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Gabe over at Gabe’s Virtual World has done a pretty nice job of looking at some of Microsoft’s claims about Hyper-V and how they really fit in a customer’s datacenter environment. There’s a 2 part series so far. Part 1 can be found here. Part 2 can be found here. Definitely worth a read.
In Part 1 Gabe looks at the HCL for Hyper-V and VMware ESX. Microsoft often touts how the Hyper-V HCL i unlimited allowing it to run on pretty much anything while the VMware ESX HCL is extremely limited. The point Microsoft doesn’t bring up is that the HCL for VMware ESX is large enough that the vast majority of shops will definitely find a server on the list that they are running. Unless you’re looking to run laptops as your virtualization host then you’re all set. Heck, if you are looking to run laptops then there’s always VMware Server or VMware Workstation.
In Part 2 Gabe looks at memory overcommit and support for different operating systems. The operating system support is a huge one that’s often overlooked. As I highlighted in my comment I run into older Windows installations such as Windows NT and Windows 2000 all the time. They are usually prime candidates to virtualize since they’re running on much older hardware usually, they are underutilized, and most of the time they’re critical to the company’s operations and yet can’t be upgraded to a more recent OS. Since Hyper-V doesn’t support these older flavors of Windows you’re really looking to VMware to solve the problem. Hey, even Citrix doesn’t support these older Windows flavors.
I won’t go into too much on memory overcommit since Gabe already pointed out how useful it is (saved 102 GB of RAM). I also talked about it some more in my comments. Needless to say I think it’s been shown how useful this is at this point.
Definitely an interesting series. Make sure to subscribe to posts on Gabe’s blog to keep up with the series and other interesting stuff that Gabe has to talk about.
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