Exploring Hyper-V from a VMware User's Perspective

Welcome to our third video, diving deep into VMware alternatives for your #homelab and your business. In this video, I boldly step into the world of Microsoft Hyper-V to uncover how it compares to VMware ESXi and evaluate it as a replacement from a VMware user's perspective. It's a long video, and a lot of planning, learning, and effort went into it, so let us know what you think!

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**TIMESTAMPS!**
0:00 Introduction
1:06 The history of Hyper-V
3:31 Hyper-V Feature Comparison
8:46 Comparing consoles
10:20 Comparing GUIs ESXi
12:17 Comparing GUIs Hyper-V
19:21 VM Management in Hyper-V
22:35 Can Hyper-V replace ESXi?
24:09 What I don't like about Hyper-V
27:06 Closing!

[ngtflyer]

13 years of my IT career were in managed services. Hyper-V was pretty popular for our smaller clients and helped clients save cost by only having to have one well configured server running as their DC and the rest as VMs. It worked fine. It did its job and it was stable and reliable. So for those small clients, it was a good solution.

[scottf]

Hyper-V supports Thick Provisioning just fine when creating the virtual disk, it just doesn't give the option when setting up a new VM and you use that window to specify the size. If you create a new virtual disk stand alone you can totally thick provision it.

The biggest issue we run into on a daily basis is in VMware we can easily add a USB Controller and map any USB device through to a VM, but in Hyper-V you cannot pass through just any USB device. You can set an external hard drive to "Offline" and pass through the physical hard drive, but if you have a USB security key that a program living inside a VM requires, then you're looking at a product like USB Network Gate and sharing it from the host or another device.

[brett_rose]

I'm in the middle of moving from VMWare to Hyper-V at our office. I have had no problems with it so far, and if anything it's been easier to setup and configure with more features out of the box than VMWare. I have a cluster setup and can live migrate between hosts with no extra cost. I've been using VMWare for 2 decades for reference.

[Gattancha]

I've used HyperV in my homelab for quite some time now. Mainly due to issues with ESXi not liking my hardware and I moved away as it was just eating through disks for fun - I didn't have sever-grade hardware and ESXi just constantly (as in every few months) fell over due to disks failing which brought down ESXi and so, after a few lost VMs I gave up and went with HyperV

The lack of a web GUI is not a deal breaker for me as I find that I can manage most functions well enough from the Console and Powershell.

A quick note is that Hyper-V has 3 options for Disk sizes - Fixed Size (Thick), Dynamically expanding (Thin) and Differencing (mainly used with Checkpoints)
Another feature I like with HyperV is that VHDX's can be mounted directly into Windows - meaning it is a lot easier to copy files to and from a virtual disk when not attached to a VM

The EOL of the "free" version of Hyper-V is an issue, but from my own experience with ESXi - I am firmly in the HyperV camp now.

[TayschrennSedai]

Okay... A lot to unpack here. I'll try to summarize though.
Preface: I am vmware (6) certified bu thave been running Hyper-V and now SCVMM at an Enterprise for the last 5 years. Yes, I chose to work somewhere with a massive hyper-v presence. However, I am actively moving my Datacenter and the associated DR to VMWare Vsphere+ because of a laundry list of issues, complaints and utterly horrible approach Microsoft has had towards Hyper-V. My ROBO locations I'm - for now - leaving hyper-v simply because for a stand alone host, Hyper-v is "Fine" - not great, and I'd prefer them under one vCenter - but it's 'included' in the cost so it is what it is; and most of my issues are around clustering and performance issues which are Datacenter specific.

The three main things I want to address on this video are SCVMM/WAC, Performance, and Microsoft's approach.

Starting with Microsoft's Approach: They don't care about you. Not saying Broadcom does, but Microsoft doesn't even offer training for SCVMM/Hyper-V, and they don't want you to keep things on premise - they want you in Azure. All of their push is to get everyone to move everything into Azure. Not the cloud, not IaaS, not Virtual Colo - Azure. Want support? GLHF - it's either Unified Support (aka Premier support re-branded) which costs a LOT of money - or you deal with a nightmare of a time trying to get help even if you pay SA. On Premise enhancements? Nope - they haven't updated any core functionality of on premise systems in years and won't unless it specifically ties in with enhancing their ability to get you into Azure. Period. Further proof? What did they release with 2022: Oh yeah, Windows Server Datacenter: Azure Edition. An on-premise install of Hyper-V with a tighter integration to Azure. What's that? Broadcom is only in it for the money? What's that? You don't like their subscriptions? Sure, go to microsoft and pay a capex for the software and opex for SA, and a huge opex for Unified Support -- but what's that? You don't actually get EVERYTHING when you buy that? No - because they want you to also pay for Azure. Azure update manager, Azure Monitor (vastly better than SCOM), Azure Arc, Azure Money, Azure Cloudy Days, Azure owns your soul.

