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 is good for small installations."
"This is the best solution for customers with budget constraints."
"The solution allows us to take advantage of our physical environment."
"We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product."
"It is definitely the toughest competitor for VMware. It easily increases memory for our virtual machines."
"Using cluster with Hyper-V had a major impact on our protection environment. So all applications were virtualized using Hyper-V."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the storage virtualization."
"Microsoft's a good name for legacy support and solutions"
"The initial setup is very easy and takes half an hour to complete."
"Using vSphere we have virtualized over one thousand servers and this gave us management, cost and datacenter space advantages."
"I use the ESXi a lot for my users to create their own templates and control their own VMs without my interaction."
"It's easy to use."
"It is easy to manage the solution. It is scalable and very stable."
"The most valuable feature is being able to VMotion and migrate easily, moving machines around on the host. I know DRS will take care of a lot about that, but there's still some manual intervention here and there, so the flexibility of it has been really good."
"The most valuable feature is vSAN, as it reduces the cost of SAN storage and maintenance."
"The UI is very intuitive, you don't have to spend hours before you figure it out. All in all, compared to other environments, like Hyper-V, we find vSphere a lot more user-friendly and intuitive to use."
"There are bugs, and this should be resolved by Microsoft."
"The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols."
"The biggest problem with Hyper-V is that the virtual machines are mostly running on top of the Windows Server, so we often need to reboot the machine and virtual machines when updating the host level. That's why we prefer VMware. It's much easier to patch the host. Also, Hyper-V has security vulnerabilities. It's easy to attack and compromise the host."
"Sometimes there's a bit of slowness in the VMs."
"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."
"Enhanced visibility and reporting capabilities are desired for better insights and analysis."
"The solution is heavily reliant on Microsoft's active directory for authentication, for coordination between nodes. Therefore, it inherits all the issues that are within the active directory."
"We have our cluster connected to a Dell EMC VNX (SAN). The Hyper-V nodes are on Cisco UCS blades, and everything is interconnected via fiber. I attempted to use a virtual Fibre Channel connection to present a SAN volume to a VM but was not able to make that work."
"I feel that the scalability of the solution should be improved."
"To manage it properly, you have to know this product really well."
"The documentation could be improved. It does not help me to show the client the value of going with VMware vSphere rather than an open source or cheaper solution."
"The way that vSphere manages the alerts on the data machine is not easy to configure."
"The improvement is more from a licensing perspective rather than from a feature functionality perspective. There could be more flexibility and fewer model options to make it easier to sell. Today, there are so many different options available, and sometimes, it is not really clear which one is the right version or the right model to propose."
"I would like to see a little bit more visibility regarding errors. When an error does occur, there are times where it says "Unknown error" or something to that effect, and it doesn't necessarily give you a lot of metrics. If you go online and you give a description of it, normally the VMware forums can help you find out what it is, but I'd like to see a little bit more visibility from the software itself regarding what's going on: "This went wrong, this is why.""
"Reporting on vCenter needs to be improved."
"We want to see improvement from VMware with security. We want minimal downtime. We want automation. We want to deploy more efficiently."
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, KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas VMware vSphere is most compared with Proxmox VE, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation, 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.