It’s not so long ago we used to hear the following from Novell Netware heads:
- Windows isn’t scalable.
- Active Directory isn’t good enough. You can’t build an enterprise on it.
And guess what … that sort of hot air usually came from people who hadn’t even tried Windows or AD on normal production hardware or even at all. Over the last 5-6 years we’ve seen NDS disappear faster than Tyrannosaurus Rex and consultants making a fortune doing Netware-to-AD migrations. AD is reliably managing 10’s and 100’s of thousands of users and probably more.
Now I get great pleasure in reading from vested interests that Hyper-V isn’t up to the job. "It can’t be used in an enterprise". "It’s only good for testing". That sounds very familiar, eh? And again, it’s pure trash! I’ve been hammering Hyper-V over the last while since it was a release candidate. It performs beautifully. I can’t complain about it. Easy to install, easy to set up VM’s and reliable. I’ve not had one outage. VM’s are lightening fast. I’ve been even using differencing disks and haven’t had any issues (not that I recommend differencing disks for production). Don’t just take my word for it either.
I’ve read a lot of critiques by the vested interests and they make me laugh. They are so obviously commenting from a standpoint where they haven’t even tried the product in the last 6 months.
Before anyone goes nuts; ESX is an excellent product. There are certain reasons why I would choose it over Hyper-V and there are reasons why I would choose Hyper-V over ESX. And I’m sure Xen is probably excellent too, but to be honest, if I’m paying extra for virtualisation outside of the System Center management scope, I’ll go for ESX.
If you are looking at Hyper-V as a potential solution then try it. That’s the only true test. Remember that us bloggers are very often no better than you. Look for credentials. Look for evidence that they’ve tried what they are talking about. If the commentary is too one sided then watch out for the "Fair and Balanced" alarm bells 😉