My comments on Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V Will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace

Microsoft has released a new market analysis from Clabby Analytics on:

Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V Will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace

When I read through this Market Analysis I found some arguments that I wanted to comment on some of these six reasons.

The six reasons is:

1. Price
2. Packaging
3. Depth
4. Reach
5. Control/integration
6. Installed base

Regarding price. Clabby Analytics has layed out a comparison chart on pricing differences between Microsoft and VMware . I havent checked the pricing listed in the charts. What they forget in this picture is that the Consolidation ratio on VMware due to memory sharing would probably be alot higher than on Hyper-V. Thus require more Hyper-V hosts than ESX hosts to run the same amount of virtual machines. So when doing price comparison - I strongly suggest that you do this on a per virtual machine basis.

On packaging they argue that Hyper-V is an addon to any 64bit version of Windows Server 2008 operating system - this is a valid argument. They also state that installing Hyper-V is a breeze. Rigth, but first you need to install Windows Server 2008. How long does that take? VMware is delivering ESX 3i for free - and the major server vendors is adding this builtin to the physical servers and it takes seconds to enable the software and boot the server with ESX. No installation of an operating system is required. Its basically Plug´n´play.

On product depth, VMware is in the lead and will be for a while. Microsoft will over the next years come in closer but I agree on the management side Microsoft has a strong competition parameter. Many large organisation does already have some or all of the System Center products installed and licensed and this will be a clear advantage from Microsoft. VMware’s advantage in this section is that VirtualCenter is user-friendly and easy to use for the administrators, whereas the Microsoft System Center application suite is pretty complex to setup and maintain.

In the control/integration sections  clabby analytics claims that VMware is a Windows add-on? HUH? Is this article on VMware Server? or is it on VI3 products? ESX doesnt require a Microsoft OS to be installed prior to installing ESX. VirtualCenter run’s on top of an Microsoft operating system and thats whats basically is required to run a VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment today.

The article states some shortcomings of Hyper-V - which mostly refers to live migration (VMotion). But what other features does VMware ESX provide that uses VMotion. VMotion is the key enabler of alot of features from VMware:

1. Storage VMotion - moving LIVE guest VMs between different LUNs. This does make it alot easier to redesign the storage when scaling out or migrating to a new storage array.
2. VMware Update Manager - patching of ESX hosts without any downtime for the guest VMs? This cannot be done with Hyper-V yet.
3. DRS - automatically load balance between ESX servers in a VMware DRS Cluster.
4. DPM - automatically shutdown ESX servers hosts to save on power in periods of low usage.

Microsoft Hyper-V doesnt provide any of the above features without downtime for the guest VMs.

Furthermore VMware has as other key features as mentioned earlier Memory sharing, Memory overcommitment and Memory balloning - all techniques to save on memory usage within an ESX server host. This enables ESX to have alot higher consolidation ratio than Hyper-V. Hyper-V would in most circumstaces need more hosts to run the same amount of guest VMs that ESX. So Hyper-V would also be more expensive in cooling and power costs….

Finally I would like to mention an interesting product from VMware - called VMware Site Recovery Manager - providing features for disaster recovery between physical datacenters with the feature of testing a failover periodically.

Update: I just found an answer from VMware regarding the above market analysis, which can be read here

Five reasons to choose VMware over Hyper-V or?

I read Bernd Harzog’s Microsoft Hyper-V Virtualization: Resistance is Futile (Almost) and good points were made. But take alook at one anonymous guy who commented on the article with these 5 statements on why Microsoft doesnt live up to the hype:

1. Hyper-V is marketed as free but really isn’t.

Yeah it’s $28 bucks but that’s on top of a Windows 2008 License paid in full. This is nowehere near the realm of free, in fact if you take a straight Windows 2008 Standard Licence which is $999 and add Hyper-V you have a $1027 hypervisor that doesn’t event have management ability.

ESXi starts at $495 and comes bundled with most major hardware vendors soon (which can be perceived as free similar to hyper-v if apples are to apples). ESXi also has far more functionality and stability over Hyper-V.

Perceived pricing is all fine and good but when it’s time to actually fork over the cash, the reality can (and will) be painful. There is no way to obtain Hyper-V without paying MS for full Licenses of Windows 2008. Even if you have a software deal, you still paid, and don’t kid yourself that you didn’t.

2. Hyper-V is not actually bare metal.

What we have here is a competitor to VMware server with Hardware assist and Enlightened devices. Hyper-v looks good on paper but is nothing more than a hosted hypervisor with paravirtualization support with dated features.

3. MS target market is low margin with little to gain because SMBs aren’t ready.

Going for the entry level market is fine strategy that has worked in the past but Virtualization does not follow standard paths. There are reasons why SMBs don’t use Virtualization as much, if they really intended to do server consolidation en masse they would have done so with the plethora of free software already out there.

The truth is that SMBs do not want to put their eggs in one basket. Placing 10-15 servers on one physical box is not ideal for them. In this situation a single outage is massive and may bring down the entire company. Hyper-V only increases this risk further. There are no killer features in Microsoft’s roadmap right now that can address high availabilty at the costs necessary to achieve SMB adoption. Free is not going to work here otherwise VMware server would be absolutely everywhere already.

