During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.

It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the years and how the three major manufacturers look at each other and copy features. But you can’t trust all manufacturers by just a simple green checkbox. Some claimed features need third party add-ons, aren’t suitable for production workloads or are only supported on a limited set of operating systems. You have to investigate further and I hope I’ve done most of that work for you with this new enterprise hypervisor comparison.

(more…)

Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.

During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.

Changes:

• No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
  This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
• The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
• No free versions have been used in this comparison.

(more…)

At the end of May of this year we wrote a article concerning Hypervisor comparisons and we got a lot of positive feedback on it. The downside to that is that people want an update as soon as one of the companies launches a new version of its product, and who can blame them. However the issue is that this takes a lot of research and because of that, a lot of time. And because two of us are ill and in bed wearing a sombrero and the other two are extremely busy, we simply don’t have that time right now.

However, Scott Lowe has written an excellent article on the feature comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 which is a must read for everybody who’s advising customers on hypervisors.

It’s not as extensive as the Enterprise hypervisor comparison we did earlier but it gives you a good image how both products relate to each other. To extend the picture I added a list of supported operating systems.

(more…)

Project Virtual Reality Check finally posted a new document about previous results and possible clock drift when using the “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)”.  Previous test setups and results didn’t take into account how different hypervisors handle passing time.

In my opinion this is a serious setback to Project VRC which is considered an institute in the virtualization world. People will start questioning the results when no new tests will be performed.

Below is a description from the Project VRC website explaining the new whitepaper they published on September 14th 2009. This is a must read for people that already did some testing as well as new tests. In short: ‘Because of Windows clock behavior in virtual machines the results were affected and some hypervisors may come out better than they really are.

This whitepaper is a review and reflection on previous Project VRC publications, the benchmark: “Login Virtual Session Indexer (VSI)” and Windows clock behavior within virtual machines.  This discussion is fueled by the fact that results from the individual Project VRC whitepapers are set side-by-side to compare hypervisors. Project VRC has been in discussion with both vendors and community, and performed additional research in this context. Before Project VRC can publish new results, it is important to address any questions, review the impact of this discussion and improve VSI where possible.

You can download it at www.projectvrc.nl

The major conclusions in this Whitepaper are:

(more…)

I was checking out the news and was checking out the competition on Microsoft’s Virtualization Team Blog and ran into some interesting news.

Microsoft just announced that their Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft hyper-V Server 2008 R2 have been released to manufacturing.

I guess my ‘Microsoft-informant’ was right, Microsoft’s intention is to release Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V at the same time and not 3-6 months later as they did with version 1.0.

After the initial Hyper-V R1 release, Microsoft interviewed their customers to discover what they wanted in their new v2.0 product. These are the improvements and priorities which their customers want (according to Microsoft).

(more…)

I use TWeetDeck on my laptop to follow the news concerning virtualization. vSphere, Hyper-V and Xen have their own column. It’s because of these queries I noticed a tweet from @ilijabrajkovic about a free Hyper-V training from Microsoft.

(more…)

Last night, after my son’s first birthday,  I checked my missed twitter messages and a retweet from Duncap Epping caught my eye. It was a link to an article from Eric Gray on vCritical about HA for Linux guests on Hyper-V. Now you will probably think, nice an HA for Linux on Hyper-V whitepaper/how-to, but this is not the case.

As you probably know, very little Linux distributions are supported on Hyper-V and therefore no integration tools are available. Because the lack of integration tools Microsoft Clustering Services, the service which provides HA services for Hyper-V, you can not gracefully shutdown an unsupported Linux host and when shutdown MSCS will desperately try to keep the guest up and running. Because of this shortcoming you will have to choose, run HA OR Linux because you can not run both.

A complete desciption can be found here in Eric Gray’s article on vCritical.com. If you are considering a Hyper-V implementation you should definitaly read this article.

Yesterday I attended the ‘TechNet – Get Ready for all Microsoft virtualization products’ session in Utrecht (NL). This was a new style paid (€99,-) Technet session, max of 20-30 professionals in a classroom. The program consisted of Hyper-V, App-V, Med-V, Terminal services and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

Hyper-V
We started with an introduction to Hyper-V, luckily the trainer had updated his lab to Hyper-V 2, so we could check out the new features which should compete with VMware. After explaining the architecture, networking and storage it was very obvious that this was the standard Microsoft propaganda. They were comparing Hyper-V 2 to VI 3.5, which were practically the same, but of course Microsoft’s hyper-V solution was much cheaper. Grrrrr! Again, when you do a comparison, do a fair comparison and compare Hyper-V to vSphere 4 (because the release is not far away I will allow Microsoft to use Hyper-V 2 in this comparison). Then the numbers are very different and maybe the VMware solution costs more but obviously you will get a lot more.

