Virtualization project

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We are planning to roll out three virtual servers housing 6 VMs. It's going to be 3 IIS front ends with 3 SQL back ends. The first 4 are going to be a clustered production environment and the last 2 are for development. We are going to use the free version either Microsoft, Citrix, or VMware's servers.

I've been looking for a good comparison of:

Win 2008 R2 Core / Hyper-V
Citrix XenServer 6.2
VMware ESXI 5.5

I found this so far:
Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware

Welcome to 2011, right? This one doesn't compare the newest Xen and ESXI, obviously. We can't go with 2012 because it's not completed an approval process yet. Still, an interesting read on these products.

I also found this discussion:
XenServer 6.1 Vs ESXi 5.1 - VM - Server management

Pretty interesting... I love Citrix, The Hyper-V from 2008 R2, seems to have gotten pretty good. It makes me wish I could look into 2012 for my project too. Comparing these two:
Hyper-V Comparison

It's pretty amazing how much more 2012 does than 2008. That's not just an upgrade... its like a reinvention.

I'd be interested in hearing about other people's Virtualization experience, preferences, etc!

 

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I currently work for a company that had both Citrix and Hyper-V in house looking after a mix of *nix and Windows infrastructure, we are talking over 200 different servers running either Xen or Hyper-V in both Dev and Prod.

In the last 12 - 14 months we have moved towards a VMware based infrastructure with more workloads looking to move away from Xen and Hyper-V over the coming months, why? Simply put the ability of the VMware platform is greater than either Xen or Hyper-V is capable of delivering even with the in-house experience we have with both Xen and Hyper-V.

We have more trouble with Xen than we do with Hyper-V and the VMware platform has been effective with what we are trying to do with it but it's by no means a cheap thing to be doing. I can say that of the three different platforms in use we get more back from VMware than we do from either Citrix or Microsoft, by that I mean that VMware are more prepared to help us deliver what it is that we are trying to deliver.

I should point out that I have been a Microsoft engineer for many years but I am very much a VMware person these days, there are so many really cool things coming down from VMware at the moment that are really great to be playing with (SRM, vCAC, vFAD etc) and it's a really good place to be at the moment.

One of the reasons we didn't go down the Hyper-V route at the beginning (and this did go out to tender and both Xen and Hyper-V were suggested by different companies) was that it didn't offer the full range of products that we are currently using the aforementioned SRM, vCAC, vFAD products for starters as well as vCO for a lot of our orchestration requirements). From a performance perspective we can deliver a large deployment of Windows and Linux VM's with applications deployed on to them in around 30 - 40 minutes (talking over 300 vms), with Chef and Puppet runs as well as DNS registration and IP allocations done and all reporting back to required infrastructure, we could never do that with Hyper-V (it used to take us over 35 minutes to deploy a single VM in Hyper-V using SCCM).

I for one haven't even bothered looking at Hyper-V 2012 and doubt very much that I will be going down the MCSE 2012 route any time soon.

 

I agree that VMware is expensive but it also does what we need it to do very well, at the time of starting the project we did look at all the viable solutions and VMware was the only one that could do what we needed (and support the various OS's) out of the box (although with some tweaking).

I do admit that I am hearing good things about Hyper-V 2012 but in all honesty I am not doing enough Microsoft based work these days to justify the certification (I do run my home lab on 2012 R2).

 

Playing devils advocate here a little and taking into account that I know very little about Hyper-V. Between XenServer and ESXi free I would personally go with XenServer. 6.2 Includes all the features that the previous versions only included with the platinum license with the exclusion of automated patch management and support but you won't get that with ESXi free either. Also ESXi free disables most of the API's required for host based backups so you won't be able to use products like Veeam to back up your infrastructure. With XenServer this isn't a problem and you can use PHD Virtual or Unidesk for such tasks.

That being said I must ask when production systems are going on a cheap as chips hypervisor version and hopefully you have all the correct MS licenses.

Simon and I often meet at VMware user groups so I apologise in advance for going against the green on this one. ;)

 

Honestly, these days I really like VMware vSphere 5.5 and Hyper-V 2012 R2 with SCVMM. I actually converted my lab from vSphere to Hyper-V 2012 R2 with SCVMM to learn a bit about Hyper-V as I can see some organizations are starting to adapt Hyper-V and some even making the switch.

Personally, I still prefer VMware over Hyper-V but technology is changing so quick theses days that tomorrow we can have a new competitor with another great offering. One of these days, I'll need to build another cluster two have both products in play in the lab, would need more hardware for that

 

Theprof, interesting to hear someone else using SCVMM, what do you think of it?

Just to add my 2p worth to the topic, I have worked with all 3 mentioned hypervisors and still think VMware has the crown... have worked with VMware environments of all sizes, and Citrix XenServer environments... currently on project(s) which involve building full cloud deployments using Hyper-V 2012 and SCVMM and its just horrible, just seems terribly buggy, unreliable and unintuitive compared to VMware.
It has been nothing but headache for the last few months! But unfortunately it is gaining popularity... mainly due to licensing costs...

everyone has their preference I guess but I know that VMware just works

 

One thing is for sure, you really have to understand the architecture of SCVMM, Hyper-V, SCOM, Networking, etc to be able to deploy a fully functioning private cloud.

Also, MS clustering is heavily involved with SCVMM, if you want to have an HA solution. If you look at the bigger picture, there are many clusters you need to consider, such as a SQL cluster, SCVMM cluster, Hyper-V Cluster, CSV (Clustered Shared Volume), etc which is a recommendation from MS (makes sense for large prod environments).

The best point I could make, is that it's not like VMware, the architecture is different, different features, and different way of working. At first I had a lot of trouble with SCVMM (coming from a VMware Admin background), but once I figured out the mechanics of how the product works, it's actually not that difficult.

Like anything else, if you know it, it's easy