5 Reasons to Choose VMware vSphere 5.5 over Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

In that same datacenter, we did first attempt to virtualize with Microsoft Virtual Server prior to trying VMware ESX and were disappointed with the performance and lack of centralized management. In more recent years, I have also created two video training courses on Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2 and have written numerous articles about Hyper-V. Finally, I have visited Microsoft HQ in Redmond, WA and have received briefings on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V to fully understand the latest features. I do run Hyper-V in my lab for testing and education on it's capabilities (but inside a VMware vSphere virtual machine). I do respect and follow what Microsoft is doing to enhance Hyper-V and have respect for the innovation and speed at which they have enhanced Hyper-V. I enjoyed learning more about Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure this year at Microsoft TechEd 2014. But enough about me! Here are the five reasons why I think you should choose VMware vSphere over Hyper-V.

5 Reasons to Choose VMware vSphere over Hyper-V

1. VMware: The Leading Virtualization Innovator

VMware has undeniably been the leader in virtualization technology and innovation for many years. No, just because VMware pioneered vMotion, storage VMotion, distributed resource scheduler, high availability, storage distributed resource scheduler, and fault tolerance for Intel-based virtual infrastructures doesn't mean that they will continue to be the leading innovator in virtualization technology. However, it's a safe bet. With the most recent release of VMware vSphere 5.5, VMware offered new features like server-side caching and VMware virtual SAN support. VMware's network virtualization hypervisor will soon be available to the masses and it's poised to do for the network what ESX has done for the datacenter.

Over time, Microsoft has tried to replicate many of these advanced features that VMware invented years ago. In some cases, Microsoft's cloned feature is similar in functionality. In other cases, the results of the feature may be the same but the level of effort required to accomplish the same results is frustrating (i.e. vSphere's single click to enable HA for a cluster versus Microsoft's entirely separate HA management application that was not designed for Hyper-V high availability, but must be used to configure it on a per-VM basis).

In other cases, vSphere still has numerous advanced features that Microsoft has yet to imitate. For example, vSphere offers fault tolerance, hot-add vCPU, built-in agentless VM backup software with deduplication, a disaster recovery planning and testing software offering, load balancing for storage performance and capacity, and their own end-user computing suite for desktop virtualization.

So I ask you: Would you select the leading innovator in the software-defined datacenter, or the most well-known imitator?

2. The Proven Virtualization Solution

You want to run your datacenter and consolidate all of your company's servers and most critical applications on a single virtualization platform. You require reliability and dependability in the datacenter. Your most critical tier-1 applications must perform predictably. Which platform would you choose to accomplish this?

It's vSphere's time-tested advanced features that make it so reliable, both in uptime and performance consistency. There's a good reason that so many companies choose VMware. In fact, more than 500,000 customers of all sizes have chosen VMware as their virtualization platform, including the following.

99 percent of Fortune 100 companies

99 percent of Fortune 500 companies

100 percent of Fortune Global 100 companies

99 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies

Small companies also have good reasons to choose vSphere. Within small- and medium-sized businesses (fewer than 1,000 employees) VMware has 77 percent market share, according to Spiceworks MarketView data from February 2014.

Not only is VMware proven, VMware is entrenched. Petri IT Knowledgebase Editorial Director Jeff James recently wrote an article on the 5 Reasons that VMware is here to stay and said that "VMware released ESX Server 1.0 in 2001, a full seven years before Microsoft launched the first release of Hyper-V." He goes on to say that "Much like Oracle and IBM, VMware has attained the hallowed status of the IT industry equivalent of tenure." However, I would point out that -- unlike Oracle and IBM -- VMware is widely known as a leading innovator in the datacenter, and is not just relying on their tenure. Similar to what Apple did with the iPhone, VMware has fairly consistently alternated between releasing major and minor version of vSphere hypervisor since they announced the original VMware vSphere back in 2009, which is a much more consistent stream of new innovations and enhancements than Hyper-V.