The SMB market is slowly coming around but just any old Hypervisor is not going to break them free. What is really needed is an affordable solution that can bring functionality like VMotion and High Availability at a price that is highly affordable.

4. Hyper-V ties the hypervisor back to the OS.

I don’t see a server that is running Windows 2008 being vunerable to viruses, patches and so on being a palettable platform to house 10 or more machines. Need a security update? Time to reboot…yeah that’s not going over well. Virus took down a windows component? Now you have a massive outage.

The OS being part of the hypervisor is a big mistake. It has to be transparent, the user can’t know it exists at all, VMware is right that it should be in the hardware completely protected from the elements. A hypervisor is supposed to be running virtual machines, not Virus Scanners and other 3rd party junk screwing up the OS.

MS will have to release a true bare metal product to compete with VMware and they need to do it soon. I highly doubt they will though as Windows is integral to Hyper-V’s ability to do half of the things ESX does.

5. Virtual Machine Density is a fraction of what is possible

Overcommit is underestimated by Microsoft. If you give 4GB RAM to a Virtual Machine, does it really actually always need that 4GB? No! If it uses 2GB 90% of the time, why not use that 2GB?

ESX has at least double the capacity for VMs over Hyper-V in the overwhelming majority of situations. And yes, it performs admirably in reality. Higher VM density = major cost savings.

Microsoft has a long way to go. They have a 1.0 product, good for them. But this product is going to have an uphill battle for a long time in a new market. Virtualization is a different animal than SQL server and Netscape. Price is not the only factor, especially when just implementing Virtual Machines gives immediate ROI regardless of the solution chosen.

I for one will choose 99.999% uptime and spend 2x the money to get it over a solution that can’t offer anything close when I’m already going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on top of licensing fees to implement it (or millions).

Food for thought.

Interesting reading…

Microsoft releases Hyper-V

Microsoft has released Hyper-V for download:

Read more here.

 

Thoughts on Microsoft’s Hyper-V feature called Quick Migration vs. VMware VMotion

Quick Migration in Hyper-V is Microsoft’s way to provide high availability in their virtual infrastructure. Quick Migration requires setup of a Microsoft Cluster to be able to failover VMs from one Hyper-V host to another. This requires Enterprise or Datacenter licenses for Windows. But what does this mean?

Microsoft does not support two Hyper-V hosts accessing the same LUN at the same time. You have to setup Cluster Disks that only one host can access. This means that when you want to do a failover with Quick Migration – you failover the whole LUN. All guests (VMs) that use that specific LUN will be suspended in a short period and then moved to another host. It happens within seconds – but the VM is not accessible in that period and users may lose connectivity.

To be able to move a single guest from one Hyper-V host to another host requires that this guest use its own dedicated LUN. This could potentially limit the number of VMs running on a Hyper-V host. For database servers, like SQL, Exchange, where you split the load on more than one LUN to separate random IO from sequential IO, this will dramatically limit the number of guests on one specific host or cluster. One host or cluster can only address up to 255 LUNs. 16 nodes are supported in a MS Cluster.

If you decide to put more guests on the same LUN – this group of guests will all be failed over to the same destination host. In the end this means that you would need more hosts to support the same amount of guests compared to VMware, because you need available resources within the other hosts to be able to take over the load from all guests within a same LUN. One thing to consider is how long a failover takes. This should be tested thoroughly. In prior versions of MS clustering the more resources in the resource group that you want to failover the longer it took.

Also you would not be able to separate the load from one Hyper-V host (that has failed) to multiple hosts. It all depends on design – but it makes it more complicated in my opinion.

I think the way VMware does this is far more flexible and scales a lot better and potentially it is possible to use more resources on each hosts and still have capacity to lose a single or two hosts within a cluster. VMware can failover multiple guests to multiple hosts – sharing the same LUN and by that spreading the load from the failed host on multiple hosts.

Many customers are not very confident with running a Microsoft Cluster solution based on the reputation the cluster features has on stability, management and complexity. I have prior build and setup multiple MS cluster solutions and they have became a lot more stabile in Windows Server 2003 and hopefully even more with Server Windows Server 2008.

Final note is that Quick Migration can’t be compared with VMware’s VMotion. Quick Migration suspends the guest or guests before they are failed over with a minimal downtime. VMware VMotion moves the VM guest within hosts without downtime. Several other features from VMware is built on top of VMotion – which is VMware Update Manager, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS – automatic load balancing on CPU and memory), VMware Storage VMotion, VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM – currently in experimental support only)

For more info on Microsoft Quick Migration read this whitepaper: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/5/3B51A025-7522-4686-AA16-8AE2E536034D/Quick%20Migration%20with%20Hyper-V.doc

For more information on VMware VMotion read this datasheet: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf

Be carefull installing drivers on Microsoft Hyper-V

I had my concerns on the parent partition of the Microsoft way of doing hypervisor virtualization and on how secure it was. This article below describes a weakness within the parent partition when installing 3rd party drivers.

Read this article from Randall C. Kennedy: Hyper-V’s Achilles’ heel

The article talks about Microsoft key advantages to VMware that it supports generic Windows drivers but it “could” also be the weakest point on Hyper-V.

If you need to update drivers in the parent partition you should consider shutting down your running VMs first. Hopefully Microsoft will work on solving this before release.