Hyper-V Room for Improvement
KE
Kevin Ewing
IT Director at HOMELAND TECHNOLOGY GROUP, LLC
The most significant issues have with Hyper-V are the snapshots, local backup, and retention. VMware handles their backups are a lot better. I'd also like to see the ability to virtually hook an input-output device directly to the Hyper-V and the VMs, whether it be a card reader or disk drive. This is something you can do in VMware.
We still use customer or software solutions that come on a disk. I often have to rip the data and transfer it over. If I could just throw it in my disk drive and link my disc drive to that VM, that would be beneficial, or if I had a card reader that I could hook straight in. It's not a make-or-break thing, but that would make everything a little bit easier on some installs.
View full review »
Benjamin Mpolokoso
Manager ICT at NJIT
VLAN is not very easy to configure. The product must provide automation of virtualization across VLANs.
Tommy Myo Min Aung
Senior System Engineer at Vantage Drilling
The solution could improve by having virtual restore.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Hyper-V
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Hyper-V. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Suleeporn Romlee
Operation Database Administrator & Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The area revolving around operations in the product has certain shortcomings where improvements are required. The tool should have reduced operation time.
VM
Vineeth Marar
Cloud solution architect at 0
There's room for improvement in Hyper-V. One area I've personally encountered issues with is live migration. Sometimes during live migrations, the process gets stuck in a certain state. This can happen with replication as well. It's not necessarily a major problem, but at times, the error messages aren't very informative. They don't clearly explain why the migration failed.
If Hyper-V could be more user-friendly with more detailed logging during live migrations, it would be a significant improvement for users.
For example, let's say a VM fails to start. The error message might mention a "parameter interrupt" failure, but it wouldn't tell you which specific parameter is causing the issue. These are the kinds of minor details that can be improved to make things easier for end users.
With more specific error messages, users could readily identify a configuration issue in a parameter, fix it themselves, and get the VM running. But without clear information, they have to raise a support ticket and wait for support personnel to analyze logs and potentially use source code tracing to identify the problem. This can be a time-consuming process.
By providing more user-friendly error messages, we can avoid these situations and empower users to resolve issues independently. That's one immediate improvement.
View full review »EU
Eloho-Unufe
IT infrastructure lead at 0
Hyper-V serves its purpose, but some areas may not be as feature-rich as alternatives like VMware ESXi. The resource management capabilities in VMware are more intuitive and efficient for more extensive infrastructures. The difference is in the management of VMs. In Hyper-V, managing VMs can sometimes be more tedious as it requires handling them on a case-by-case basis, whereas VMware offers more streamlined management options.
For high-level management and granular control, VMware ESXi tends to be preferred in extensive virtualized environments. Additionally, VMware has an expensive upfront cost but can offer cost efficiencies in larger deployments due to its scalability and features.
Hyper-V is suitable for smaller environments and may have improved over the years. VMware ESXi often emerges as the preferred choice due to its robust features and management capabilities for larger and more complex virtualization needs.
The integration feature should be added.
Maged Elmasry
Help Desk Specialist at SESCO Trans
The security part of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. When I contacted the product's office to raise my concerns about the tool's security, I was told that it would be taken care of in the solution's upcoming versions.
Mohidul Islam
System Administrator at Flora Limited
They could work on lowering the cost of the solution.
View full review »
AANKITGUPTAA
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS
They need to make some improvements to compare to VMware on Nutanix. There should be a center manual console to manage all the Hyper-V servers and cross-host V-motion. There should be clustering, and the virtual data center should be created with that in mind. There should be similar offerings between different services available within the industry.
I'd like there to be a central management console and a central configuration tool to manage and configure multiple Hyper-V services.
We'd like a template feature to help deploy VMs quickly.
View full review »AB
reviewer1827354
Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The only negative thing I heard was that the baseline price is very, very attractive relative to VMware, however, the vCenter counterpart, the thing that brings it all together, is quite pricey.
We could probably live without it since we are a relatively small operation, however, vCenter is very convenient. vMotion and so forth are nice to be able to do. However, in order to be able to do the counterpart to that in the HyperVision world, suddenly the cost differential diminishes dramatically. We're not considering a change anytime soon, yet things have changed even from the last two years ago when we last looked at this.
