5 Reasons To Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

5/4/2014 5 Reasons To Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V
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Home Virtualization Hyper-V 5 Reasons To Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V over VMware
vSphere 5.5
5 Reasons To Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V over
VMware vSphere 5.5
by Aidan Finn - May 1, 2014

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Updated: May 1, 2014 - 9:00am MT - Corrected information about ESXi RAM limitations and VSAN release
status.
Editor's Note: Petri IT Knowledgebase Contributing Editor Aidan Finn makes the case for Windows Server
2012 R2 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.5 in this opinion post. In the interest of presenting an additional
contrasting viewpoint, we also have a future opinion article scheduled that will provide 5 reasons why you
should chose VMware over Hyper-V. Once that article goes live we'll link to it here.
The world of virtualization has been divided in two when it comes to picking a virtualization platform (come
on, who cares about Xen, KVM, or other similar also-rans?). Do you go with the legacy incumbent,
ESXi/vSphere, or do you go with the designed for modern computing, Hyper-V/System Center?
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In case you havent noticed, yes, I am biased towards the Microsoft stack. I am a Microsoft Most Valuable
Professional with the Hyper-V expertise. I promote and sell Microsoft licensing. I write about Microsoft
products. But (and its a big but) I started off happily working with the VMware stack (Workstation and
ESX/vCenter), and Ive angered more than a few Microsoft "blue badges," aka full-time employees, with my
criticisms in the past (for an example, see my post "What Went Wrong At Microsoft"). Back in 2008 I
started a project and I had my choice of virtualization stacks to build a business on. I evaluated the two
big contenders, being quite critical of Hyper-V during the beta period, but eventually I reasoned that
Microsoft had the best path going forward. Management agreed with me, and I havent look back since. So
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in this op-ed I want to give you my top 5 reasons to consider Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.
Hyper-V vs. VMware vSphere: Making the Right Comparison
Note that when comparing the two companies, it's important to compare apples with apples. That means
you either compare the fully featured Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 with the cripple-ware ESXi Free (Hyper-V
wins in every possible way). Or you compare Windows Server and System Center with vSphere Enterprise
Plus with vOperations Management Suite Enterprise Plus (and Microsoft has so much more to offer here,
too).
Do not fall into the trap of comparing different packages, such as comparing WS2012 R2 Datacenter Hyper-
V with vSphere Enterprise Plus. Both companies package their products differently, so features reside in
different places. For example, VMware's DRS (virtual machine load balancing) resides in vCenter, whereas
Microsoft's Dynamic Optimization resides in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. To tilt the cart the
other way, Microsoft includes all of their features including Cluster Aware Updating (automatic patching)
in even the free edition of Hyper-V, whereas VMware has a plethora of decreasingly crippled packages of
vSphere as you move up the pricing ladder.
See Also: Windows 8.1 Update > The IT Pro Perspective
Beware of the FUD
I know that the comments on this article may be let's say, colorful and intense. I also know that there will
be a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, or "FUD." Some of it will be innocent. Much of it will be out of
ignorance and anger. There are those who are invested in the VMware business who dont want to realize
that their competitor is growing market share at four times the rate of their favored product. Maybe those
people fear their jobs are at risk? Maybe they dont want to re-skill? Maybe they work for a VMware reseller
and are addicted to the rebate that they get for even trying to sell VMware software?
Personally speaking, I dont care what virtualization stack you choose to deploy. You might argue that Im
in the business of selling Microsoft server licenses. This is true but in the end, if you license your
Windows virtual machines correctly, youre buying the same Windows Server licenses that you would use if
you were buying vSphere or using Hyper-V.
And with that out of the way, lets get down to the business of money.
1. Hyper-V Is Free
You cant beat a free lunch, never mind when it comes with a free dinner, supper, and breakfast. Imagine
that you are going to deploy a 5-node virtualization cluster. Each node will have 2 x 6-core processors.
There will be at least 20 virtual machines running on each node at any one time. Ninety percent of those
virtual machines will run Windows Server. The rest will run the CentOS Linux distribution. You have to price
up the solution to run either Hyper-V or vSphere, with live migration which is also known as vMotion.
The hardware will probably be the same, so lets rule that out and stick with the software. The correct way
to license each host to run many Windows Server virtual machines is actually to license each host with
Windows Server Datacenter edition. Each Datacenter license cost $6,155 under Open NL licensing. Thats
the most expensive kind of volume license you can get, and its also the one you see listed publicly.
Datacenter edition gives you the following:
The rights to license a server with up to two processors to run Windows Server.
Licensing for an unlimited (yes, no limits) number of Windows Server virtual machines on that licensed
