Hyper-V Reviews

I have been making solutions around the Hyper-V bundles for my clients. For example, hyper-converged infrastructure, such as in vSAN and Vsphere for company data centers.

The solution is very powerful, easy to use, user-friendly, and integrates well with Windows. If you are looking for a hundred percent Microsoft environment it would be a good idea to go with Hyper-V. They work wonderfully together.

There are a lot more features and is easier to use compared to previous releases. They were using PowerCLI for the management but now it is all GUI-based which has made it a lot easier to use.

Hyper-V is not a type one hypervisor, such as vSphere. When it comes to Hyper-V, it is a role in Windows Server. Hyper-V could have been much leaner and much more powerful, but it becomes only the Hyper-V part of it. There should be some distribution or limit to Hyper-V, such as in vSphere.

The missing factor or parameter, in Hyper-V and all of the functionality, is a role it plays inside the Windows operating system. You have to enable those roles. That is something not appreciated in a data center because Windows is a general-purpose operating system, not for the sole purpose of doing these types of operations. They could skim down the version of the operating system and have it customized for virtualization, not as a general-purpose operating system.

In an upcoming release, they can improve by having better cloud integration. We are all moving towards the clouds and the integration is only through the Azure Stack, there should be tools built in to move the VMs natively to the cloud and infrastructure. Additionally, they could provide some form of multi-cloud integration.

I have been involved with Hyper-V for approximately two years.

The solution is stable in my experience.

The technical support is good because there are a lot of administrators out there in the market who are well-versed in Microsoft technologies.

The installation is straightforward. The installation time can vary depending on if you have preloaded configurations. If you were to do it from scratch then it would take approximately 20 minutes.

Hyper-V is cost-effective and is a one-time purchase. Microsoft has multiple licensing options available, such as a subscription model and an outside purchase model that customers can choose as per their requirements.

I have evaluated VMware vSphere.

Hyper-V is very popular in the market for data centers and most of my clients are using Microsoft in some form or another but it might not be their core ERP.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Hyper-V a seven out of ten.

I am a solution provider and Hyper-V is one of the products that I implement for my customers.

There are two very good things about this product including licensing and stability. 

If you have a lot of Hyper-V servers then you will need an additional product, which is the System Center Virtual Machine Manager, so that you can control the host environments of all of your virtual machines. 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.

There should be a way to restart the services and not the whole station, which would minimize downtime, especially when updating the operating system. This is a feature that everybody needs.

I started working with Hyper-V in 2012, between eight and nine years ago.

The product is very stable, in particular with the most recent version of Windows Server. This is true even in a cluster environment, and I have never found an issue with stability.

Obviously, when you are using Windows Server update, it will restart the server occasionally and you will have downtime, but it will be minimal. If you don't want to have any downtime then you will need multiple hosts in a cluster environment. You can move your virtual machines from one host to another, which means that you can restart the server and not affect the service. This can be important because sometimes, the restart process takes too much time to complete.

It is very easy to scale Hyper-V. However, it depends on the version that you have because if you have the Standard Edition then you only have three hosts. If you want more than three hosts then you will need a Datacenter version.

I have experience with VMware and one of the nice features is that you can restart a service after an update and everything goes live in seconds, rather than minutes.

These two technologies compete with each other, and in deciding which to use, I speak with users about their needs. I also speak with them about the knowledge of their technical team and the budget. These are all factors in the decision because I want to provide the best solution from both a technical and budget perspective.

The initial setup is very easy. All you have to do is watch a 10-minute YouTube video and you can deploy the hardware.

It can be deployed in different ways. If you need to have a virtual environment then it will be hosted on Microsoft Azure. If instead, you have your own private cloud then it will be hosted on-premises, on your physical servers.

The tricky part about this field is not the deployment. It's troubleshooting and finding solutions for issues. For just about any software, you can deploy anything. Even if you don't understand anything about the product, you can deploy anything from scratch and there is no issue with it. The problem is figuring how to solve issues and find solutions outside of the box. Almost all Microsoft issues are solved in this way. It's not about what you find online or in the documentation. Rather, you need to think outside the box. It's the hardest part about this field.

If you have the standard edition of Windows server then with each copy of the operating system, you have two virtual machines for free.

If you have a Windows Datacenter license then you have unlimited virtual machines for free. This is much better compared to ESXi or VMware, where each virtual machine requires its own license. In the Windows Datacenter, you can have as many as you want.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is the replica service.

Hyper-V requires improvement with manageability.

We have been using Hyper-V for two years.

This solution is stable.

We are running Hyper-V on-premise, so the scalability is limited.

We rely on Microsoft inputs for Hyper-V, at times it is a bit difficult to get the information that we want.

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward.

We deployed Hyper-V in-house. We have two people dedicated to the maintenance of the solution.

Hyper-V is part of Windows Server, so there are no extra costs for the product.

Anyone considering implementing Hyper-V into their organization should do so in a way that allows for upgrades at a later stage. 

