I’ve just read one of the most uninformed or biased articles about Hyper-V yet – outside of VMware of course. The author reports or makes 3 comments about the “failings” of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V:
“When it comes to large enterprise customers, he said there is very little hope because the "vast majority" of them have very little interest in switching.”
OK. But that’s not a failing in Hyper-V even if this is true. I’m not going to get into decision making between products. I’m too hungover for that. What I will say is that MS sells through their partners. What I’ve seen in the last 2-3 months is partners start to get genuinely interested in Hyper-V now that CSV and Live Migration are here. I’ve seen it here at TechEd Europe 2009 too.
This isn’t a technical problem for Hyper-V but I guess having 3 “failings” makes for a better headline than 2.
"… every physical host has a copy of Windows that is used as the parent OS. It manages the I/O drivers and is home to any management agents that are installed” … "so what you end up with is one big, fat, single point of failure."
Hmm … so how do VMware, Xen, RedHat all manage their hypervisors? Oh yeah, they’ve all got some sort of operating system or platform on the machine to manage it. Duh!
“Every time it’s necessary to patch the parent OS, it is also necessary to take down all the VMs.”
No, not quite true. I have deployed patches that do not require reboots. True, they are rare but it does happen. And if you deploy a Hyper-V cluster (which you can do with the totally free Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with CSV and Live Migration – something VMware does not have) then you simply Live Migrate the VM’s to another host and then do your host operations. Heck, VMM 2008 R2 makes that easy with the “maintenance mode” option for hosts which does all that leg work for you. By the way, a VMware “patch” is way worse to deal with. With Windows and Hyper-V I have Windows Update, WSUS/ConfigMgr for downloading, testing and managing the deployment of my updates (including reports). It just so happens to be the same engine I use for managing updates for all of my MS software/OS’s. Windows happens to be on 72% of all servers in the world.