After the first, "whew, it’s finally here" round of reporting, more nuanced and informed opinion is coming in from the launch of Hyper-V. David Davis (of VMwareVideos among other venues) lays it out in full effect. Read the whole thing, but here are some snippets from his conclusion. Link: COMPARISON: Microsoft vs. VMware :: SearchCIO.com.au.
Why VMware ESX beats Microsoft Hyper-V, hands-down
In the end, it is my opinion that VMware "wins the war" for several
reasons. Perhaps most obvious, is that Microsoft is already incredibly
behind VMware in terms of virtualisation know-how and may never catch
up. In 2007 alone, VMware announced ESXi, Site Recovery and Update
Manager in an effort improve ESX Server. As they will continue to
improve their product year after year to provide more value, Microsoft
is fighting an uphill battle.
In
addition, VMware will continue to see a huge surge in revenue thanks to
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). …
Finally, and most
importantly, ESXi can still win in efficiency. Compare the ESXi
hypervisor at 32MB to the size of Hyper-V at about 2GB. …
In the end, if you look at just a single
license of VMware Infrastructure Suite Enterprise at $6950, and compare
that to a single license of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise or Standard,
the cost for the VMware solution will undoubtedly cost more. However,
it still beats Microsoft’s Hyper-V in terms of performance hands-down.
Rich Brambley at VM /ETC thinks that David is right, especially about pricing. Link: Which of these companies sounds more qualified? | VM /ETC.
Joe Kelly (as well as Mr RTFM himself) also points to our Virtual Reality blog entry on some of the architectural differences between the two hypervisors. Link: My Hypervisor is better than yours…and here’s why « blog.virtualtacit.com.
Straight from the horses mouth is an interesting post from the blog fancied, VMware: Virtual Reality
that explains some of the major architectural differences between
Hyper-V, Xen and ESX. A bit marketing tainted, the post describes such
items as the reasoning behind the “Direct Driver” (ESX) architecture as
opposed to the “Indirect Driver” (Xen, Hyper-V) architecture,
hypervisor sizing, memory management and overcommitment, and shared
storage. There really is nothing like a few netperf graphs, an “Uptime”
taunt, and the smell of gun powder in the air to kick off the 4th!!!
