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.
"The implementation process is simple."
"It is a very stable product. We have not had any issues with Hyper-V crashing itself."
"The setup was straightforward and easy for our company. The deployment was fast."
"I like that Hyper-V comes for free with Windows Server. You don't need to buy the license, and you only have to pay for the management aspect in System Center."
"It allowed us to add on servers and fix things in an expedient manner."
"The most valuable features are ease of use, and it gets the job done in a straightforward manner."
"I have found the GUI user-friendly and having the solution be a Windows application makes it familiar to users."
"The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is that it's very intuitive."
"The benefit of the solution is that you can create template-based servers within minutes. If you were to use a physical server, it would probably take several hours, if not a whole day, to get everything set up the way you need."
"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."
"This solution is very stable. It's scalable and simple to set up."
"I like the capability of logging into one system, then being able to shift over to another system within that single pane of glass."
"Production people can quickly reboot the server with ESXi Quick Boot."
"VMware vSphere has plenty of features."
"I have found the solution to be flexible, and the vCenter and vMotion useful."
"It is a very mature solution that is easy to use and flexible."
"The cost and licensing can be improved."
"It would be better if it demanded less memory. Once you have allocated those memory spaces for the installed server, fewer resources are left to allocate for the Hyper-V virtual environment. That's the drawback with that. For example, once you install Windows 10, and let's say Windows 2019, Windows 2019 will take at least 10 GB of memory. If a customer has only 16 GB of RAM on the system, they think of installing Hyper-V. Because when you have windows 2019 or something else, they give two free Hyper-V virtual licenses. But we can't because there's not enough memory. We can, however, install this as a VMS. But this UI isn't that user-friendly for most customers. They like to have a user interface with VMI, and it's not easy when you install VMI. It would also be better if they can improve their core Hyper-V version to be a bit more familiar and user-friendly with its interface. I think it would be much easier. We had a few issues with the VM Hyper-V virtual network. Once you have such issues, it's very difficult to find out where they came from. They had such issues, and we had to resolve the system again. But other than that, if it's useful and keeps working nicely, it will work very nicely even if something happens. But it's very hectic and challenging to find out where it's happening. In the next release, it would be better to control this data store part in a manageable way. This is because once we install and create a Hyper-V machine, it goes everywhere. It would be better if it had a single location and a single folder with a heartbeat and virtual machine information. You can just go forward, and the data store and everything are going into one place like the C drive. But something always goes fast, or everything gets lost if the customer doesn't manually change the direction of where the virtual hard drive routes, the more serious the problem. It would be better if they could merge all that together. This includes the virtual machine and the virtual hard drive in the same folder when creating the virtual machine. I think that it would be much easier to manage and in case something happens. Technical support also could be better."
"There are some storage problems which do occur in high load systems, especially SQL workloads."
"The Hyper-V management console could be improved to make it easier. It should be a little bit more granular. Various virtual switches could also be improved to make virtual desk management slightly better. The replication could be improved slightly. The checkpoints or snapshots could be improved to make it a bit more transparent to the user."
"There is a hard limitation of 20 gigs per file with Dropbox, so you've got to overcome that by chunking the zip files into something smaller and manageable."
"The initial setup was complex. It was nearly six years ago, but I remember it was complicated."
"Hyper-V is hosted on OS but if your OS scratches you are in big trouble. In addition, if a host fails, automatically the machine and the virtual machine should boot from another source. Those type of features would benefit Hyper-V."
"It's not completely stable because your stack becomes bloated."
"The solution is stable. It has some small bugs which are not influencing the main functions but every software has some bugs."
"The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure."
"As we introduce the DevOps culture, we need to make sure that the principles and tools used to support this approach can be easily integrated and interoperated with the vSphere environment with no (or less) redundancy in tools and functionality."
"The solution could benefit by expanding the CPUs and memory from different physical nodes."
"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."
"The solution could be more stable."
"The setup is easy. However, the configuration expansion can be difficult. The full implementation took three to four days. This included the move from physical servers to virtual ones."
"If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful."
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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