Comparison between Hyper-V and VMware - Top performance and capacity tips for Hyper-V (3 of 7)

Today we’ll take a look at how Hyper-V 2012 compares with VMware. The table below shows the differences.

The Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is effectively allowing you to connect the hard disk directly to a virtual machine.  Within vSphere 5.1 this can be done up to 64TB whilst Microsoft suggests that Hyper-V 2012 can do 256TB plus and is only limited by the size of the physical disk – so there is scope to grow.

Both vSphere 5.1 and Hyper-V 2012 offers similar support for guests, although interestingly this has only been provided by VMware on a recent upgrade to 5.1 and it’s the first time that vmware have had to upgrade their software to ‘catch up’ with Hyper-V.

Currently Hyper-V supports larger cluster sizes and is potentially cheaper, although this appears to be dependent on which website you’re looking at.

If your organisation is buying datacenter licenses then certainly Microsoft can work out more cost effective, a data centre licence allows you to enable the hyper-v role and then all of the guests running on that server are automatically licensed.  The same cannot be said for VMware, which involves buying the VMware software and then your Microsoft software.

Hyper-V comes with enterprise functionality available as standard whereas with VMware you tend to have to have the ‘higher level’ versions to unlock things like V-motion etc.  It’s a similar story when looking at the management layer,Hyper-V can be managed with the out of the box tool whereas VMware requires the purchase of vCenter.

With regards to the performance comparison, there are very few independent sources that have performed an objective comparison and the likelihood is that each will perform better in different circumstances.

That said and whilst Hyper-V 2012 is still quite new, early test results suggest that there is not much between the two platforms with regards to CPU and memory.

Early reports, suggest

 

•         Improved IO throughput with Hyper-V

•         Comparable CPU loading

•         Improved memory utilization with Hyper-V

It’s still too early to tell whether there are significant benefits to be had by choosing one over the other.

 

On Wednesday I'll be sharing my thoughts on what metrics you should be monitoring and the options for capturing data. In the meantime join our community and get access to our white papers, podcasts and free downloads.....

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Rob Ford

Principle Consultant