View full review »
BasemMahmoud
Information Technology Help Desk at ServFund
Sometimes a server or machine shuts down and doesn't automatically restart. I checked the settings and made some adjustments so that the machine will start when services are stopped. That solved the problem
View full review »
MichaelHarvey
Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Many vendors, such as Cisco and HPE, are discontinuing support for Hyper-V as they believe it does not have a significant market share. This poses a significant problem for our Hyper-V customers since several major vendors will no longer provide support for it.
Hyper-V doesn't need additional features. They just needed to be well-defined. So, people aren't using it as much as before, and so they need to market it better. Everybody knows VMware, but not a lot of people know Hyper-V.
View full review »RD
RameshDasari
IT Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Disaster recovery capabilities are the primary choice for improvement. There could also be improvements in virtualization, performance, management, monitoring, reporting, recommendations, integration, customization, and technical support. Performance and up-scaling are the most important areas in need of improvement.
View full review »TJ
TJ1
System admin at Riyad Bank
The area that requires attention is the noticeable slowdown in performance. A singular interface for administration control, allowing centralized management of all aspects, would be preferable. Enhanced visibility and reporting capabilities are desired for better insights and analysis.
View full review »FM
Fred M.
Consultant at a hospitality company with 1-10 employees
The weakness of Hyper-V is in its interaction with iSCSI protocols. I had a bad experience with iSCSI, but that is storage not from Microsoft and is a very particular storage option that I chose long ago.
I would like to see a more granular configuration of the iSCSI protocol without going to the registry to configure it. Instead, there should be a user interface to quickly configure the parameters of iSCSI communication.
View full review »MO
Morne' O'Kennedy
Lead specialist at OKCIUS (Pty) Ltd
I believe further improvement can be made on the cluster manager side, not specifically Hyper-V related. There are some storage problems which do occur in high load systems, especially SQL workloads. These do not necessarily affect uptime, but it can evolve into a larger problem if not attended to. Otherwise, the product is fantastic.
View full review »JK
Joseph Kobe
CEO at ICES International
For Hyper-V, the copy and paste function could be improved. You cannot continue copying from the host machine to the virtual machine. It's very difficult. You can paste text if you want to extract the command from the virtual machine. You can save the command on the host machine and pass through the main activity to paste the command on the virtual machine. It's good but sometimes when we want to work very quickly, it would help if Microsoft integrated the possibility to paste a file from the host machine to the virtual machine.
The integration tools are sometimes not very smooth. Most clients can't develop it very well because most administrators are working on host machines or from a laptop administering virtual machines. So the administrator working on a laptop must have the possibility maybe from the host to paste on the virtual machine.
View full review »WG
Reviewer1961
Works at a non-profit with 10,001+ employees
I think the management tools have room for improvement.
View full review »
Le Ban
IT Security Manager & Chief IT Engineer at JVPC
They should include a few more hardware components for integration with servers. It would work great for the Hyper-V environment. Additionally, they should consider cloud virtualization features.
View full review »AW
Arno Wolthers
System Administrator at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
In terms of performance, when compared to VMware, it is much slower. This applies not only to the system performance but also to the virtual machine performance. Particularly, the disk I/O is very poor, in my opinion. Additionally, it is lacking in many features that are offered by tools such as VMware.
I currently have all the features I need. Therefore, I do not think that there is anything I need to add to my wishlist. Moreover, the company I work for is not that big. I am the sole IT personnel in a company with only 30 employees.
View full review »
Andrea Andrea
CTO at BE.iT SA
Hyper-V could benefit with improvements to their management interface. Also, there are some features that are better on other solutions. For example, VMware is easier to create 3D acceleration than on Hyper-V.
View full review »
Soundar Rajan
VMware Administrator at Ingram Micro Saudi Arabia
The product performs a bit slowly compared to VMware.
View full review »
Shashika Rathnayaka
Technical Manager at OAK integrated System Pvt Ltd
We haven't had any difficulties with the solution. We're happy with it.
Sometimes there's a bit of slowness in the VMs. The performance could be a bit better.
We'd like to see a bit more done with the migration capabilities.
The solution needs to offer better local or regional support.