Next up is SCVMM/WAC: SCVMM is "Required" if you want anything close to vCenter, but it's not vCenter by a long shot. Zero training available so good luck even figuring it out, because it's not intuitive and the documentation on it is horrible. SCVMM is also not even the source of truth - nor can it do everything once integrated with Hyper-V or clusters - it's at best a wrapper for powershell commands, and buggy on top of it. As a small example: When telling it to remove a node from a cluster, it looked at the underlying storage API it is 'certified' to work with, and instead of removing the connections to that node from the SAN, it just ripped out the connections of all disks to all nodes in the cluster. Why? Because it's Microsoft and it doesn't make sense. Another example: Patching - SCVMM can integrate with WSUS, but you can't actually integrate it with SCCM (which is how you would normally patch 'windows' machines in a large environment) - and I have found SCVMM patching to be buggy to an extreme. Sometimes it puts servers into maintenance mode, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it patches, sometimes it just spins. Cluster Aware Updating is better, but at that point why would you pay for SCVMM --- because SCVMM isn't free, you have to pay for System Center licensing for all your hosts/VMs to use it.
WAC/Windows Admin Center is somewhat better but unpolished and doesn't have feature-parity anywhere with anything. However I have it on good authority that anything MMC related (i.e. hyper-v manager) is not having ANY R&D put into it and is going to be phased out; remember our Azure conversation? Yeah, they want you to get used to systems they can easily move to Azure; indeed WAC has tight integration with Azure.

Finally, Performance: Oh boy. I'll keep this one brief: It's not feature complete compared to VMWare. I know because I'm going from top of the line R650 Dell servers running Hyper-V on 2x32gb FC between two PCI cards (each on a socket so 100% ideal bandwidth) connecting to NVME SANs, to actually a generation older Intel Chipset servers with 2x32gb on a single PCI card - and I in real world situation and benchmarks have seen significant performance improvements of the VMs especially SQL VMs, despite identical or possibly lower hardware. The Hyper-V environment even went through a 'validation' with a Microsoft SME (not 3rd party a literal Microsoft SCVMM/Hyper-V Engineer who has written books on Microsoft software) to ensure everything was tuned tweaked and optimized; heck we even found a CSV(VMFS) setting that they recommended was in fact wrong, and we got performance increases on hyper-v by disabling it.

I could probably record an entire half hour video on the failings of Hyper-V and SCVMM. I legitimately am sad to see so many people going to Hyper-V with their 100s or 1000s of servers - they are going to find the grass is not always greener.


Now --- does this excuse Broadcom? NO. I am ANGRY at how Broadcom is handling the entire situation, and I 100% believe that they are only looking for a profit; I also know that VMWare remains the absolute best hypervisor out there, and I will protest even while running it.

[david-]

The thing I like with Hyper-V is that it runs on my win10 laptop and is good to test various things without my sysadmins knowing :3 V-switch are not bad at all.

Hyper-V on a "simple" win10/Win11 pro host is understated in my opinion.

[sarkhori]

There is a "vCenter equivalent" - System Center Virtual Machine Manager, often referred to SCVMM. ALL base functionality for a virtual infrastructure can be handled through Failover Cluster Manager and most through Windows Admin Center, though templating without SCVMM requires manual template creation, sysprepping, copying and creation processes.

[Zewwy_ca]

Finally videos from someone who uses the products. The only thing I wished you covered in all series (Proxmox, NG, and now HyperV) is how hard it is to clean tag the MGMT interface l, that is easy via ESXi via the console you showed off that's nothing more then a checkbox and textbox to define the VLAN ID.

