More VMware Compete Wins For Hyper-V

VMware made a cute video to defend themselves against Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V.  But MSFT continues to hand out a GTA IV style baseball beat down at TechEd.

This post would have been impossible without the tweeted pictures by David Davis at http://www.vmwarevideos.com

General Feature Comparison

Does your business have an IT infrastructure so you can play, or to run applications?  What features have you got to improve those services?

Capability	vSphere Free	vSphere 5.0 Ent +	WS2012 Hyper-V
Incremental backups	No	Yes	Yes
Inbox VM replication	No	No	Yes
NIC teaming	Yes	Yes	Yes
Integrated High Availability	No	Yes	Yes
Guest OS Application Monitoring	N/A	No	Yes
Failover Prioritization	N/A	Yes	Yes
Affinity & Anti-Affinity Rules	N/A	Yes	Yes
Cluster-Aware Updating	N/A	Yes	Yes

So Hyper-V has more application integrations.

Live Migration

Capability	vSphere Free	vSphere 5.0 Ent +	WS2012 Hyper-V
VM Live Migration	No	Yes	Yes
1 GB Simultaneous Live Migrations	N/A	4	Unlimited
10 GB Simultaneous Live Migrations	N/A	8	Unlimited
Live Storage Migration	No	Yes	Yes
Shared Nothing Live Migration	No	No	Yes
Network Virtualisation	No	Partner	Yes

Shared-nothing Live Migration is actually a big deal.  We know that 33% of business don’t cluster their hosts, and another 33% have a mix of clustered and non-clustered hosts.  Share-Nothing Live Migration enables mobility across these platforms.  Flexibility is the #2 reason why people virtualise (see Network Virtualisation later on).

Clustering

Can you cluster hosts, and if so, how many?  How many VMs can you put on a host cluster?  Apps require uptime too, because VMs need to be patched, rebooted, and occasionally crash.

Capability	vSphere Free	vSphere 5.0 Ent +	WS2012 Hyper-V
Nodes/Cluster	N/A	32	64
VMs/Cluster	N/A	3000	4000
Max Size iSCSI Guest Cluster	N/A	0	64 Nodes
Max Size Fibre Channel Guest Cluster	2 Nodes	2 Nodes	64 Nodes
Max Size File Based Guest Cluster	0	0	64 Nodes
Guest Clustering with Live Migration Support	N/A	No	Yes
Guest Clustering with Dynamic Memory Support	No	No	Yes

Based on this data, WS2012 Hyper-V is the superior platform for scalability and fault tolerance.

Virtual Switches

In a cloud, the virtual switch plays a huge role.  How do they stack up against each other?

Capability	vSphere Free	vSphere 5.0 Ent +	WS2012 Hyper-V
Extensible Switch	No	Replaceable	Yes
Confirmed partner extensions	No	2	4
PVLAN	No	Yes	Yes
ARP/ND Spoofing Protection	No	vShield/Partner	Yes
DHCP Snooping Protection	No	vShield/Partner	Yes
Virtual Port ACLs	No	vShield/Partner	Yes
Trunk Mode to VMs	No	No	Yes
Port Monitoring	Per Port Group	Yes	Yes
Port Mirroring	Per Port Group	Yes	No

Another win for WS 2012 Hyper-V.  Note that vShield is an additional purchase on top of vSphere.  Hyper-V is the clear feature winner in cloud networking.

Network Optimisations

Capability	vSphere Free	vSphere 5.0 Ent +	WS2012 Hyper-V
Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (DVMQ)	NetQueue	netQueue	Yes
IPsec Task Offload	No	No	Yes
SR-IOV	DirectPath I/O	DirectPath I/O	Yes
Storage Encryption (CSV vs VMFS)	No	No	Yes

• NetQueue supports a subset of the VMware HCL
• Apparently DirectPath I/O VMs cannot vMotion (Live Migrate) without certain Cisco UCS (blade server centres) configurations
• No physical security for VMFS SANs in the data center or cololated hosting

Hyper-V wins on the optimisation side of things for denser and higher throughput network loads.

VMware Fault Tolerance

FT feature: Run a hot standby VM on another host, taking over if another host should fail.

Required sacrifices:

• 4 FT VMs per host with no memory overcommit: expensive because of low host density
• 1 vCPU per FT VM: Surely VMs that require FT would require more than one logical processor (physical thread of execution)?
• EPT/RVI (SLAT) disabled: No offloaded memory management.  This boosts VM performance by around 20% so I guess this FT VM doesn’t require performance.
• Hot-plug disabled: no hot adding devices such as disks
• No snapshots: not such a big deal for a production VM in my opinion
• No VCB (VSS) backups: This is a big deal, because now you have to do a traditional “iron” backup of the VM, requiring custom backup policy, discarding the benefits of storage level backup for VMs

If cost reduction is the #1 reason for implementing virtualisation, then VMware FT seems like a complete oxymoron to me.  VMware FT is a chocolate kettle.  It sounds good, but don’t try boil water with it.

VMware Autodeploy

Centrally deploy a Hypervisor from a central console.

We have System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager for bare metal deployment.  Yes, it’s a bit more complex to setup.  B-u-t … with converged fabrics in WS2012, Hyper-V networking is actually getting much easier.

And even with System Center 2012 Datacenter, the MSFT solution is way cheaper than the vSphere alternative, and provides a complete cloud in the package, whereas vSphere is only the start of your vTaxation for disparate point solutions that contradict desires for a deeply integrated, automated, connected, self-service infrastructure.

More Stuff

I didn’t see anything on SRM versus Hyper-V Replica but I guess it was probably discussed.  SRM is allegedly $250-$400 per VM.  Hyper-V Replica is free and even baked into the free Hyper-V Server.  And Hyper-V Replica works with cloud vendors as well as internal sites.  Orchestration of failover can be done manually, by very simple PowerShell scripts, or with System Center 2012 Orchestrator (demonstrated in day 1 keynote).

I don’t know anything about vSphere support for Infiniband and RDMA, both supported by WS2012.  In fact, today it was reported that WS2012 RC Hyper-V benchmarked at 10.36 GigaBYTES/second (not Gbps) with 4.6% CPU overhead.

I also don’t know if VMware supports network abstraction, as in Hyper-V Network Virtualisation, essential for mobility between different networks and cloud consolidation/migration.

Take some time to review the new features in WS2012 Hyper-V.