host. Note, if those virtual machines move to another host then that host needs licensing too, even if
the move lasts just one second.
Oh, and you have the right to enable the fully featured Hyper-V on the host.
Lets say a host has 20 virtual machines. That will cost $6,155. If that host runs vESXi free, the Windows
Server licensing cost for the 20 virtual machines will be $6,155. If the host runs vSphere Enterprise Plus,
the Windows Server licensing cost will be $6,155. If the host runs Hyper-V, the Windows Server licensing
cost will be $6,155. We have five hosts, so the total Windows Server cost will be $30,775. It is basically up
to you if you want to install Windows Server Datacenter on the host and enable Hyper-V. You can just
record that youve assigned the license to a host, and install vSphere at an additional cost.
For those who balk at the cost of the Datacenter license, to license each virtual machine with the
Standard edition (which could cause legal issues with vMotion or live migration) would cost $882 per virtual
machine, or $88,200 for at least 100 virtual machines.
What is the cost of vSphere? Well need to go with the cripple-ware Standard edition to get the cheapest
license with vMotion. That will cost $1,940.25 and it is per processor. We have five hosts with two
processors each, so that is 10 processors, costing $19,402.50 for vSphere. Add in the Windows Server
licensing costs and the total for a vSphere implementation would be $50,177.50.
A Hyper-V implementation would have been just the cost of the Data Center licensing. Thats $30,775, a
whopping 38 percent cheaper than the VMware-based alternative. And youd get all of the features of
Hyper-V without any constraints, unlike those imposed by VMware on each edition.
This is where someone cries about Linux. Yes, Hyper-V supports Linux. The Linux Integration Services
(like VMware tools) are built into most of the Linux distributions that are using in hosting or private
enterprise, making them Hyper-V ready and supported out of the box. You do not have to buy Windows
Server to run Hyper-V if all of your virtual machines will be Linux based. You can download the fully-
featured and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. I cant say that ESXi Free is fully featured; its probably best to
call it barely-featured, considering the 32 GB RAM per host limitation that is applied by this cripple-
ware doesn't offer vMotion, HA, and other such features considered essential in enterprise virtualization.
Hyper-V = free. VMware = pay lots more.
2. Scalability
I laugh when I hear vFanboys cry that Hyper-V isnt scalable for enterprise workloads. This is the perfect
example of ignorance or blind loyalty.
You might remember an American company that used to feature the owner saying I like it so much that I
bought the company." Microsoft uses Hyper-V. Sure, Microsoft has some 95,000 employees, so you can
imagine that they run a lot of hosts internally. But that is nothing when you consider that Microsoft Azure
is based on Hyper-V. The Xbox game, Titanfall, ran on 100,000 Azure virtual machines, or, 100,000 Hyper-V
virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. When someone deploys a cloud service in Azure, its running on Hyper-
V.
Lets look at scalability numbers. The following table, from a Microsoft whitepaper called "Competitive
Advantages of Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.5," shows how a WS2012 R2 host
compares with vSphere 5.5. Note that Microsoft didnt bother increasing these Top Gear numbers since
WS2012 because they had reached theoretical limits that customers were no longer interested in. Microsoft
jumped way beyond VMware with the release of WS2012, and maintain much of that lead with WS2012 R2
despite VMware playing catch-up for their last two releases.
Comparing WS 2012 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtualiztion scalability
Nice numbers for the hosts, but Im more interested in getting big workloads operating as virtual machines.
How does Hyper-V compare there? VMware matched Hyper-V with the ability to have 64 virtual processors
and 1 TB RAM in a single virtual machine, assuming that you pay up for the Enterprise Plus edition at
$6,815.25 per proc, or an additional $68,152.50 beyond the cost of the same Hyper-V installation.
3. Storage and Networking
Storage is a bedrock of virtualization. Bad storage leads to a bad virtualization implementation. Microsoft
made huge investments in block-based (legacy) storage and software-defined storage in the years leading
up to and following the release of WS2012.
Historically a cluster from either platform has required a SAN. Microsoft added alternatives in WS202 and
developed them in WS2012 R2. SMB 3.0 is an alternative storage networking protocol that EMC (the owner
of VMware) has declared publicly to be the future of storage." When combined with Storage Spaces we
can build scalable transparent storage in the form of a Scale-Out File Server. So not only can we reduce
the cost of licensing with Hyper-V, but we can also reduce the cost of the physical storage with a flexible
software-defined storage system. Meanwhile, VMware has released the interesting, but not production
supported, vSAN.
In terms of storage performance, the Microsoft VHDX supports native 4K disks. The VMware VMDK does
not, and therefore relies on a very inefficient RMW process.
In other storage areas, Hyper-V has ODX where vSphere Enterprise Plus has VAAI. VHDX grows up to 64
TB, where VMDK was recently expanded up to 62 TB. Both platforms have hot storage resizing, but vSphere
is limited to expansion only.
A great service is pretty pointless if you cannot get to it. One of the big headline features of Hyper-V is