Overall, I would rate Hyper-V an eight out of 10.

Our organization is a financial institution in the banking industry. We use Hyper-V for network virtualization and storage and application virtualization. There are five or six users of the solution.

The most valuable feature of the solution is storage virtualization.

Hyper-V has limitations. When one server or one virtual machine fails, or one is turned off, the virtualization stops, and we have to initiate again with human intervention. 

In the next release, I would like to see virtualization replication added.

I have been using Hyper-V for five years.

Hyper-V is scalable.

Customer support for Hyper-V is good. I would rate the support a four out of five.

Positive

No setup of Hyper-V is required. It is a feature of Windows Server 2016 and 2012. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for customers who want to virtualize their infrastructure, but are on a budget and don't need advanced features. 

This is the best solution for customers with budget constraints. 

Security could be improved and they need to have some sort of a Distributed Resource Scheduler like VMware. Hyper-V doesn't have that kind of a solution. Computing balance could be improved. If you have three or four nodes in a cluster, it should look at the load and based on the algorithm they use, it will place the VMs automatically onto a utilized node in the cluster. Memory ballooning, where unused memory can be cleaned and given to demanded VMs, is a feature I would like to see. 

Taking snapshots could also be improved. It's not straightforward and I had a couple of issues with the Windows server 2000 tool when I took a snapshot of the active directory. When I went to restore that snapshot, I had a problem with active directory sync issues. VMware doesn't have this problem. Even if you're taking a snapshot of the active directory, you can easily revert back and you will not have any trouble with active directory replications. 

I have been using Hyper-V since 2012. 

It is stable, especially if you do Hyper-V clustering. Some customers don't invest much into IT infrastructure, so I design Hyper-V-cluster-based solutions. The only potential problems are attacks on Windows servers, vulnerability issues, or receiving stolen packages could require you to restart it. But it does its job. 

Some of my customers have software assurance from Microsoft, but those who don't have to pay if they need technical assistance. Microsoft Azure has support, but if a customer has deployed the infrastructure on-premises and they don't have software assurance, they will have a problem getting support from Microsoft. 

The installation took about fifteen to twenty minutes for a Microsoft Windows server. 

For deployment, you need expertise in terms of storage, network, and computing. If a customer requires a high performance, we need to look at the computing, processor, and what kind of storage and network switches we're using. You need an expertise team in order to get the best solution. 

I installed this product myself. 

I recommend Hyper-V to customers with budget constraints. 

VMware has a lot of features. For example, with vMotion, if an administrator wants to do maintenance, they can do live migrations. Hyper-V does the job and is okay, but it's not the same as VMware. 

If you are on a budget and can't invest too much into IT infrastructure, I recommend Hyper-V. If budget isn't a problem and you're looking for the best solution, I would go for VMware. I have about 85 customers that are using Hyper-V clusters at the moment. Hyper-V is okay for utilizing the file server, clusters, or active directory, but you won't get advanced features. 

I would rate Hyper-V a six out of ten because it is missing a lot of features. 

We use it for anything like production and everything we're running on right now.

I like that it's easy to use.

The backup site could be better. We used to face a lot of issues, and we are looking to solve that now. We are in the process of moving all the infrastructure to the cloud. It could also use more integration on the management part. We also need more integration on the monitoring sites.

I have been using Hyper-V for four to five years.

It could be more stable. We faced a lot of issues on the backup site.

Hyper-V is a scalable solution. We are a global center, and we use Hyper-V across 22 countries.

We also use VMware vSphere.

It is a straightforward implementation. If you want to put Hyper-V as a single load, it will take about one to two hours. If you want high availability, it will take approximately four to five hours.

We implemented this solution.

I have been using VMware and Hyper-V. Comparing the two, I love to use VMware more than Hyper-V. However, I would recommend this solution to potential users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Hyper-V an eight.

We use Hyper-V for production, testing, and development.

It's a core infrastructure solution, so it's not a user-solution. It's for server virtualization. It's actually deployed virtually for other services that need to deploy virtual machines using it.

We plan to keep using this solution in the future.

I have been using this solution since 2008.

Hyper-V is both stable and scalable; however, I also use VMware which I find to be more scalable and stable overall.

The support with Microsoft is great.

We use VMware, but Hyper-V is much cheaper; however, VMware is more robust, more scalable, more agile for us. It was a mix of both because we wanted to be able to see our way through technology skills.

The initial setup was quite easy.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. If it were a little more flexible and stable, I'd give it a higher rating.

We run the majority of our production servers from our Hyper-V 2012 R2 Cluster. 

• It was our first step into virtualization around five years ago. 
• It allows for quick deployment of servers and workloads.

• Live motioning of VMs, which I consider to be a standard function. 
• When upgrading clusters from Windows Server 2012 to 2012 R2, we were able to live motion VMs from one cluster to another.

I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage. 

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.

It works very well. Its performance, stability, and redundancy are all very dependable.