View full review »SA
Shahzad-Ahmed
Engineer, System Admin at ebm
Microsoft has developed a Windows Admin Center to manage its servers. I would like Microsoft to put more effort into the Admin Center interface and make it much easier. It is customizable, but you have to be a PowerShell expert to customize these things. That is a limitation. Microsoft could also do more modules related to servers and add administration features for that. I like Admin Center, and I want to deploy it in my organization, but the role-based access control feature is limited as we have to give a complete administrative right to other users as well. So these are some limitations that are blocking us. The Admin Center needs to provide a consolidated management interface that is easy to configure and provide a role-based access control so that we can give certain rights to our other users enabling them to administer the servers.
MC
MichelCalle
Engineer at SIP
I'd like the performance to be better.
If you have a bigger implementation, you need more tools to coexist with many, many features that are not present in the base Hyper-V.
The interface needs more options and more refinement.
View full review »LL
Liam Lynch
Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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.
Ibrahim Mashal
System Administrator at Al Abnaa
Hyper-V needs to improve its support.
View full review »
Mohamed -Adel
IT Specialist at IPIC
The pricing and technical support can be improved.
View full review »AK
Alan Kuo
Project Engineer at ASE Group Global
There are usability issues with Hyper-V's manager. VMware has a much better system, but it's a much more expensive solution.
The interface is not uniform at all, which makes the manager difficult to use. It's not very convenient and isn't smartly designed. They need to reimagine it to make it more effective.
There needs to be more functionality overall in the Hyper-V manager.
It might be helpful if Microsoft could recommend the use of STV. Then, at least you can use Nano products to manage the Hyper-V server. Currently, I don't use STV. I'm not too familiar with this product. It would be helpful if Microsoft could provide some guidance as to its usage and the options available and why users might opt for them so that we have a better understanding of what we can do and how we can use the services on offer effectively.
View full review »
Rouben Amirthasawmy
System Administrator at Sun Resorts
Hyper-V doesn't have a lot of features and is limited compared to other virtualization software.
View full review »IJ
reviewer1647333
Works at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Traditional architecture, such as converged infrastructure, should be done away with. So, nowadays, we can save space, like space footprint. If one is using hyper-converged infrastructure, everything will be virtualized. So, basically, we can state that we are a completely software-defined data center once we move to the hyper-converged infrastructure. That is our target.
At present, Hyper-V can be managed by the SCVMM, but it doesn't have the portal. In VMware vSphere there is a portal, through which the VMs can be managed. Microsoft is providing Windows helping center, but it should be dedicated to a certain extent. It doesn't have full features when compared to SCVMM. So, it's better to have something similar to that.
Nishant Ambast
Deputy Manager at Arya Omnitalk Wireless Solutions Private Limited
The solution should be compatible with different systems.
View full review »
Pablo Ramírez
Datacenter & Security Manager at Binaria IT Services
The solution should improve its native integration with other public cloud solutions.
View full review »
Ali Yazıcı
IT Service Manager at Kuveyt Turk Participation Bank
We would like it to migrate virtual machines without interruptions.
View full review »JJ
reviewer1613121
Test Environment Manager at a wireless company with 201-500 employees
The WSUS could stand to improve a little bit. It is also foggy at times. Again, I use a wide variety of products and services, but going through each one would take much longer, but WSUS is an awesome Microsoft product that could use some improvement in terms of reporting tools and such. Even the additions and servers work is more difficult. Even the manual add is difficult, and reporting occasionally breaks into the endpoints, but that could be one to five servers when I'm checking a hundred to 200 servers. I suppose it's insignificant, but when it causes problems with those minor details, it can be difficult. But, aside from that, it works well.
It does what it needs to do and is adequate for the time being. It completes tasks such as replication cycles and other similar tasks. That's probably the only way it can be. In my opinion, it would have been better to truncate the site-to-site replication. If it could have been a simpler process, or if there was another way they could have done it, it would be beneficial. For example, if I'm doing site-to-site replication, I would normally have to do that in terms of bandwidth; Cisco has some, and they have some different tools that would enable the packages to be smaller and faster, but maybe just Microsoft takes a while to do the site-to-site replication.
View full review »DO
David Oparinde
Managing Director with 51-200 employees
Hyper-V could improve by making it easier to manage.
View full review »JK
reviewer1714488
Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »JS
Jarek Słupiński
Freelancer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
I am waiting for improvements in networking and life migration. Some networking settings could be less cryptic.
View full review »
it_user326982
Service Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
One thing I would love to see with this product is the ability to provide an offline solution. It would be great if someone could do work when no network connection is available, then sync up when a connection is available. I would also like to see better performance with media. Right now, streaming any media within Hyper-V is just not feasible.
