is 64 VP’s.