There has been a lot of movement in the virtualization space recently, what with the release of vSphere 5 and Microsoft giving us a sneak peek at the upcoming Hyper-V 3.0. All in all it seems that Hyper-V is a very rapidly maturing product, and Microsoft is adding the features and scalability so craved by enterprises. Indeed, it also appears that they are pulling ahead of vSphere in certain areas.
The table below highlights some key performance maximums
| vSphere 5 | Hyper-V 3 | |
| Max Nodes per Cluster | 32 | 63 |
| Max VMs per Cluster | 3000 | 4000 |
| Max CPUs per VM | 32 | 32 |
| Max RAM per VM | 1 TB | 512 GB |
| Max VM Disk Size | 2 TB | 12 TB |
| Max Processor Cores per Host | 160 | 160 |
| Max RAM per Host | 2 TB | 2 TB |
In addition to that Hyper-V 3.0 will also bring the following to the table:
- Live storage migration
- This allows you to move you VHDs to another volume whilst the VM is online. The volume need not reside on shared storage
- Hyper-V Replica
- This allow replication via LAN, for incredibly easy and cost-efficient DR
- Native NIC teaming support in Windows Server 8
- Storage De-Duplication
- Offloaded Date Transfer (ODX), which basically offloads the grunt storage work to an ODX-enabled SAN
- Virtualization-Aware Domain Controllers
- You now can now make and revert to snapshots of a virtualized domain controller
- Domain controllers running as a VM can also be cloned
This is some of the more important features Hyper-V 3.0 has to offer. It is quickly turning into a very viable and cost-effective alternative to vSphere.
Hyper-V 3 is in deed getting there, deserves to be second best in the market.
ReplyDeleteObviously the fun will be to see what VMware has in store with their next release.
Sounding like the Audi / BMW / Mercedes one upmanship battle yet?
Oh it's way beyond cars - we're talking Liverpool - Man U here!
ReplyDeleteI am vendor-agnostic, implementing, supporting and loving both Hyper-V and vSphere. What is awesome for the entire landscape is how MS is pushing VMware, obtaining feature parity at (quite often) a lower price-point.
Is Hyper-V there at the very high-end? Perhaps not. Is Hyper-V good enough for a vast majority of scenarious? Definately. In the end the client wins - were it not for Hyper-V and Xen we would still be sitting at ESX 3.5.