We performed a comparison between Hyper-V and VMware VSphere based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware VSphere is the winner in this comparison. It is easy to deploy, reliable, robust, and has excellent customer support. Hyper-V does come out on top in the pricing category, however.
"It has provided a good cost-saving from the management perspective."
"The virtualization aspect of the solution functions similar to VMware is one of its most valuable features…It is a stable product."
"Microsoft's a good name for legacy support and solutions"
"We have a higher capacity server (specification wise) so there is no need to buy another additional hardware."
"Live migration, SMB3."
"The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."
"The flexibility and API are the most valuable features. It helps us be able to integrate with other systems and then push data easily."
"The setup was straightforward and easy for our company. The deployment was fast."
"vSphere does offer quite a bit of security stuff built-in. It is nice to know that we can have the virtual machines encrypted, so that if somebody were to get a hold of any of those files, we don't have to worry about them actually being used."
"It is absolutely simple and efficient to manage. We can bring in people who have never been exposed to vSphere or virtualized environments and they're still able to support it from a server standpoint. The training time as well as the adoption rate, for a junior technician or somebody coming right out of college, is very good."
"The virtualization this solution offer is very complete for the infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its performance."
"The ability to to virtualize systems and run those virtual workloads with a fewer number of servers is tremendous."
"For me, the most valuable feature would be the EVC, but EVC has been changed to be per-VM which makes it possible for us to migrate the VMs to cloud and not take into account what hardware they're running on. Also, a big improvement from the previous version is that I'm now able to schedule backup for the VCSA. That is, in my opinion, a huge improvement. The last thing that I think is really great is, I'm not able to boot the OS and not the entire server. That's going to save me a lot of time."
"One of the things I like with the web client, versus the thick client, is that we're able to access all the vCenters that we manage. With the thick client, you have to log in to one vCenter at a time."
"The built-in encryption of vSphere really helps us to secure our customers, especially customers in the medical field who need to be HIPAA compliant. Being able to encrypt the VM itself helps out a ton."
"VLAN is not very easy to configure."
"In terms of performance, when compared to VMware, it is much slower."
"Hyper-V needs to improve its support."
"The only negative thing I heard was that the baseline price is very, very attractive relative to VMware, however, the vCenter counterpart, the thing that brings it all together, is quite pricey."
"The pricing and technical support can be improved."
"Hyper-V's management platform falls short in terms of scalability, especially when handling multiple Hyper-V servers. VMware has a central console to pull in all your VM servers, so you can easily manage them all through one console. You can manage servers in Hyper-V's admin centers, but it's not as scalable. It's doable with a couple of Hyper-V servers, but it becomes harder to manage when you get over two or three Hyper-V servers."
"The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols."
"I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage."
"On the older version of VMware vSphere, possibly version four, we had a feature that allowed us to backup Ziploc machines. It has not been available in the newer version such as six or seven. I have been looking for another solution to accomplish the backups but they should bring back this plugin-type tool to allow older backup capabilities."
"We've been using vSphere on Windows 7, and it had less fluff associated with ThinApp. Currently, with Windows 10 version that we have, it adds a lot of bulk to ThinApp. We have offices spanning across Canada from the east coast to the west coast. A ThinApp that is roughly around 400 MB in size would take minutes to open up. With Windows 7, the same ThinApp used to be close to 75 to 80 MB in size. So, I'm really not happy with the extra fluff that is bundled in Windows 10. It really messes things up for us at times."
"The integration capabilities of the solution have certain shortcomings, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would suggest that the tool reconsider its pricing strategy. The recent price hikes could potentially pose a problem for VMware in the future. The recent price increases, especially since Broadcom acquired them, seem excessive. There are reports of businesses experiencing massive price hikes, sometimes as much as 10-30 times higher. This is causing smaller businesses to consider exiting the space altogether."
"In the last couple of years, the breaking apart of specific added benefits and charging license upcharges for them. That would be the only negative thing that I have to say: As a large consumer of the Hypervisor, we have a hard time justifying the cost of utilizing the extra products, especially when it's a couple of grand here and there, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. It's hard for an IT administrator or an architect to sell to upper management. When they're seeing so much ROI from the Hypervisor, it's hard to show them that there is extra value in the additional products that can be tied on top."
"The Web Client is too slow."
"The ability to run ARM based VMs on an x86 platform for testing purposes. With the growing use of SBCs running on ARM architectures for IoT devices, it would be very useful if developers could build and deploy VMs running operating systems like Raspbian used on Raspberry Pi devices on their existing x86 ESXi environments. Even if this is not possible through some form of emulation, the ability to add ARM hypervisors to vSphere environments would be very useful. This will enable more rapid development cycles for customers just getting started with IoT but already existing vSphere users."
"Where I think there is room for improvement is in the HTML5 interface in vCenter. What it lacks, for me, is integrating to VMware's other products, especially NSX."
Hyper-V is ranked 3rd in Server Virtualization Software with 134 reviews while VMware vSphere is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 446 reviews. Hyper-V is rated 8.0, while VMware vSphere is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Hyper-V writes "It's a low-cost solution that enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSphere writes "Offers good performance and is useful for banking systems". Hyper-V is most compared with VMware Workstation, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox, KVM and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Proxmox VE, VMware Workstation, Oracle VM, KVM and Nutanix AHV Virtualization. See our Hyper-V vs. VMware vSphere report.
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