Comparing Hyper-V Performance with ESX and XenServer

Taylor Brown (Microsoft) linked to and quoted from a review done by Virtualization Review.  Here’s the important bit:

”Hyper-V was the first product compared, and it performed quite differently from expectations. Hyper-V has been a focus of Microsoft dev efforts, and it shows. Overall, Hyper-V did well in this comparison and proved itself a worthy product.”

“In our tests, Hyper-V did well in all categories-it’s a real, viable competitor for the competition. Table 2 shows Hyper-V’s comparative performance.”

“After doing these comparisons of ESX to Hyper-V and XenServer, it’s clear that at the hypervisor level, ESX is optimized for a large number of less-intensive workload VMs. For intensive workloads that may not be optimized for memory overcommit apps, Hyper-V and XenServer should definitely be considered-even if that means adding another hypervisor into the data center.”

They go on to say it’s horses for courses:

“For CPU- and memory-intensive applications, XenServer and Hyper-V are attractive and have proven their mettle. For a large number of light to moderate workloads-or if you decide that memory overcommit, for example, is important-ESX may be the answer”.