View full review »GS
reviewer1563234
IT Operations Manager at a computer software company with 1-10 employees
It's hard to compare it to other solutions. Everything has almost the same offering.
It's possible that more deployment tools might make it a bit better.
If a person has never implemented the solution before, they might find the process difficult.
The next generation should at least include most of the tools of the next operating system.
View full review »AA
Aws Al-Dabbagh
IT Manager at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
The solution has already improved for us. We have the older version, which was released in 2012, or the end of 2012. There were two releases after that, however, we haven't updated due to the fact that the upgrade costs are too high, and therefore we've migrated to Hyperflex.
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.
If you have other virtualization solutions you have about 95% or 99% of the resources of the host available to you to assign to a virtual server. However, with Windows, that number is less than 95% and is more like 90%. There is a margin reserved for the server itself. That's a downside.
The solution needs to improve integration with hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, or SGI solutions. We were going with SGI for our next virtualization solution. I read reviews about the Hyper-V causing issues with SGI. When we decided to go with SGI, I decided against going with Hyper-V due to the integration issues that it had.
View full review »it_user327432
Technical Support Specialist at PCMS Datafit
I have not gotten to configure virtual SANs, but I wish there were more solutions for storage options. Virtual SANs aside, Server 2012R2 does provide a rather easy way to setup iSCSI targets with local storage. I wish importing/exporting were more robust and more user-friendly. Creating templates would be nice. I will say Hyper-V replica for clustering/failover is pretty sweet. P2V situations are a little more convoluted than with VMware, but still relatively easy. You just have to create a VHD image of the physical machine then attach it to a new virtual machine.
View full review »AG
Ahmed Gamil
PreSales Manager at UC-Solutions
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.
View full review »KS
Kirandas S
Technical Head ESG at Technoline Systems & Services
If I want to create a cluster of around five to 10 physical servers Hyper-V does not get integrated with any kind of virtual sense, such as vSense.
SA
Syed Nouman Ali Rizvi
System Admin at Institute of Space Technology (IST)
Some of the interfaces need improvements, like the virtual switch or virtual VLAN interfaces.
ZA
reviewer294312
IT Infrastructure at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Failure capabilities are insufficient for disaster recovery. Better disaster recovery is required.
The technical support is adequate but it could be better.
View full review »
Ligor Medina
Technology Solutions Manager at KdmConsulting
One of the network problems I face is I cannot introduce other security layers on top of Hyper-V as you can in VMware. When it comes to the network the VMware is more flexible than Hyper-V.
View full review »KS
reviewer1625112
Manager IT at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The performance of VMware was better, which is why I've moved away from Hyper-V.
The operating system is very, very heavy. Sometimes the system is pretty slow. Basically, the iOS performance is very slow, as compared to VMware. They must make the OS as simple and as smooth as they can to make it more user-friendly and faster.
The product is quite expensive.
View full review »SO
Reviewer893
Sr. Programmer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
They could turn it into a product because that's the problem with it. It doesn't have a single place where you can manage things. You have to go into all different screens to be able to configure it. It is hard to track what the performance is. It's really just a feature added to Windows, and Microsoft does not really have anything that pulls it all together well. Compared to VMware, it does not have everything collaborate on one screen.
In addition, the solution needs better ability to do backups.
View full review »SS
Sandeep Shenoy
Works at hadafq8
I am able to give end users better performance and better response time and better availability.
The the only challenge for us was moving existing physical machines to virtual machines. The time taken was to migrate the physical machine to the virtual machine took about two months.
View full review »it_user203934
Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
They need to make the initial configuration more straightforward, as the networking part is confusing.
View full review »
Timur Assembayev
Network Specialist at Wattum
When it comes to Hyper-V, the worst thing is it's based on the Windows operating system. For the installation of Hyper-V, you're supposed to install the right operating system. For me, it's strange.
View full review »
Muzamil Yakub
Chief Executive Officer at Infoview Limited
Hyper-V isn't a lightweight solution like VMware. Management could be more straightforward. Even as far as disk management tools are concerned, it would be better if that could be made simpler. Performance can also be better.
View full review »
Benjamin Bodenehim
Chief Technology Officer at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
The backup has room for improvement.
View full review »YA
YaoAyivor
CTO for Pydynamix
The interface could be more user friendly. In addition, the documentation and security could use improvement.
