Hyper-V vs VMware Shane Lawson – Cleveland Utilities

Kevin McKenzie - InfoSystems

Conduct internal comparison of VMware & Hyper-V Pros and Cons Total Cost of Ownership

Need for High Availability

Free up rack space

VMware Capacity Planner Study to determine server consolidation ratio and storage requirements

Physical World Virtual World

Many:1 relationship between applications and hardware

Relevant cost metric = COST PER APPLICATION

1:1 relationship between applications and hardware

Relevant cost metric = cost per server

1:1

1:1

1:1 Many:1

1:1

1:1

1:1

VM density matters!

VMware cluster with Dell R720s at 2 locations 96Gb of RAM per Server 16 total Cores for processing

Dell EqualLogic PS4100x iSCSI SAN Redundant controllers Redundant iSCSI network

Veeam Backup & Replication Onsite backup Replication to DR

Agent free

Best support for VMware and Hyper-V

Image-based backup and replication

2 in 1 backup and replication

Instant VM recovery

Instant file level recovery

Built-in WAN acceleration

Built-in deduplication and compression

Distributed Architecture Backup servers, proxy servers, and repositories Centralized management Intelligent load balancing

Low TCO No agents to license, deploy or maintain Storage agnostic Manage VMware and Hyper-V fron a single console

Replicate offsite for DR

Numerous optimizations for replication across the WAN

Re-IP after failover and failback

Restore what you need: Entire VM

Individual VM files

Individual guest files

Application data

Built-in WAN Acceleration

Backup from Storage Snapshots

Native Tape Support

Virtual Lab for Hyper-V

vSphere Web Client

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Sharepoint

VMware ESXi

x86 Architecture x86 Architecture

MSFT Hyper-V

Parent Partition, wholly based on Windows

Lots of legacy Windows code! First ultra-slim x86 hypervisor in industry

VMware ESXi 5.1 144MB

Smaller attack surface area No extraneous code to patch

Hypervisor burdened with unrelated code that introduces additional threats

Direct driver model Indirect driver model

Easier to deploy/redeploy Easier to patch with ability to rollback if necessary

More complex host provisioning Patches are complex, installed one on top of another

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Server Core Installation

5GB

AV agent AV agent AV agent

Introspection

VMware vSphere

MS Hyper-V

Microsoft Hyper-V—Agent-Based VMware vSphere—Agentless

Traditional Security Method:

Install antivirus agent in every VM

Weaknesses:

Based on legacy physical solutions

Agents are resource intensive; difficult to scale for VDI, large cloud deployments

Susceptible to “AV storms” which can cause 100% saturation of CPU and storage

VMware Security Method:

Offload AV processing to a secure VM, powered by partners like Trend Micro, Symantec, BitDefender, Kaspersky, McAfee

Included in vSphere Essentials Plus and above

Strengths:

Agent-less architecture improves performance and scales well for large environments

Eliminate AV storms

Hypervisor Architecture

Purpose-Built Hypervisor No reliance on general

purpose OS Hyper-V requires

Windows Server OS

Small Attack Surface Area 144MB disk footprint Server Core: 5GB Full Install: 8GB

Advanced CPU Management Specifically tuned to support Intel SMT hyper-threading

No reliable performance advantage when using hyper-

threading

Advanced Memory Management

Ballooning Transparent page sharing

Memory Compression Swap to disk/SSD

Dynamic Memory: No Linux support, disables NUMA

Hyper-V 2012 vSphere 5.1

Broad Support & Choice

Guest Operating Systems 96 guest OSs inc. more Windows than Hyper-V

25 guest OSs

Compatible Service Providers 7,200+ VMware Service

Providers Less than 200 worldwide

ISV Support Statements 3,600+ applications

explicitly supported by 2,000+ software providers

No explicit support statements for virtualized apps

Business Continuity

Zero Downtime for Most Critical Apps

Fault Tolerance Nothing comparable

Agentless Backups Data Protection: Built-in

de-dupe for both Win & Linux

System Center DPM req’s agents, 3rd party dedupe;

No Linux VMs

Live Resource Expansion Hot-add vCPU, vRAM

Hot-plug/extend virtual disk No hot-add vCPU

No hot-extend virtual disk

Host-Based Replication vSphere Replication Hyper-V Replica:

Single VM management only, inflexible RPO

Robust High Availability High Availability:

Single-click, heartbeat thru network and storage

Failover Clustering: Based on legacy network-dependent heartbeats

Broad Support & Choice

Guest Operating Systems 96 guest OSs incl. more Windows than Hyper-V

25 guest OSs

Compatible Service Providers 7,200+ VMware Service

Providers Less than 200 worldwide

ISV Support Statements 3,600+ applications

explicitly supported by 2,000+ software providers

MS certifies on Windows, but not specifically Hyper-V

Hyper-V 2012 vSphere 5.1

Hyper-V 2012 doesn’t support Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000

Windows Server 2003 (32/64) Windows Server 2008 (32/64) Windows Server 2012 Windows Home Server 2011 Windows Small Business Server

2011 Windows 8 (release preview) Windows 7 (32/64) Windows Vista (32/64) Windows XP (32/64) RHEL 6 (32/64) SLES 11 (32/64) CentOS 6 (32/64)

