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 simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."
"Hyper-V is much easier to deploy because Hyper-V is already installed inside Windows Server OS. You only need to turn on Hyper-V as a service, and then you can use it. The most convenient thing about Hyper-V is the operating system."
"The organization has realized the benefits on smaller data center space, power, cooling, etc. apart from the benefit that the virtualization layer brings in."
"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."
"Microsoft has documentation that is easy to find, helpful, and readily available."
"The Failover Clustering feature allows us to be able to make our most critical workload highly available."
"The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is that it's very intuitive."
"The initial setup is simple. There's not much to do. We input one command or just one or two clicks on the UI. Initial setup in the Windows environment for any software is not that difficult."
"It is the number one virtualization-layer platform available, and a lot of people trust it."
"With VMware vSphere, it is easy to manage the scaling of our company's virtual infrastructure."
"It's much more stable than other products. It is scalable and easy to implement as well."
"The solution can scale well."
"We find the solution simple and efficient to manage."
"It is easy to use."
"It provides a new environment in an expedient manner."
"The solution is user-friendly. It is easy to convert, create, and manage systems."
"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."
"Microsoft tech support is horrible."
"I also use VMware which I find to be more scalable and stable overall."
"It needs to improve compatibility with third party software."
"Many vendors, such as Cisco and HPE, are discontinuing support for Hyper-V as they believe it does not have a significant market share."
"Security, computing balance, and taking snapshots could be improved. Features like DRS and memory ballooning could be added."
"It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities."
"I encounter issues such as mouse cursor problems, dependencies, lagging, freezing, and unresponsiveness using Hyper-V."
"There are certain tools the can't run in parallel and occasionally, in those instances, we have trouble migrating customers from one source to our data center."
"The biggest problem in this solution is the incompatibility of some of the features with some of the drivers installed on servers. For example, if I want to install vSphere on an HPE server, the driver is really different from a Dell server or a Fujitsu server. I need to download different drivers and install them manually, which can be improved by VMware. They can offer a special image to match different servers. We face different problems when we install vSphere on an ESXi server and have different drivers on the storage. ESXi cannot detect different kinds of storage, and they should improve this. We updated our existing version to vSphere 7 in a private environment, but it seems that this version is not very stable. We are facing issues with restarting the host. In earlier versions, such as vSphere 6 or 6.5, we didn't have any such problems. It would be good if VMware can offer specific applications for mobiles to enable us to control the management of all servers by mobile. They should also improve the vCenter GUI because it is currently not compatible, and there are a lot of problems. Some of the options do not appear well in the browser. VMware should spend more time resolving the problems in the GUI."
"Its price should be better. Their support should also be more customer-friendly, and they should train people like us so that we know more about the latest technologies and features. If there is some program and drive from their side to teach us, it is definitely going to help us. Pricing and support are the most important features for mid-level companies. We are not implementing this solution for big tech companies."
"It would be highly beneficial for VMware to collaborate with local hosts and partners in countries like those in Africa to establish specific pricing that would align with the economic conditions of countries in Africa, ensuring suitability and compatibility with our consumption capabilities."
"If they improve on the knowledge base and documentation, it would be extremely helpful."
"The solution is slower than other tools."
"They need to further develop graphics virtualization."
"I would like to see better fault and performance reporting in the GUI."
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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