So I ask you: Should you select the proven datacenter solution or the new kid on the block?

3. The Best Virtualization Architecture

The tier-1 applications of the world that run on Windows run there because Microsoft developed the applications: Exchange, SQL Server, and Sharepoint. For the vast majority of non-Microsoft-developed tier-1 applications, you should note, they don't run on Windows. Think about this: Roughly 67% of all Internet-facing servers run on some version of Unix/Linux, including financial applications, storage servers, voice over IP systems, and database systems.

VMware ESX Server initially ran around a specialized Linux OS; today, vSphere uses open source components and has a busybox Unix-like command interpreter. Many perceive ESXi as being based on Linux, but that's technically not true as vSphere has its own kernel. No matter how you look at it, vSphere doesn't run on Windows, vCenter is available in a non-Windows version, and other VMware applications are moving further away from Windows all the time.

This unique design gives VMware a strong advantage over Hyper-V. With Microsoft "bolting on" virtualization to Windows Server, security and reliability for the virtual infrastructure are decreased. Think about it: To Microsoft, virtualization is a "role" of a Windows Server that does other things like act as a print or fax server. To VMware, virtualization is a hypervisor – and the only thing running on that server.

The VMware vSphere 5.5 hypervisor is less than 200MB to install, while the Windows 2012 Server Core with Hyper-V installation is still roughly 5GB. Yes, that is server core (I had to double-check that). The Windows OS with the bolted-on Hyper-V hypervisor design means that Hyper-V will require many more server reboots for critical security patches, most of which are completely unrelated to virtualization

For example: In 2013, Microsoft released at least one patch per month that required a reboot of a Windows Server -- while there were no critical patches that required the reboot of a vSphere host -- but were unrelated to Hyper-V. Perhaps if you have a small cluster this wouldn't be that big of a deal for you. However, if you have a large datacenter with 50 or 100+ virtualization hosts, this is a huge problem.

This is one of the reasons that Hyper-V has been termed the "good enough" hypervisor: It's good enough for small, less-important workloads for which you don't care that you have to reboot your datacenter once a month, and perhaps you don't even apply patches but once a year. If we leave the reboot issue out of the equation -- and again look at the same 2013 timeframe -- there were 34 critical security patches for Hyper-V while there were only 3 for VMware vSphere. Again, this is because Hyper-V is a bolt-on Windows feature.

So I ask you: Should you select the a hypervisor built for enterprise data centers or a general-purpose operating system, built for everything under the sun, that happens to have a virtualization option that can be enabled? Should you choose the  virtualization option that clearly has the optimal design for enterprise virtualization, or the virtualization option that you can most easily enable on your file and print server?

4. VMware: The Strongest Ecosystem

Another reason why I'd choose VMware over Hyper-V is the strength of the VMware partner ecosystem. My Petri colleague Jeff James highlighted VMware's success in building a partner network and a powerful community in his article on why VMware is here to stay. Many people think that Microsoft has a strong partner ecosystem, and while that is true, that Microsoft ecosystem in general is spread across many different products, services, and communities that are totally unrelated to virtualization. Microsoft has strong communities of .NET developers, application experts, Xbox enthusiasts, Windows phone developers, and desktop support specialists. But I'd argue that VMware has built an amazing ecosystem that is focused solely on virtualization.

For those who aren't too familiar with the term ecosystem, an ecosystem might include:

software and hardware vendors

VARs, sales partners / channels

certified experts

consultants

books, video training, classroom training

certification programs

user groups

blogs, forums, and print magazines

VMware's ecosystem built around virtualization has more energy, excitement, and strength than Microsoft's ecosystem in its entirety.

There are so many different ways to measure this. One would be the two companies' conference attendance numbers. VMware's annual conference, VMworld, has had continually increasing attendance every year (except the year of the economic downturn) and, last year, it had 22,500 attendees. That exceeds Microsoft's 2014 TechEd attendance figures (12,000) by 10,000 attendees. Remember, VMworld is solely focused on virtualization and cloud topics, whereas Microsoft's TechEd covers every product that Microsoft makes, and virtualization is just a small piece of this.

