Posted
by
Bink on
on August 6 2008, 1:25 PM
with 4 comment(s)
Jason Whitaker: Everyone who knows that i keep it no secret, i believe the most significant development to be released from Redmond in the last decade is Hyper V, even though it is in itself a relatively small piece of code, I’m tired of people slamming hyper V more mature competitor, ESX.
Some key points to remember:
· ESX has a monolithic hypervisor whilst Hyper-V takes the same approach as the rest of the industry (including Citrix/Xen and Sun) with its microkernelised architecture which Microsoft consider to be more secure (Hyper-V includes no third party code whilst VMware integrates device drivers into its hypervisor).
· VMware use a proprietary virtual disk format whilst Microsoft’s virtual hard disk (.VHD) specification has long since been offered up as an open standard (and is used by competing products like Citrix XenServer).
· Hyper-V is included within the price of most Windows Server 2008 SKUs, whilst ESX is an expensive layer of middleware.
· ESX doesn’t yet support 64-bit Windows Server 2008 (although that is expected in the next update).
None of this means that ESX, together with the rest of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure (VI), are not good products but for many organisations Hyper-V offers everything that they need without the hefty ESX/VI price tag. Is the extra 10% really that important? And when you consider management, is VMware Virtual Infrastructure as fully-featured as the Microsoft Hyper-V and System Center combination? Then consider that server virtualisation is just one part of Microsoft’s overall virtualisation strategy, which includes server, desktop, application, presentation and profile virtualisation, within an overarching management framework.
Hyper-V disk throughput is 150% that of VMware ESX Server - largely down to the synthetic device driver model (with virtualisation service clients in child partitions communicating with virtualisation service providers in the parent partition over a high-speed VMBus to access disk and network resources using native Windows drivers).
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