I have most experience with VMware, and have not worked with Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V. A few more SC tweaks and some attractive licensing could be the vSphere killer in 2016.
Microsoft has a nearly unlimited R&D budget and knows how to play the undercut game pretty well. In 2000 nobody thought Active Directory would ever replace Novell but here we are. As of now I don't see anyone who is deeply invested in VMware jumping over to Hyper-V, that could change though. In this industry its not always about who has the best product but who can deliver a majority of the required feature sets at the lowest cost. You can sort of replicate the functionality of virtual distributed switches in SC \ VMM but it takes much more configuration and the end result isn't the same. The virtual networking options in vSphere are much more robust than what VMM \ System Center have. The browser compatibility issues are troublesome. That being said, I'm not a fan of the vSphere web client which is becoming a requirement. System Center still feels like a bunch of disjointed MMC's that were ported into a server manager-like interface. vCenter is a much more refined interface that is very intuitive. I still personally prefer working with vCenter over System Center. At a hypervisor level they are pretty much even with the exception that the ESXi image is only just over 300MB and Hyper-V still requires a pretty large footprint. I absolutely hated Hyper-V in 2008 but like 2012 R2 quite a bit. I've used both quite a bit, vSphere more so than Hyper-V. My only reasons to use Hyper-V are for cash strapped organizations or not-for-profits that have strict cost controls. I could not do this as easily with Hyper-V and maintain a cross section of Ubuntu, CentOS and W2008r2, 2012-r2 guests running. With 5 hosts in the data center, in an emergency, critical functions could be run on 3 hosts. I had zero downtime upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5. Most of the other VM's were development servers and DR was not a huge issue with those systems. Replication of critical VMs' to the data center or the main office for DR.
Use of all of the nice vCenter tools including Update manager. Total storage grew from 6TB (totally utilized) to more than 16TB, all hosts running ESXI5.5 (with 6.01 update planned). The total number of hosts grew to 7 (seven), two Dell R620's (144GB RAM), 3 Dell R710's (120GB, 120GB, 96GB) at the data center, with two more R710's at the main office. A Dell MD3220i unit was added as primary SAN storage.
The AMD host was rebuilt as a Windows 2012-r2 server running StarWind iSCSI SAN and exposed 4TB as secondary SAN storage.
There were a host of issues as the environment was not maintained properly. I inherited a three host ESXi running 4.1, without a SAN and one host being AMD processor (other two were Intel). A former client brought me back to take over their IT director role three years later. There are several factors that I consider, and cost is not always the leading factor.Ģ) Disaster recovery and backup, including other servers that are not virtualizedģ) skill set of admins and the future plans of the organizationĤ) needs for downtime and how to mitigate scheduled and unscheduled downtimeĬase in point. I have used VMWare since version 1.0 when it ran on top of Windows, Hyper-V (2008r-r2), Parallels Viruozzo and Citrix Xen.