Network Virtualization, also known as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Ill give this to VMware: They
know how to get the media to think that theyre the first to do something. Lots of reporters believe that
VMware NSX is the first network virtualization solution on the market. Microsoft was there a long time
before VMware announced NSX. SDN was a reality in Microsoft Azure and was launched in WS2012 with
System Center 2012 SP1 management. WS2012 R2 added virtual NVGRE gateway functionality to make
NVGRE-based SDN a reality for businesses. This isnt just some marketing feature SDN makes it possible
for hosting companies to enable self-service network provisioning. It allows huge scalability of up to 16
million virtual subnets versus 4096 VLANs. And SDN increases flexibility, such as overlapping IP subnets or
provider IP-agnostic cloud services.
Pure-software networking is not enough. Hardware in a host can offer functionality increases in
performance and service scalability. Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (DVMQ) provides more efficient and
scalable processing of packets into the virtual switch from the physical network. Both platforms offer this
hardware enhancement. For those for whom security is important, Hyper-V can offload the encryption and
decryption of IPsec to a NIC; VMware cannot do this. Single-Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) enables
selected virtual machines to connect directly to a hosts physical for reduced latency and improved
performance. Both platforms offer SR-IOV functionality, but only Hyper-V supports live migration of SR-IOV
enabled virtual machines. Note that only Hyper-V offers a no features that prevent live migration policy.
Microsoft also built on DVMQ to enable Virtual Receive-Side Scaling (vRSS). This feature enables huge
throughput into network-intensive virtual machines. VMware also offers this feature but only with VMXNet3.
Comparing networking features
4. Its All About the Service, Dummy!
We IT pros focus on machines, switches, routers, pretty flashing lights, and all that jazz. The business
does not give a monkeys about any of that. Your MD cares that the website is selling product to the
customer. Sales cares that the CRM and order services are online. Accounts cares that the credit control
service is running. Purchasing wants email and web services running. Our job in IT is to make services
operational, available, and responsive. No one cares about virtual machines, but they do value services.
Microsoft has been building service-centric infrastructure for over a decade. System Center is all about
deploying services (Virtual Machine Manager or SCVMM), monitoring services (Operations Manager or
SCOM), automating services (Orchestrator or SCORCH), enabling self-service (Service Manager or SCSM),
or the mother of all service systems, enabling the cloud (Windows Azure Pack or WAP).
VMware has a history of developing a great virtual machine virtualization platform. Thats their expertise.
Theyve developed and acquired a collection of point solutions over the years to build their own suite of
products. Quite honestly, this collection befuddles me. I can never remember what product does what and
how; there are just so many vProducts. The cost isnt pretty either. You can buy VMwares Operations
Management Suite Enterprise Plus (for all features) on a per host processor basis for $4,245.00. That will
total $42,450 to manage five dual processor hosts.
System Center is an all-inclusive suite that is licensed in the same fashion as Windows Server. Five copies
of the Server Management License Datacenter edition for five dual processor hosts and unlimited virtual
machines on those hosts will cost 5 x $3,607, or $18,035. So you get all eight components of System
Center plus free add-ons like WAP (to build a cloud), Global Service Manager (global monitoring of web
sites), and System Center Advisor (integrated cloud-based best practice analyser). And you get all of
those tightly integrated suite components for less than half of the cost of the VMware management suite.
Note: When it comes to pricing, both companies offer different bundling options and discounts. Im
comparing list prices. I am also not comparing vCenter to System Center because vCenter has no way to
compare with the Microsoft stack. I am sticking to comparing apples with apples.
5. Built from the Cloud Up
I hate to steal a line from Microsoft marketing, but this tagline for Windows Server 2012 and System Center
2012 SP1 perfectly describes what Microsoft has been doing. Microsoft built a cloud OS, a single consistent
platform based on Hyper-V that runs in:
Private cloud: managed by System Center
Public cloud: hosting companies that present their cloud to the customers via Service Provider
Foundation (SPF, a REST API) and a WAP portal
Microsoft Azure: a hugely scalable cloud based on Hyper-V
Services can be deployed, managed, and automated using one System Center installation across the entire
hybrid cloud. No virtualization or cloud company other than Microsoft can say that they have a consistent
offering for private and public cloud, as well as hybrid cloud through the entire stack from fabric through to
self-service.
The cloud OS, spanning private, public, and
hybrid clouds.[source: Microsoft]
Right now the cloud OS gives you the flexibility to choose the right location to run the tiers of your
services, as well as a path forward that you know is built for the future instead how things were done in
the past.
Agentless Application & Server Performance Monitoring>> Test drive Demo
Related Articles
How to Choose the Right VMware Infrastructure ESX Edition For You
Create Guest Clusters in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
Five Reasons you should Virtualize your servers with VMware Server
Introducing Hyper-V Server 2012 R2