Some customers have been complaining of running into Immobility Licensing Restrictions. They were running on an ELA, and there was no flexibility with a volume license agreement.
In addition, it would be nice to have the ability to assign more dynamically, like VM-ware does. Furthermore, it would be nice to return the SRM feature back into Hyper-V so that you're not looking at a virtual box which is a cheap version, but that you're looking at enterprise, you're looking at VM-ware. If this could be placed into a one-button feature, that would be very attractive.
View full review »SK
Saad Khoudali
System Administrator at Confidential
We would like to have a cloning function added to this product.
View full review »SK
Sajith Kalinga
Senior System Engineer at avian Technologies (pvt) ltd
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.
View full review »MD
Reviewer4901
IT Executive at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
It might make it easier to move VMs across Hotmail hosts. This application process may make it a little bit easier.
View full review »it_user79785
Director of IT with 51-200 employees
To be determine – we will be conducting a review of the R2 release in the second quarter of 2014.
View full review »
TC
reviewer1109874
Solutions Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »SK
SivaKumar1
Chief, Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Digestive Disease Institute at a government with 201-500 employees
Hyper-V requires improvement with manageability.
View full review »MY
MINBALEYENEW
Works at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »SK
Shams K
Vmware Administrator at Intertech
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.
View full review »AV
reviewer1406361
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »DW
reviewer930288
Works at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
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.
View full review »CS
MissileMax
Senior System Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It would be nice if they had video acceleration, they got rid of that and VMware has video acceleration. It would be nice to be able to test through video part the Virtual Machine, like you can with VMware, Hyper-V does not let you do that.
SS
ShaileshSurroop
Assistant Manager - IS Infrastructure
The cost and licensing can be improved.
View full review »it_user1122
Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The only cons I can really think of are as follows:- Individual licensing costs for each server.
- If you aren't using Hyper-V Core and are running Hyper-V on top of the full Server 2008 R2 platform, then you have less resources to allocate to your Virtual Machines.
- Except through RDP, there is no way to access the VM's on alternative platforms (like Mac or Linux).I use Hyper-V almost exclusively for all my virtualization needs. From a Network Administrators viewpoint, specifically one catering to a Windows client base, there is no better choice than Hyper-V. Like I said before, it fully integrates into the Windows environment, allowing access via MMC consoles to change settings and create/administer virtual machines remotely.
View full review »
OR
O'Neil Robinson
Manager, Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
I'd like to see better predictive diagnostics, so I know what's going on with the machines.
View full review »MD
Madhura Direckze
Technical Account Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
VMware has antivirus protection that covers the entire VM. If Microsoft could have something similar to this in Hyper-V, that would be great. Currently, in Hyper-V, we have to have a separate antivirus for each VM. If there could be umbrella coverage to the entire setup, then that would be beneficial.
View full review »AD
A.J. DiLorenzo
Senior Systems Administrator at Privia Health
The only issues we have had recently are with Windows updates that are built into the Windows server with Hyper-V.
In the future, I would like to see a simplification of licensing of this product. In addition, I think it would be beneficial to have more monitoring.
View full review »AC
Reviewer5227
System Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »RM
reviewer1164519
Director Of Services Nicaragua at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The management of Hyper-V could improve, there is a lot to improve in that area.
View full review »AO
reviewer1260267
Senior System Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Hyper-V systems need a lot of admin effort because security updates and monthly updates require rebooting after the update. For example, if you use Hyper-V, you should restart once a month. It is very hard to operate.
Also, it is very slow.
The stability and scalability could be improved. It could be more user friendly as well.
View full review »MA
MS Alam
System Administrator at Abdullah Al-Othaim Markets
Sometimes it is a mess, and it should be something that could be easily fixed. It made us have to deal with fixing the bugs.
View full review »KW
Reviewer2829
Interim Director of Technology at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage available. We currently have around 400 users.
View full review »TM
reviewer1505493
Systems Engineer at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
It's not completely stable because your stack becomes bloated.
View full review »
Yogesh (Datamotive)
Founder at a tech company with 11-50 employees
The management interface is in need of the biggest improvement. There are a few gaps in there when I compare with VMware.
Some additional monitoring features would be helpful.
View full review »DU
ReviewerD658
Network Administrator II at a maritime company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It needs to improve compatibility with third party software.