Another way to measure an ecosystem is the number of blog posts that are created around it. VMware's Planet v12N blog aggregator collects all blogs related to VMware and lists them on the v12n website, via Twitter and RSS. There are easily more than 20 per day. Go ahead and try to find the best Hyper-V blogs posted each day by using you can use Google Alerts. You'll find a vast difference between vSphere and Hyper-V interest. Again, this is simply a measure of how excited and engaged an ecosystem is around a product or company.

Finally, another test is to do two saved Twitter searches, one for "vSphere" and one for "Hyper-V." See what your results are to measure interest, but don't try that search during VMworld or TechEd or your results will be swayed.

So I ask you: Should you select a hypervisor that comes with the strongest ecosystem support, or the hypervisor whose ecosystem is mostly unrelated to virtualization?

5. VMware: The Best Educational and Career Opportunities

One final point: VMware has vastly expanded their educational courses and certification options, all around VMware's virtualization solutions. According to VMware's certification roadmap they have more than 15 certifications available, all around virtualization. How many does Microsoft have on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V? Answer: they have one certification around "private cloud," the MCSE: Private Cloud, that relates to virtualization.

Why do the number of certifications matter? The exact number doesn't matter, but the point is that VMware offers so many virtualization-specific certification options and Microsoft so few. VMware education also offers more than 50 courses covering virtualization and IT pros line up to take them. Pluralsight.com offers over 90 video training courses on virtualization, mostly on vSphere. VMware's vExpert award program for those who evangelize virtualization was awarded to more than 600 people last year (compared to the 72 Microsoft MVPs for Virtual Machine).

Finally, VMware created a centralized global user group in 2010 and in just four years they have amassed a membership of more than 100,000,  with 150+ events across North America, Europe, and Australia. To find out about Microsoft's global community events, you can visit the Microsoft technical communities events calendar. There are hundreds of events listed covering topics like development, Xbox, and Sharepoint. But if you search for events focused on Hyper-V (as offered in their drop-down menu) for the next six months, there are absolutely zero events (yes, worldwide). Conversely, if you search for Windows Server community events, there are three planned events (two of them virtual).

Combine excited IT pros, education, certification, popular user groups, and a steady stream of exciting new product features, and you have an army of virtualization evangelists. Those virtualization experts are finding that there are many more job openings for those with vSphere knowledge than with Hyper-V knowledge (which results in higher pay).

So I ask you: Should you select the a hypervisor that offers the most options for training, certification, and for your career, or the hypervisor with the least?

Don't Get Stuck on Cost or Scalability

In my justification for vSphere, you may notice out that I didn't talk a lot about the cost or the "configuration maximums" (AKA scalability). It's not that these things don't matter. Of course they are important. However, both vSphere and Hyper-V have gotten to the point that they are plenty scalable for every potential use case and, if there is some scaleability limitation that a small percentage of very large enterprises hit, then there is an architectural design decision that is made to accommodate for it, such as not having more than 32 hosts per cluster.

Related: VM Limitations in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

On the cost side, what Microsoft undeniably holds over the heads of most every enterprise that uses Windows Server -- and most enterprises do -- is that if you buy Windows Server Datacenter Edition then you get an unlimited number of Windows Server guest VMs. This is undoubtedly a benefit to using Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition Hyper-V that VMware cannot match, as it simply doesn't own the Windows OS.

However, I won't trade all the benefits that vSphere offers simply to save money on my Windows licensing costs, so I'll save you an extensive cost comparison. Most every unbiased cost comparison that I've seen --  including the one that I did in my vSmackdown: vSphere 5.1 vs Windows Server Hyper-V article -- shows that if you left out the Windows licensing benefits that Microsoft has the luxury of "giving away" that Hyper-V and vSphere are similarly priced with vSphere costing more as you move up to higher editions, such as VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus.