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Matthias a day ago
>Aidan Finn
Oh boy, I knew that we were in for some dumb FUD from the very first sentence onwards, so I'm not
surprised. Pretty ironic a warning about FUD emits from his keyboard.
It's sad that a so called "IT Pro" like him has to make a case for Hyper-V, when it in fact really does
have quite a few advantages over vSphere.

1
Ian Dodds 9 hours ago
From a smaller business perspective, I took a shot at Hyper-V free version about a year ago & left it
alone since then. It was difficult & limiting to deploy & change as clients needs changed. (Adding a
new disk/datastore was a major sticking point at the time).
Again, from another SMB support guy, apparently the best version of Hyper-v for new players & single-
dual server environments, is to use Server 2012 & then turn on the Hyper-V role, allowing easier
management within the server's own GUI.
"Free", therefore becomes subjective, as the server software is required, or another server 2012, or a
copy of Windows 8, to manage the Hypervisor. A community tool named "corefig" is also apparently
popular. I assume due to the lack of visibility & ease of management of Hyper-V.
VSphere free version in my experience has been a very easy product to deploy & use, simply with a
copy of VMware workstation on any remote PC or laptop for some tasks. As a service provider, I can
VPN to my clients office & then connect my VMware workstation easily to their VSphere Hypervisor, or
use an on-site VShere client.
Whilst only in the small business market, as opposed to most of the commenters being in the
datacentre, corporate environment, I would still place ease of management & visibility as high
priorities, if for no other reason than to minimize mistakes.
cheers
Ian
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Ian

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Diego P 21 hours ago
see more
Some people comment about Hyper-V or VMWare from a capacity
point of view (both of them are pretty impressive), some others from a brand
point of view (simply Microsoft haters or Microsoft lovers) and I will simply
comment about my experience.
I was always told about the stability of the VMWare
environments, based on a really tiny hypervisor providing a solid base for a
reliable VM solution.
But unfortunately I never had the chance to work in
production with VMWare, I work with Hyper-V since several years ago (I would
say around 5 years) and my experience was always the same if stability is the
most important factor well over budget then you better keep your physical
servers and leave virtualization for a test environment.
We had a cluster of Windows 2008, then 2008 R2, 2012 and
currently 2012 R2. We are running on top of the line servers (no brands, but)
1TB RAM, 40GB LAN connections, 8GB FC, 6x 8 cores processors per host. With a
total of 4 host on the cluster.

Reply
Vladan 2 days ago
Sorry to see articles like this on Petri. Plenty of wrong or outdated informations concerning VMware.

Reply
Jeff James a day ago Mod Vladan
Thanks for the note, Vladan. We've updated the article to correct two factual errors: One
related to ESXi free memory limitations, and another about the release status of vSAN. In the
interest of fairness, we're also posting a companion article soon that will make the case for
VMware over Hyper-V.