View full review »it_user345411
IT Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The networking component of the setup needs to be less complex.I have one physical server with four built in LAN ports (NIC1, NIC2, NIC3 & NIC4) and I want three more VMs on it. In order to distribute the traffic load, I want to assign one NIC to each VM with one for the physical server. This means whenever L needs remote access for management purpose it will utilize NIC4, but this needs to be simpler to setup.
View full review »it_user1065
Senior Manager of Data Center at a integrator with 51-200 employees
Few cons of Hyper-V are-
1) Licensing costs
2) Vulnerable to server failure
3) Lacks advanced features of virtualization platform
4) More consumption of CPU, memory and need more disk I/O bandwidth than physical servers
View full review »
FA
Fitsum Abebe
COO at FA IT SERVICES PLC
We're missing quite a lot of features on Hyper-V and I'd like to see more flexibility in terms of moving server automation. Unfortunately, the reporting mechanism is not there. They really need to move in the direction of Hyper-V, a hyper-convergence infrastructure kind of solution.
NM
Hea43278Dpt21
Head of Department for IT Services at a government with 201-500 employees
The live migration feature needs improvement.
View full review »it_user474570
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
- Cannot copy paste within the app
- Some bugs were not fixable and I had to reinstall core OS
MF
reviewer1647993
Manager
The product can be a bit difficult to use. I find, for example, Citrix to be much less difficult.
View full review »WM
Willy Marcelo Maurer
Coordination of Scientific Investigation, Investigator in Scientific Computing and Biotechnology at IEESL
We have our scientific network, and it's run off the university sever, and we need two servers to optimize our scientific work, such as the mathematics work. Then you have to work with Python and Java, and the Microsoft Windows desktop system isn't the best option for this kind of work. Use the Hyper-V as your basic layer, for binding and administration of the systems to the hardware. In the virtualization yo can combined the best of Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows.
View full review »MT
Muhammad Tariq
Program Architect (Microsoft) with 5,001-10,000 employees
The networking portion of Hyper-V needs improvement.
View full review »it_user3870
Senior Manager of Engineering with 1,001-5,000 employees
To manage Windows Hyper-V Server 2012, you need an additional server 2012 server. Not very cost effective - I think Microsoft should consider pushing a Hyper-V Management console update to Server 2008 R2 to be able to manage Hyper-V 2012.Hyper-V is definitely our preferred Hypervisor. With its simple configuration console, setting up a Virtual Server is very simple. Multiple Hyper-V servers are easier to manage when integrated into a domain network, when you have a standalone server (especially server core) it can be difficult to manage.
View full review »
TN
Thendo Ndzimeni
Network Administrator at Automated Outsourcing services
There is a problem with high-availability if the load is too high.
View full review »WW
Walmik Wankhede
Manager IT at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees
It should be deployed with OS so there is no need to install OS separately, only select the OS and get it ready.
View full review »AG
AriGreenbaum
IT at a non-profit
The corrupted volume is a problem.
View full review »ST
Shabarinath Thekkemeppully Ramadasan
Systems Architect at UST Global
SCVMM needs to be more user-friendly. Without SCVMM, automating is not easy to use and we look forward to the upcoming versions of SCVMM becoming simpler and more admin friendly.
View full review »it_user747783
Technology Systems Analyst with 1-10 employees
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. But that's going to depend on the bandwidth. You can have an adverse effect as well, if somebody is just using a real small data pipe. Then, they could choke you with Dropbox. They've got to calculate it out.
I didn't give it a 10 out of 10 because sometimes remotely managing it isn't as simple as it could be. Basically, it just involves having to log directly into a box rather than doing something via remote command.
And there's also still a little bit of a learning curve, and as I'm learning additional things with some of the maintenance stuff - then scripting that and automating it - then I won't have to deal with it anymore.
In a way, it's still easier, in my mind, in comparison to when you do have to dig in deep on a VMware box.
View full review »NT
reviewer1019193
Founder at a non-profit with 1-10 employees
Hyper-V could improve the management tools.
View full review »DB
reviewer1596237
IT & Security Team Leader at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
In general, based on my little experience with Hyper-V, I see a lot of obstacles. I think it falls behind the other competitors.
There are several areas that can be improved. The network configuration, for example, can be improved. The storage as well, can be improved. I find it very dependent on the active directory as a service, overall. I think they have to review that. I understand that active directory is an integral part of that infrastructure for authentication and logging, etc..., but it can be an obstacle. I think they should review that mechanism.
