Vmware Vsphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V

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I am planning on studying Vmware Vsphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V and just wondered if anyone has studied and taken these exams? How difficult is the product to understand? And which one would you advise i look into first?

Many Thanks

 

I found the Hyper-V exam pretty relaxed. Exam was so-so, i.e. not too hard. It was the studying part which was very interesting.

 

wagnerk - Im going to go on the course, getting my comp to pay for it. I do think its a bit odd that you won't get your certification if you didnt attend the course.

I have a very big interest in Virualisation technology so would like to get qualified in both applications.

Shinigami and wagnerk - many thanks for your advice my friends.

 

Microsoft's virtualisation technology still has a long way to go to catch up with VMWare. I've used ESX/Virtual Infratructure/VSphere/Whatever EMC's Marketing Department Are Calling It This Week for years and it's by far the bext technology I've ever worked with. It has it's foibles, obviously, but since nobody considers Hyper-V a serious enterprise virtualisation platform and the other players in the market are small potatoes, I'd concentrate on VMWare. For departmental and non-enterprise virtualisation I can see very little difference between VMWare and Microsoft (they're both free, so I guess it just depends on personal preference) but I wouldn't even consider using Hyper-V in production for anything other than single-server deployments.

 

I disagree.

There are some major customers using Hyper-V these days.

 

Then they're not doing virtualisation properly. What's the point in not being able to have true hot migration of VMs? Or FT for VMs instead of the horrible, horrible bodge that clustering has always been? Or the ability to overcommit RAM on hosts? or DRS? or hot migration of storage for VMs? or HA so that if a host in a cluster goes down, the VMs registered on that host come straight back up another host in the same cluster?

As far as I'm aware (and I may be wrong - as I'd never dream of using Hyper-V in a production environment due to knowledge that at least three of the above features which I'd consider mission-critical definitely don't exist) Hyper-V provides none of the above. Like I said - for departmental virtualisation, I have little doubt that there's a fag-paper's width between the two of them. For enterprise-level virtualisation, MS is waaaaay behind VMWare, and anyone who has adopted it for their full infrastructure is either a fool, big enough to be an 'early adopter' and work heavily alongside MS as a result, or just enjoys implementing complex solutions that require heavy effort and maintenance in favour of simple ones that just work

Besides, you can't possibly be objective - you work for MS!

 

I don't work in sales so I would not have the authority to display number or customer names, but I don't think these customers are necessarily fools.

But you do not seem to have the latest information regarding Hyper-V. For example, hot migration as you call it, is available in Windows Server 2008 R2. And there's a specific reason Microsoft went without Ram overcommit. Just dig up the articles and read away.

What I'm not saying is that Hyper-V is better, VMware after all has been on the market for a long time and they've perfected their product over time.

But I've seen plenty of case study scenarios where Hyper-V makes sense. But to each their own.

But I just like to call it out as it is. i.e. I corrected you regarding the use of Hyper-V as I've seen the names of customers switching over from VMware (or implementing Hyper-V alongside VMware), and these are not just one off, small quantity numbers we are speaking of.

And well, yes, I work for Microsoft, but we're also taught to be self critical and objective, and the reason why I work in IT is because of my love with hardware and software. Working for Microsoft or not, I still enjoy the entire computing industry.

Just my two cents

 

Relax - I wasn't ragging you over working for Microsoft. And, FWIW, I don't blame anyone for using Hyper-V alongside VMWare. Both of them are fine as silo virtualisation solutions, or for departmental projects (or just for cutting down on power costs & tin sprawl).

However, it's disingenuous to say that MS' Vmotion 'competitor' is even remotely as good as Vmotion. No-one in their right midn would adopt that for a mission-critical infrastructure (I've seen the comparisons - MS' offering is laughable). I've also yet to see anyone come up with a credible reason why Memory overcommit/Ballooning/TPS is bad - just a bunch of fanboys getting into a huff about it. I'm well overcommitted on RAM on my production clusters. I've never even had a sniff of the problems the MS advocates claim are likely to occur. After all, one of the ubercool things about virtualisation is the ability to run thinner than required (something that's near-eradicated if you don't overcommit on RAM)

Anyway - opinions are like a$$holes - everybody's got one! I just think it would be daft for anyone to bother learning Hyper-V for the workplace when VMWare has the production infrastructure market sewn up.

 

Thanks for all your advice. I don't think it would hurt if i studied both applications, i would like to specialise in a particular area and am interested in virtualisation.

