Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences

Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ March 21, 2012

About the SpeakersScott Lowe•18 years experience in the IT industry•Prolific author of thousands of articles and 3 books•Top virtualization blogger•Founder and Managing Consultant, The 1610 Group Follow me on Twitter @otherscottloweJonathan Reeve• SolarWinds, Senior Director of Product Management• Previously ran product management at Hyper9™• Multiple successful start-ups in the IT spaceSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 2 -

Agenda Why Should You Learn About Hyper-V™? Hypervisor Types and Footprints Kernel Variances A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls vSphere Memory Handling Hyper-V™ Dynamic Memory Product Storage Options vSphere™ Storage Capabilities Networking Workload migrationsSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 3 -

Why Should You Learn About Hyper-V? You may not always be working with Vmware® With Windows® 8, Microsoft® will release a new version of Hyper-V with new features For many organizations, Hyper-V has proven to be “good enough” for their needs For those with existing Microsoft infrastructures, Hyper-V may be the best fitSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 4 -

Hypervisor Types and Footprints Common misunderstanding  Both vSphere and Hyper-V are Type 1 hypervisors  vSphere has a much smaller footprint than Hyper-V  vSphere: 144 MB  Hyper-V: Minimum of 10 GB Hyper-V requires a full (or core) Windows Server installation Hyper-V also requires the use of a “root partition” for operations General purpose Windows = greater hardware compatibilitySide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 5 -

Kernel Variances vSphere  Monolithic kernel  vSphere’s architecture revolves around a more monolithic core which includes many shared drivers as well as the virtualization stack Hyper-V  Microkernelized  Lends flexibility and security to the hypervisor model by isolating the virtual machines from one another with little shared code, such as drivers  More synthetic drivers are used, which can boost overall service performanceSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 6 -

High Level Overview Operating system support  vSphere enjoys far broader operating system support Licensing limitations  vSphere imposes stricter hardware-based licensing limits  Hyper-V provided significant Windows licensing benefits Scalability  vSphere scales fay beyond Hyper-V  vSphere vCPU per VM: 32  Hyper-V vCPU per VM: 4Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 7 -

A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls vSphere  Shares. If a VM has a share value that is half of another, it’s entitled to only half the CPU resources.  Reservation. A guarantee that a virtual machine will receive at least some level of resourcing.  Limit. Limits the ability of the virtual machine to consume unlimited resources.  vSphere has a powerful CPU scheduling mechanism in place that ensures that virtual machines receive attention from the system. VMware has produced a white paper that goes into great technical depth for how this scheduling is achieved.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 8 -

A Similarity: CPU Scheduling Controls Hyper-V  Virtual machine reserve (percentage). Allows the reservation of a portion of the server’s total processing resources for this virtual machine.  Virtual machine limit (percentage). Limit how much of a host’s processing resources can be consumed by a single virtual machine.  Relative weight. allows the weighting of this virtual machine against others.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 9 -

Automated Resource Scheduling vSphere  Distributed Resource Scheduler  Aggregates cluster resources into a single resource pool  Provides both initial placement services and continuous optimization  Enables affinity rules to ensure that workload placement meets business and availability rules  Supports clusters of up to 32 hosts and 1,280 virtual machines Hyper-V » Resource placement • Current VMM provides initial placement services only » One-off service only • VMM 2012 will provide Dynamic Optimization » Will provide cluster-level workload balancing for VMsSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 10 -

vSphere Memory Handling VMware Oversubscription/Overcommit. Allows administrators to assign more aggregate RAM to virtual machines than is actually physically available in the server.  Transparent Page Sharing. This is basically a deduplication method applied to RAM rather than storage.  Guest Ballooning. A method by which virtual machines can borrow memory from one another. Memory compression. A technique that is used to prevent the hypervisor from needing to swap memory pages to disk when RAM becomes limited.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 11 -

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Dynamic Memory relies primarily on a process similar to vSphere’s Guest Ballooning feature. To prevent a virtual machine from having RAM reduced to dangerous levels, Hyper-V provides a (default) buffer of 20% of unused memory.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 12 -

Product Storage OptionsTechnology Description vSphere Hyper-VDAS Directly attached storage  NAS Network attached storage  --FC Fibre Channel  iSCSI Internet SCSI  FCoE Fibre Channel over Ethernet  -- Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 13 -

Supported Storage FeaturesTechnology Description vSphere Hyper-V Allows administrators to allocate the spaceThin they believe they may ultimately need for aProvisioning service without actually having to dedicate   the space right now Link base virtual hard drive images to oneLinked Images another so that there is less repetition of -- -- data Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 14 -

