This document compares VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V, highlighting differences in architecture, resource management, and features. VMware vSphere is noted for its broader operating system support, superior scalability, and advanced resource scheduling capabilities, while Hyper-V is recognized for being sufficient for many organizations, especially those already using Microsoft systems. The upcoming Hyper-V 3.0 version promises new features that may enhance its competitiveness against VMware.

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

2. About the Speakers
Scott 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 @otherscottlowe
Jonathan Reeve
• SolarWinds, Senior Director of Product Management
• Previously ran product management at Hyper9™
• Multiple successful start-ups in the IT space
Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 2 -

3. 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 migrations
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4. 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 fit
Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 4 -

5. 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 compatibility
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6. 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 performance
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7. 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: 4
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8. 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.
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9. 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.
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10. 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 VMs
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11. 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.
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12. 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.
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13. Product Storage Options
Technology Description vSphere Hyper-V
DAS Directly attached storage  
NAS Network attached storage  --
FC Fibre Channel  
iSCSI Internet SCSI  
FCoE Fibre Channel over Ethernet  --
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14. Supported Storage Features
Technology Description vSphere Hyper-V
Allows administrators to allocate the space
Thin they believe they may ultimately need for a
Provisioning service without actually having to dedicate  
the space right now
Link base virtual hard drive images to one
Linked Images another so that there is less repetition of -- --
data
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15. 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 disks
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16. 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.
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17. 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.com
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18. 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.
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19. 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 overhead
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20. 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 environment
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21. 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 downtime
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22. 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 MSCS
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23. High Level Features
VMware HyperV
Feature Standard Enterprise Ent. Plus Standard Ent. DC
Max host processors 160 160 160 4 8 64
Max virtual SMP (guest) 8 8 32 4 4 4
Max host RAM (GB) 2048 2048 2048 32 2048 2048
Max RAM per VM 255 255 255 64 64 64
Failover nodes 32 32 32 16 16
Memory overcommit/dynamic mem.      
Transparent page sharing   
Live workload migration    
Live storage migration  
Max guests per host 512 512 512 384 384 384
Distributed Resource Scheduler  
Distributed switch 
Virtual instance rights (Windows) 0 0 0 1 4 No limit
Hypervisor licensing model per proc per proc per proc per host per host per proc
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24. A cost comparison scenario
 Impossible to do 1:1 comparison for every scenario
 Pricing Assumptions
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25. A cost comparison scenario
 Environmental assumptions
» This example will assume a need for 150 virtual machines
» Consolidation ratio: 15 to 1 = 10 hosts
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26. Registration Survey Response #1
*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar
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27. Registration Survey Response #2
*Based on 330 responses to the registration survey to this webinar
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28. 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.
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29. 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 challnges
Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 29 -

30. 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 tools
Side by Side: vSphere™ and Hyper-V™ - Slide 30 -

31. Thank You