Having hyper-v cert and an vcp4 can't hurt.

 

I never knew you worked for MS. Do you get free exams?

 

I work for an MS gold partner, I hold an MCSE three times over
I still wouldnt put hyper-v in production with a barge pole, its a very convoluted process and does not stand its ground against vSphere

but, i still have clients using it, i still work with and support it, VMware is expensive, but you get what you pay for, just like cars however, we can't all afford/justify the 200k sports car just because 'we get what we pay for'

Most business however, can.

 

Yes, I get free exams now. One of my yearly objectives is to pass at least two. But in the past 5 years, all of my employers have paid for my exams anyway, so not much changed there when I changed jobs to MS...

Anyway, with all the good and the bad there is to say about Hyper-V, it IS still in its infancy but Microsoft is pushing hard to make it a real alternative for VMware, and some of our customers see it as such. Admittedly, to get the "real" benefits of Hyper-V, you'll need SCVMM and I think there's signficant motion within Microsoft to ensure that Hyper-V develops into a solution that everyone would want.

The way I see it is like this:

Let's say that 5 years ago, Microsoft had "Virtual Server" as their software solution for providing virtualization to customers. So back then, VS had "10" feature sets whilst VMware provided "30" feature sets. i.e. there was a massive difference between the two products and the features they provided.

Fast forward 3-5 years with the release of Hyper-V and Hyper-V R2, which now provided "30" feature sets whilst VMware had grown to "40" feature sets.

VMware still has more solid features, but in between the releases of Hyper-V replacing Virtual Server, the actual "gap" between Microsoft's virtualization product and that of VMware has not grown as drastically as it did back in the days, Microsoft has narrowed the gap a little bit.

So does this mean that Hyper-V in the next Windows Server release will add another 10 features whilst VMware grows by just another 5, I don't know... only time will tell. But this is how I see. I'm not a virtualization expert, I've only been using Virtual Server and VMware since 2004, and Hyper-V since Server 2008 got released. A few hundred servers were virtualized here or there.

Anyway, all of this is just MY opinion. My opinion as a tech freak. The numbers I displayed above are very general and only meant to display the difference in these products over a time curve (which I could have drawn up and posted as an image, but got lazy ).

Anyway, here's an interesting bit of information that you people may not have known:

microsoft.com, the website, runs off a Hyper-V virtualized web farm. All of it. It has been running pretty well in this form for some time now. If we trust our corporate main portal to Hyper-V, and we hold one of the busiest sites out there, maybe that says something about Hyper-V?

 

Aye - it says your garden's running on a lot of reeeeeally expensive hardware, with some extreeeemely powerful front-end loadbalancing (F5 or the like), with a load of reeeeeally clever in-house MS techs to call on instantly if anything ever goes wrong... and you still can't VMotion everything properly, or use DRS, or HA...

LOL - this is an argument you can't win.

I'm not discounting MS totally though. They'll just do what they did with SQL Server - keep throwing resources at it, using millions of people in production environments across the world as beta testers, then finally have a product that works properly (a la SQL Server 2000), spend ten years apologising to everyone for the horror-show that was the previous incarnation (SQL Server 7) and finally begin to achieve some real penetration into the large-user market dominated by a third party (Oracle) some fifteen years after they first entered it. By my reckoning, Hyper-V should be on my radar sometime around 2020

 

Either an argument I can't win, or just an argument where we agree to disagree

I'm just saying that from what I've seen, the latest version of Hyper-V can do things a lot better than you give it credit. HA and Vmotion is there, it's just not built in the same manner as VMware. Different companies do software in a different manner. Yes, if you want a lot of the goodies with Hyper-V, you have to look into SCVMM and Clustering, but at least Clustering has vastly improved over all the tricky work one had to do to get it running in 2000/2003 (hoo boy, I can stil recall the fun fun times I had with my Exchange 2003 cluster on Windows Server 2003...).

I however am not a Hyper-V evangelist. I just know how to self critique and self praise when this is due. I have witnessed the case studies and sales/facts presentations which give the lowdown on each product and I'm a lot more open to Hyper-V than I was a few months back before I was hired (5 years of VMware use does that to you).

Thus, if VMware does it for your company, all the more power to you. And as you so rightly said, maybe Hyper-V is something for the radar in the future (even if that means 2020 ;) ).

 

Both Zeb and Shin repped.

Interesting read. Thank you!