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Red star Indicates important rule

  1. Merging snapshots gives downtime (from a few seconds to an hour)
  2. Moving the VHD gives downtime (from seconds to a minute)
  3. Search Engine Results for "Problems" *Fixed*
  4. Insufficient Backup Capabilities *Fixed*
  5. vMotion - Lacks Features Present in VMware *Fixed*
  6. Memory Overcommit - Lacks Features Present in VMware *Fixed*
  7. Opinions

  1. Merging snapshots gives downtime (from a few seconds to an hour)

    When merging snapshots HyperV requires the VM be offline (VMware does not).

  2. Moving the VHD gives downtime (from seconds to a minute)

    When moving VHDs HyperV, requires the VM be offline (VMware does not have this issue when moving VMDKs as it has Storage VMotion).
    This is important because even a few seconds results sessions dying eg. SQL Server

  3. Search Engine Results for "Problems" *Fixed*

    Jan 2010: The following are the number of hits returned by Google for issues regarding Hyper-V and VMware.

    • "VMware problems" - 532,000 - First released 1999
    • "Hyper-V problems" - 1,280,000 - First released 2007

    This indicates that HyperV is causing the community a lot of grief
    Jan 2011: *Fixed* ?do a google and you will see that the results have turned around and now VMWare has the most problems?by a large margin.

  4. Insufficient Backup Capabilities *Fixed*

    With SCDPM (System Centre Data Protection Manager) in beta and incompatible with Hyper-V RC 1, the only reliable way to backup is to shutdown a VM and export. This is time consuming and unreliable.

    *Fixed* - Almost every vendor now has HyperV agents eg. Tivoli, Comvault, Backupexec etc

  5. vMotion - Lacks Features Present in VMware *Fixed*

    • VMotion - for moving VMs without downtime

    *Fixed* - LiveMigration ?allows you to move the VM without downtime

  6. Memory Overcommit - Lacks Features Present in VMware *Fixed*

    • Memory Overcommit - for allocating total of more than physical memory

    *Fixed* - Called Dynamic Memory ?released in R2 SP1 ?Better because you never have the hyper visor paging to disk

  7. Opinions

    • "In this case, we strongly suggest that you test Hyper-V in the lab and then try it out in test and development roles before considering production deployments." - John Enck and Thomas Bittman (Gartner) - Article
    searchio.midmarket.techtarget

Acknowledgements

Adam Cogan
Matt Hodgkins
Daniel Hyles