Jean-Francois APREA a day ago Vladan
Effectively, with ESXi 5.5 free hypervisor, the physical RAM limitations have been removed. My
point of view, it is just a little mistake in this article.
All others points are fine (for me)! note that limitation of 8 vCPUs is always here with free ESXi
Hypervisor.
Maybe the more important point is that on the free Hyper-V Hypervisor all "equivalent VMware
features" are in-the-box at no additionnal costs.
But more important, the question is "Are you ready to open your mind to other "good solutions"
? Today, Hyper-V box running on Windows Sever 2012 R2 are mature and really ready for all
production environment - as ESX is, of course.
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production environment - as ESX is, of course.
PS: Remember Netware in the past who was the Directory Services leader, Netscape with
Browsers, and others ... It is not editors who impose their products and technologies but
customers that choose.
The fact is, Hyper-V and System Center are now very competitive and market share is
changing day after day! A lot of Microsoft customers starts to think that Hyper-V could be a
good alternative. Today, there is a place for both VMware and Hyper-V, but tomorrow ...

Reply
vmcreator a day ago Jean-Francois APREA
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Enough said !

Reply
Jeff James a day ago Mod Jean-Francois APREA
Thanks for the note, Jean-Francois. We regret the errors, but the article has now been
updated with correct information.

Reply
Chris 2 days ago
I like petri but I stopped reading after only point #1 where they stated ESXi free as cripple ware with a
limit of 32GB of RAM. It's limit is 4TB which is a far cry from 32GB so not sure where your getting your
numbers and I'm worried what else is incorrect here.

Reply
Jeff James a day ago Mod Chris
Thanks Chris - We've updated the article with the latest information on the ESXi free limit and
the release status of VMware vSAN.

Reply
Bill3 2 days ago
#fud

Reply
vmcreator 2 days ago
A very compelling argument, and if all true is hard to disagree with. But us users are used to the way
Microsoft works. If Hyper-V is so good, why do you have to keep banging on about it. Why has
independent gurus like Gartners Chris Wolf and ex Cisco's Bred Hedlund chosen VMware as there
new employer - surely they must know something you simply do not?. And the big bad news for
Microsoft is that the trend is not to have total vendor lock-in and feed the greed. I personally would pay
more to keep VMware as my Hypervisor, iPad as my tablet, iPhone as my mobile and the rest of the
Microsoft excellent software products as well as Linux distro offerings. And this is what I hear from all
my customers. NO SINGLE VENDOR LOCK IN............period. Multiple vendors in competition/co-
opetition keeps you all on your toes to keep producing excellent technology products. There is room
for both VMware and Hyper-V.

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4 comments 4 months ago
Christopher Dearie Thanks for the great info
Damian.
Whats New in Windows 8.1 Update
Hank Shank Bring back the Start Menu, and
you may have something. Without the Start
Menu, you're just
How to Create VMware vSAN Storage Microsoft to Bring Back Start Menu in Future
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Susantha Silva 2 days ago vmcreator
Hi vmcreator you boast about "NO VENDOR LOCK IN" but based on what information? As far
as I'm updated both or most of the hyper-visors support multi OS support. As for Microsoft they
are the first to go ahead with multi hyper-visor support in the first place. What you forget is how
the virtualization market growth happened. VMware started with success when no one focus
on this market. So sales are obvious. Now the paradigm has changed. Most of the vendors
offer their hyper-visor with much more maturity where VMWare has to struggle to retain that
market with quality and same time survive with sales numbers. If you look carefully both hyper-
visors have arrived to mature level.
"If Hyper-V is so good, why do you have to keep banging on about it" - I don't know your
thoughts about this but we're coming from technical background and we like to speak about
the technology we use and interact everyday. Please ask with VMware expert and they will
have the same answer :)
"Why has independent gurus like Gartners Chris Wolf and ex Cisco's Bred Hedlund chosen
VMware as there new employer - surely they must know something you simply do not?" We
would like to know that too since I guess you also don't know about it. So my "ASSUMPTION"
is it's all about survival in the market with strategic planning :)

Reply
vmcreator a day ago Susantha Silva
Good points Susantha, but I feel Mr Finn is indicating that Microsoft would like to kill
VMware and promote Microsoft only shops albeit with multiple guest OS. I sorry
something that most will certainly not accept.
VMware is the major disrupt or in the IT arena, and in a few years when we see the
Appvisor between above the VMware Hypervisor / kernel then apps will simply plug into
this and there will be no need for operating systems. If Microsoft succeeds by
marketing hype and gains major share over VMware in this Hypervisor space, they will
simply be shooting themselves in the foot, as VMware will be weakened and a prime
target for acquisition, and guess who will be the new owner YES = Google. Makes
sense as they will provide the billions to continue with the Appvisor and disrupt the last
twenty years of traditional IT as it has stayed to date.
Ho hum :-)

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