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.
"We've probably seen a 50 percent speed increase on our SQL server. Hyper-V has also significantly reduced our downtimes with faster boot-up and reboot. If we have to reboot a server, there is maybe two or three minutes of downtime. When we were on a bare-metal server, it could be five to ten minutes due to the total boot time."
"There are some products that you can mount over Hyper-V that provide the features that, in today's Hyper-V, are not present."
"The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization."
"The solution has good scalability."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from how my company uses Hyper-V for replication."
"I like that Hyper-V is like a virtual environment. I like to use VMware because of the resource requirements. In Sri Lanka, most of the customers use the Hyper-V GUI. When installing the interface with the Windows version, we also install the Hyper-V feature on the server. This is because they require more features and memory. There are so many features that they have embedded in Hyper-V that are useful."
"Microsoft's a good name for legacy support and solutions"
"The performance is very good."
"The solution saves cost."
"Technical support was helpful and knowledgeable."
"It is easy to deploy and find troubleshooting articles as well."
"Using vSphere we have virtualized over one thousand servers and this gave us management, cost and datacenter space advantages."
"The stability of VMware vSphere is very good. It has high resiliency, it is one of the best solutions on the market."
"It is very stable and scalable, and implementation is straightforward as well."
"The most valuable feature would be enhanced, what we call, Linked Mode to link our disaster recovery site to our primary site across different vCenters, without being required to be broken apart. Meaning, we have identity management and the actual vCenter servers split. We can actually do embedded now, thanks to vSphere 6.7."
"It helps to automate the data replication and DR (disaster recovery)."
"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."
"I think the console could use some improvement for the backups."
"It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage."
"The operating system is very, very heavy."
"The security part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"It would be nice if they provided a free management console that we could use to manage all of the hosts for no additional fee."
"Hyper-V requires improvement with manageability."
"It would be good if the licensing cost of the solution could be cheaper."
"The solution should be more secure."
"I would like to see more support regarding containers, and they need more features for them."
"They should improve their storage management part. vSphere has its own file system type, called VMSS, and that file system doesn't report on proper data usage or things like that. There are certain loopholes wherein it sometimes shows you erroneous data. Again, their VMSS file system, their data storage management system, and its reporting must be improved a lot."
"Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved."
"I do not find it to be simple and efficient to manage. The tools, the interface to manage it, are a pain. In the latest version, they moved us to web-only, the Web Client and it's terrible. It's slow. It crashes. It's annoying. I used the Web Client in the older version and was happy. I would go back to the regular thick client but I don't have that option anymore, so I am always fighting it."
"The management of the product demonstration is weak."
"There is still room for improvement with the HTML5 Web Client. They are working on it, as I can see on their blog. However, there is still room for improvement in the newer features that they can push into it."
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.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.