I also disliked the insinuation that when they compare a microkernel hypervisor to a monolithic hypervisor Microsoft  makes it look like VMware’s hypervisor is one out of the stone ages. Play fair, win the fight based on your own strong points.

When he explained the Hyper-V I/O architecture with the parent partition, VM Bus, synthetic drivers, etc, I asked him if this didn’t introduce a singe point of failure and a possible I/O bottleneck. In true MS fashion he denied both, claiming that I/O was tested and you shouldn’t install Exchange in the parent partition. Duh!

(more…)

April 25th we published our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments on it. A few people were kind enough to provide us feedback so we could improve the document, thanks for that.

I collected all comments and feedback and created version 1.3 of our Enterprise Hypervisor comparison which can be found here.

Again, feel free to contact us when you have feedback for us so we can improve the list.

(Gabrie, thanks for the detailed feedback. I hope  you will find that all points are taken care of.)

Update 4-6-09: Updated to version 1.3 after feedback from Jorge

Last update: November 29th, 2011.

As you may have noticed, we at VMGuru.nl have been extremely busy the last few week. Tons of work accompanied with the right amount of stress, illness and personally the build of my new house. This certainly shows in the amount of article we posted lately.

But I try to keep up-to-date, certainly with the release of vSphere 4. So today I read a great article on vTeardown by E. Horschman which I did not want to keep from you.

The article describes the quick migration feature in Microsoft’s Hyper-V, compares this to the live migration feature in the new version and warns customers on the  ‘Quick’ features provided in the next version of Hyper-V.

In the past Microsoft claimed that their Quick Migration feature was enough and Live Migration, as VMware’s vMotion, was not needed.  In vTeardown’s article you can see how quickly Microsoft changes its opinion as soon as they have finally added the feature themselves.

‘Now that Microsoft has live migration on their Hyper-V roadmap, we’re starting to learn that they never really thought much of Quick Migration themselves.  I heard Mark Russinovich, one of their technical luminaries who gave a talk about Hyper-V R2 futures, actually come out and say what we all knew to be true, “Quick Migration was our first attempt to do a live migration, and to put a nice spin on it, we called it Quick Migration. [...] Even though we said, [...] ‘trust us this is really cool, this is what you want, you don’t want instant, that’s not as good as this, this is quick,  but people didn’t seem to buy that, so we ended up [...] implementing live migration, so that Quick Migration stuff is crap, this is really good.’”  Mark’s honesty got some laughs from the packed session, but it puts us on notice that we should be skeptical when Microsoft tags a feature as “Quick”.

Not very trustworthy in my opinion. E. Horschman agrees and adds a warning to beware of Microsoft’s ‘Quick’ features as they now use the same b*lls*!t motivation on their new Quick Storage Migration feature.

So check out ‘When Microsoft Says “Quick”, Do They Really Mean “Crap”?‘.

Today my twitter popped up and I saw a retweet from Duncan Epping pointing to an article on VInternals. Duncan added a warning ‘Please sit down before reading my latest post‘, this caught my attention.

I read the article and I must say, this is a MUST READ for all virtualization architects, admins, decision makers!

The article, published January 2009, contains information directly from employees from Microsoft explaining the design considerations in relation to Hyper-V. Make sure you’re sitting down when you read the excerpts, are somewhere private like your own home, and have the bathroom door open and an Ambulance on hold. Because it is very likely you will piss yourself laughing.

This article is the next article in a long sequel of Microsoft Hyper-V vs VMware ESX articles, like:

• ESX vs Hyper-V mythbusting myth
• VMware releases a cost per application calculator
• Hyper-V, not in my datacenter!
• VMware ESX vs Microsoft Hyper-V

VMware dedicated a blog to this so called Microsoft mythbusting, you can find it here.

Last few weeks I tested Hyper-V with the intention to write an article on the subject and give you a good idea how Hyper-V compares to VMware. After a few days I was not sure if I was objective enough and if this would be a good idea. To be honest I’m a big VMware fan and during the Hyper-V test I realized this was a true MS product. What that means, it’s buggy not consistent and has some strange MS ‘brainwaves’. So certainly not my product but maybe my view is colored. But luckily I’m not alone. Gabrie wrote some great articles on the subject and his opinion is ‘Hyper-V, not in my datacenter‘ (more…)

On Gabes Virtual World I read an article with the title ‘Unbelievable Hyper-V performance ‘. At first I was a bit shocked by the title. Hyper-V good performance? That the complete opposite to my own experience with Microsofts virtualization attempt. But luckily what Gabe ment was ‘Unbelievable BAD Hyper-V performance ‘.

You can read the complete article here.

Conclusion
A max score of 1,875 VMs per core where VMware ESX on the same hardware does 3,5 VMs per core. Maybe the test is not 100% accurate but with these scores maybe someone should step up and do a real hypervisor performance comparison (same hardware, load, etc).