MS Hyper-V 2012

Total: 20

MS-DOS 6.22 Windows 3.1 Windows 95 Windows 98 Windows NT Windows XP (32/64) Windows Vista (32/64) Windows 7 (32/64) Windows 2000 WinServer 2003 (32/64) WinServer 2008 (32/64) WinServer 2012 RHEL 2.1 RHEL 3 (32/64) RHEL 4 (32/64) RHEL 5 (32/64) RHEL 6 (32/64) SLES 8 SLES 9 (32/64) SLES 10 (32/64) SLES 11 (32/64) SLED 10 (32/64) SLED 11 (32/64) Debian 4 (32/64) Debian 5 (32/64) Debian 6 (32/64) CentOS 4 (32/64) CentOS 5 (32/64) CentOS 6 (32/64) Oracle OEL 4 (32/64)

Oracle OEL 5 (32/64) Oracle Linux 4 (32/64) Oracle Linux 5 (32/64) Oracle Linux 6 (32/64) Asianux 3 (32/64) Asianux 4 (32/64) Ubuntu 7 (32/64) Ubuntu 8 (32/64) Ubuntu 9 (32/64) Ubuntu 10 (32/64) Ubuntu 11 (32/64) Ubuntu 12 (32/64) FreeBSD 6 (32/64) FreeBSD 7 (32/64) FreeBSD 8 (32/64) FreeBSD 9 (32/64) Solaris 10 (32/64) IBM OS/2 Warp 4 IBM 4690 IBM Systems Director 6 NetWare 5 NetWare 6 eComStation 1 eComStation 2 SCO UnixWare 7 SCO OpenServer 5 Mac OS X 10 (32/64)

Total: 96

VMware vSphere 5.1

Data collected Sep 4, 2012

VMware Hyper-V

March 2001 June 2008

2011

2010

2009 2008

2007 2006

VI 3 HA DRS VCB NAS & iSCSI support 4-way vSMP 16GB RAM per VM

VI 3.5 Embedded, OS-free hypervisor Storage vMotion Guided consolidation 256GB host memory support Large memory page NPT

support

vSphere 4.1 Memory Compression Storage and Network

I/O Control DRS Host Affinity Linked mode Boot from SAN vStorage APIs 8-way vMotion 3000 VMs per cluster

vSphere 5 Storage DRS Profile-driven Storage Auto Deploy Improved HA engine Metro vMotion vSphere web client vCenter Server Appliance 32-way vSMP 1 TB RAM per VM

vSphere 4 Fault Tolerance vNetwork Distributed

Switch vShield Zones Host Profiles Thin Provisioning 8-way vSMP 255GB RAM per VM

2012

vSphere 5.1 vSphere Data Protection vSphere Replication Improved Auto Deploy Improved Distributed Switch vCenter Single Sign-on 64-way vSMP

VMware vSphere Microsoft Hyper-V 2012

MAC Address Handling No special recommendations Static MAC addresses recommended for Linux

Memory Utilization Memory ballooning, transparent page sharing, memory compression, swap to disk/SSD Works with both Windows and Linux

Dynamic Memory Does not work with Linux

VM Backups VMware Data Protection Works with both Windows and Linux

System Center Data Protection Manager Does not work with Linux

Application Discovery Mapping

Virtual Infrastructure Navigator (part of vCOps) Works with both Windows and Linux

System Center Operations Manager (management pack Only supports .NET, IIS7

Purpose-Built Hypervisor No reliance on general purpose OS Requires Windows Server OS

Simplified Patching No unrelated patching Required to do patching unrelated to

hypervisor

Advanced CPU Management Tuned to support Intel SMT hyper-threading No reliable adv with hyper-threading

Advanced Memory Management Ballooning, Transparent page sharing, Memory Compression, Swap to disk/SSD

Relies only on ballooning; Reqs special drivers

Centralized Management Virtualization-aware security No centralized network security mgmt

Secure Introspection with leading 3rd Party Tools

EPSEC APIs provide introspection into guest activity without sitting in-guest

No introspection capabilities

Zero Downtime for Apps Fault Tolerance Nothing comparable; 3rd party req’d

Robust High Availability Single-click, withstands multiple host failures Legacy quorum model; complex, brittle

In-guest Failover Clustering of MS Apps

Supports MSCS in virtualized environment; AppAware HA with API

Cumbersome setup and config of Virtual FC reqs storage expertise

Live Resource Expansion Hot-add vCPU, Hot-plug/extend virtual disk No hot-add vCPU or hot-extend virt. disk

Standardized Configurations Host Profiles Nothing comparable

Automated Host Provisioning Auto Deploy: Auto configure new servers Bare-metal provisioning not scalable

Automated Network Provisioning Distributed Switch, 3rd party extensible switch Only 3rd party extensible switch

Automated Storage Load Balance Storage DRS Nothing comparable

Intelligent Storage Selection Profile-Driven Storage Nothing comparable

Prioritization of Storage I/O Storage I/O Control Nothing comparable

Functionality vSphere 5.1 Hyper-V 2012 + System Center 2012

VSA is a virtual appliance software that utilizes server storage space by presenting it as shared storage

Managed as a single instance from vCenter

VSA is installed on a cluster of servers and resides on a virtual machine on each server

The cluster enables virtual machines to access shared storage without the need for dedicated external storage.

Deploy and manage cost-effective, software-based shared storage easily

Get High Availability without shard storage hardware

Enable business continuity protection for any small environment