VMFS vs. VHD Both VMware and Microsoft provide clustering mechanisms VHD relies on MS CSV  Much more complicated than vSphere’s clustering Both MS and VMware provide direct access to storage  vSphere: Raw Device Mapping (RDM)  Hyper-V: Pass-through disksSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 15 -

vSphere Storage Capabilities Centralized management of datastores. A single location in which all data stores can be managed in order to provide more visibility into the environment. Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S) support. Standardized monitoring of storage. Caching. Improves performance. Storage DRS. A way to automatically place VMs to load balance Storage IO demands.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 16 -

Power Management VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). Combine workloads onto fewer physical machines, which also reduces the amount of electricity consumed in aggregate.  DPM automates the process of energy conservation, leaving the administrator free to focus elsewhere Hyper-V does not have automated power management capabilities © iStockphoto.comSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 17 -

vSphere Network Features vSphere  TCP Segmentation Offload. The TCP/IP stack can submit frames of up to 64 KB to the NIC -- the NIC then repackages these frames into sizes that fit inside the network’s maximum transmission unit (MTU) size.  NetQueue. Enables the system to process multiple network receive requests simultaneously across multiple CPUs.  iSCSI. iSCSI traffic results in a “double hit” from a CPU overhead perspective.  Distributed Virtual Switch. A virtual device that spans multiple vSphere hosts.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 18 -

Hyper-V Network Features Chimney (TCP offload). Offloads to the NIC significant portions of the CPU workload normally associated with TCP/IP functionality Large Send Offload (LSO). Provides Hyper-V hosts with the ability to submit larger frames – in this case up to 256KB in size – to the network adapter for further processing Virtual Machine Queue (VMQ). Creates multiple virtual network queues for each virtual machine. Network packets destined for these virtual machines are then sent directly to the VM, reducing some overheadSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 19 -

Workload Migration vSphere  vMotion is one of VMware’s claims to fame and for good reason  Zero downtime migrations  Multiple network adapter use  Metro vMotion Hyper-V  Live Migration in shipping version is “vMotion™ Lite”  Requires Microsoft Failover Clustering  More complex environmentSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 20 -

Storage Migration vSphere  Storage vMotion is another of VMware’s claims to fame  Zero downtime migrations  Thick to thin  Raw Device Mapping disk (RDM) to VMDK  Across protocols Hyper-V  Quick Storage Migration in shipping version is not as robust  Not fully transparent to end user  Requires short period of downtimeSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 21 -

Availability vSphere  VMware High Availability  Monitors virtual machines to detect operating system and hardware failures and moves workloads to other hosts  VMware Fault Tolerance  Continuous protection for mission critical workloads by running a shadow copy of a protected VM Hyper-V  Much more complex  Relies on MSCSSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 22 -

High Level Features VMware HyperVFeature Standard Enterprise Ent. Plus Standard Ent. DCMax host processors 160 160 160 4 8 64Max virtual SMP (guest) 8 8 32 4 4 4Max host RAM (GB) 2048 2048 2048 32 2048 2048Max RAM per VM 255 255 255 64 64 64Failover nodes 32 32 32 16 16Memory overcommit/dynamic mem.      Transparent page sharing   Live workload migration    Live storage migration  Max guests per host 512 512 512 384 384 384Distributed Resource Scheduler  Distributed switch Virtual instance rights (Windows) 0 0 0 1 4 No limitHypervisor licensing model per proc per proc per proc per host per host per proc Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 23 -

A cost comparison scenario Impossible to do 1:1 comparison for every scenario Pricing AssumptionsSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 24 -

A cost comparison scenario Environmental assumptions » This example will assume a need for 150 virtual machines » Consolidation ratio: 15 to 1 = 10 hostsSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 25 -

Registration Survey Response #1*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 26 -

Registration Survey Response #2*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 27 -

The Future of Hyper-V Hyper-V 3.0 will bring a lot to the table  Fast provisioning of virtual machines.  V2V conversion of VMware-based virtual machines to Hyper-V.  Conversion of physical servers to virtual ones (P2V).  Template-based virtual machine creation.  Automatic placement of new virtual machines to aid in load balancing.  Centralized management of multiple Hyper-V hosts.Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 28 -

Summary VMware remains significantly in front of Microsoft on a feature-by-feature basis For mission critical needs, vSphere is still the obvious choice Microsoft ‘s Hyper-V does, in fact, provide a good enough solution for many Hyper-V 3.0 will bring a lot more to the table and give VMware a true challngesSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 29 -

The SolarWinds Story Easy to find » www.solarwinds.com » Partner websites, and Internet Search Easy to buy » Downloadable from the website for evaluation and purchase » Affordable price points Easy to install » Products can be downloaded, installed, and configured in less than 1 hour » No Professional Services needed for deployment Easy to use » Windows-based products » Intuitive user interfaces and graphical toolsSide by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 30 -

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Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences

by SolarWinds on Mar 22, 2012

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Hyper-V vs. vSphere: Understanding the Differences Presentation Transcript

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