[nathangarvey]

As someone who has professionally been a Windows engineer and later a VMWare engineer, I agree with your analysis almost completely. I never understood why Microsoft didn't come up with a specific vCenter-esque system to manage Hyper-V. SCVMM never seemed like a good replacement to me (really focusing on management + automation instead of just management and became too complicated because of it), and Windows Admin Center is really more of remote Windows manager than a true VM platform.

A couple things to note, however, is that Windows Admin Center will now allow you to add cluster roles and configure clusters completely within the latest version of WAC. That makes it better, but still too Windows-focused in my mind for a vCenter replacement.

Likewise, Microsoft is promoting Azure Stack as their new on-prem answer to vCenter and as a quasi-replacement for SCVMM. I know this because the multi-national corp I worked for recently had decided to go the Hyper-V + Azure stack as the internal replacement for ESXi + vCenter due to Broadcom.

[jtstowell]

I switched from VMWare years ago (2014), because the writing was already on the wall. KVM on Linux. Debian isn’t going to stab me in the back.

[dunderdotten]

went from vmware to hyper-v and never looked back, it does what i need, solid and easy to handle

[selfspider]

To run windows on vmware, you also need a datacenter Windows license plus vmware licence...due to live migration..
While in hyperv, you dont need vmware licence..
It was costing us 280 in local currency and now its costing us 1670 in local currency..

[RainMan]

AWWW yeah!!
haven't even pressed play yet and you're already getting 😘

[Paraclete.Kinyanjui]

you are splendid in your - honest - in my opinion evaluation and truly - its really helpful! Thank you!

[DGao-zzvq]

I have only ever used Hyper-V in a workstation setting, but here are some of my takes.

The performance is, as with all modern hardware-assisted hypervisors, good.

The device emulation is somewhat limited. No generic 3D accelerated graphics adapter. 2nd gen VMs require the use of paravirtual network and SCSI interfaces. Mouse support for fBSD doesn't work.

There are some design choices that I find inconvenient. Notably the memory allocation policy. Hyper-V would allocate the maximum amount configured for the VM the moment the guest boots up. ESXi and KVM both only allocate the amount actually used by the guest. The way Hyper-V does it can be quite annoying if you are also doing things on the host OS. There is a memory ballooning feature, but doesn't seem to work quite right with Linux guests (the memory allocation inflates and doesn't shrink back)

Networking is very intuitive. Unlike in Linux, you can actually make a virtual switch inaccessible to the host OS, making it possible to expose guests to an external network without also exposing the host. Great if you want to run a router in your virtual environment.

There are quite a bit of advanced features hiding in Hyper-V. There's a GPU partitioning feature that does not require specialized hardware (!). It also supports runtime encrypted guests on both Intel and AMD processors, notable because the Linux hypervisor stack only seems to have support for AMD SEV.

The Hyper-V MMC is painfully outdated. It still has the Windows 7 aesthetics, and a number of recent features (including the two I mentioned above) are not made available in the MMC, only PowerShell.

No idea what cluster management looks like.

[WhiskeyPapa]

9:34 _"Since Hyper-V doesn't exist without being installed on Windows"_ This is technically incorrect. Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor, and while it _looks_ like you are installing Hyper-V on top of the native Windows Server OS, this is not what happens. When installing the Hyper-V Role on Windows Server, it actually virtualizes the Windows Server OS, and installs the hypervisor underneath on a parent partition. This change is transparent to the end user.

Note: Installing Hyper-V on a Desktop OS such as Windows 10 or 11 installs as a Type-2 hypervisor, meaning it is installed on top of the Windows OS and is dependent on the Windows OS to function. Based on your descriptions, it sounds like you were using this implementation, which doesn't make for a good and equal comparison (Type1 vs Type2).

[MiroslavIvanovimbmf]

actualy there is Switch Embedded Teaming, but you need to configure it with powershell

[johnharrison]

I don't like Hyper-V but it does work in small business since they're running windows. But they do have Azure HCI stack and Windows Admin Center.

[-tineidae]

Hyper-V is still there because it is the base of Azure and Azure Stack HCI. For Microsoft it does not matter that the interface is trash, just use the Azure Portal (you are supposed to go into cloud anyway from their perspective). Because you started this series, what about OpenStack? :)

[Korn]

The mmc flavoured console is pretty much deprecated, you should be looking at using WAC, or SCVMM... Throw PowerShell on top of that and it's quite capable. It's no vCenter, but it's still a nice option if you're primarily a Windows\Linux environment.