They have to review the overall architecture of that solution. It is a Type-2 virtualization, which means it is not bare metal. That is one problem or one issue that has to be reviewed. In my view as an engineer, the best solutions in this domain are those which are bare metal. Those that are deployed directly on the hardware get the most out of the hardware. But in Microsoft, this is not the case, it is implemented on Windows. If something goes wrong with the Windows machine, all the VMs on it are in trouble. And we all know that Windows has always been a target for viruses and bugs. So in my opinion, they have to review that, to remove that design.
View full review »ST
reviewer1455690
Founder at a retailer with 1-10 employees
I think the setup for the Virtual Network Manager could be improved.
View full review »JA
Javier-Arrocha
Oficial de comunicaciones at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
There are bugs, and this should be resolved by Microsoft. In the future, I would like to see how the hyper-converged infrastructure works with the technology.
View full review »YE
Youssef EL HADJ
System and Network Administrator at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Perhaps improvement should be made when you want to change some configuration on VM's, and you have to shut down the VM in order to do so. A major improvement would be a configuration change. So, when you change the parameter of VM, the other one can still be running.
View full review »it_user221874
Manager IT at a energy/utilities company with 501-1,000 employees
Not yet rectified.
View full review »it_user1011
Manager of Data Center at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
It lacks a built-in cloning function, you have to use the traditional export/import.
View full review »
it_user4386
Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Apart from windows and some flavors of Linux, it does not support any other virtual guests.
View full review »
AH
Ahmad Hassan
Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
I think there is room for improvement in terms of the cloud solutions.
View full review »IS
Ignacio Salom
Senior Principal Consultant at CCE
I think the console could use some improvement for the backups. The features should be improved. I know a lot of people who are considering moving to Hyper-V, but are skittish to do so because you need a system center virtual manager or a specialist to integrate the solution.
View full review »it_user810477
IT Consultant at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
I think Microsoft has answered most of the concerns of users with the release of Server 2016.
Now, they can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs.
View full review »it_user1851
Head of Data Center at a transportation company with 501-1,000 employees
P2V are not live, and there's some limitation on max hard drive space for VMs and the ability to recover VHD file space after files within the VM have been deleted.
View full review »
it_user1083
Manager of Operations at a tech company with 51-200 employees
To optimize the performance of your desktops and servers, you need to install extra RAM and multiprocessors to use Hyper-V. Hyper-V is useful for X64 platforms. VMware has got the edge over Hyper-V in the case of X86 platforms. The latest release of Hyper-V has got better scalability than its previous one. Hyper-V lags in the case of Maximum VM RAM (64GB), where VMware provides 255GB VM RAM. In its earlier version it has got also a smaller number of nodes that can be added in a single cluster which is 16. The number is 32 in the case of VMware.
View full review »
it_user947223
Technician at Computer Geeks
An improvement I suggest is having more guest operating systems.
View full review »it_user683457
Systems Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Storage via SMB3.
View full review »DN
reviewer935562
Senior Buyer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
I have found it difficult to manage more than one virtual machine.
View full review »it_user872943
Head of IT Architecture and Design at Alterna Bank
It needs additional administration and monitoring capabilities. Status and availability became an issue and need.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Hyper-V
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Hyper-V. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Hyper-V Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Product Categories
Server Virtualization SoftwarePopular Comparisons
Proxmox VE
VMware vSphere
VMware Workstation
Oracle VM VirtualBox
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
Oracle VM
Nutanix AHV Virtualization
Citrix Hypervisor
RHEV
IBM PowerVM
OpenVZ
Odin Virtuozzo Containers
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Hyper-V Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More:
- Primary Use Case
- Valuable Features
- Room for Improvement
- Customer Service and Support
- Initial Setup
- ROI
- Pricing
- Other Advice
- Do you think there is a minimum critical threshold that justifies the deployment of the System Center suite?
- How does Hyper-V compare to alternative Virtualization solutions?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between Hyper-V And KVM?
- How does KVM compare with Hyper-V?
- How does Proxmox VE compare with Hyper-V?
- When evaluating Server Virtualization Software, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
- VMware ESXi or VMware Workstation?
- How does VMware ESXi compare to alternative virtualization solutions?
- VMware has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for four years. Agree/Disagree? Why?
- Which hypervisor provides the best network performance at 10gb or higher?