However, if you're selecting a hypervisor based on the absolute lowest cost, then you aren't making the smartest decision. Do you buy the absolute cheapest server that you can find? Do you use the absolute cheapest smart phone or laptop? Would you buy the cheapest parachute or bungee jumping cable? While some people do have a need for the absolute cheapest of everything, the vast majority of people purchase products that offer the most benefit for a reasonable price. Those people have learned that the cheapest product may also be the least reliable, poorest performing, and quickest to be replaced. If you want to bet your datacenter, your company, and your career on the cheapest solution possible, then buy Hyper-V.

On the other hand, if you want to use the leading software-defined datacenter solution that continues to innovate and grow their amazing ecosystem of partners and educational resources, choose VMware. By selecting VMware, your employer, coworkers, and your career will thank you.

Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0

Hyper-V 3.0 is the virtualization feature created for the client version of Windows 8 and Windows Server 8. It is offered as a stand-alone product.

Hyper-V 3.0 builds on older versions of Hyper-V which creates a virtualized environment for multiple partitions to run. The hypervisor layer, or the parent partition, enables the management of child partitions. Hyper-V uses the term "partition" to refer to a virtualization layer that provides an independent, isolated environments in which guest operating systems and applications can run.

Distinguishing itself from previous iterations of the hypervisor, Hyper-V 3.0 has an extensible virtual switch, which affords advanced networking features such as extensions that inspect, monitor and sample traffic. Hyper-V 3.0 also offers live storage migration, which, in a step up from Windows Server 2008 R2's Quick Storage Migration, does not require periods of downtime. It is also capable of migrating virtual machines (VMs) without shared storage.

Hyper-V 3.0 is built to be scalable; it can support more than 32 nodes and 4,000 virtual machines.

How Windows Server 2012 R2 will change storage management

Microsoft Corp. revealed its forthcoming Windows Server 2012 R2 at this month's TechEd conference. Although a preview build won't be available for download for a few weeks, Microsoft has given us a tantalizing glimpse into what we can expect from the new operating system.

As you probably know, the original Windows Server (WS) 2012 release was jam-packed with hundreds of new features, the bulk of which were related to storage and virtualization. Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 R2 continues this trend by focusing on improvements to the storage subsystem and server virtualization.

Native tiered storage feature

With regard to storage, the biggest improvement in WS 2012 R2 is the inclusion of a native tiered storage feature that's an enhancement to Windows Storage Spaces. The idea behind this feature is that if an administrator adds both solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) to a storage space, the storage space engine will automatically differentiate between the two types of storage. In doing so, Windows will move hot blocks (blocks of storage that are read more frequently than other storage blocks) to SSD storage, while cooler blocks will remain on HDD storage. Remember, there's a very distinct trade-off between SSDs and HDDs. While SSDs are very fast, they're expensive and have comparatively low capacities. On the other hand, HDDs have plenty of capacity and are relatively inexpensive, but don't offer the performance of SSDs.

The storage tiering feature should greatly boost read performance on Windows servers. This will be especially true for servers acting as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) hosts, since VDI images are often identical to one another and share many common storage blocks when deduplicated.

The nice thing about storage tiering is that it will be simple to implement. Although this could potentially change by the time Windows Server 2012 R2 is released, the current build provides the option to create a storage tier within the New Virtual Disk Wizard. When an administrator creates a virtual disk, he can select a checkbox to enable storage tiering for the virtual disk. If storage tiering is enabled, the movement of hot and cold blocks between SSD and HDD storage becomes automatic. Furthermore, the option to tier or not to tier storage for individual virtual hard disks (VHDs) means you won't waste valuable SSD resources on VHDs for which performance isn't a high priority. Microsoft even provides an option to specify the size of each tier on a per-virtual disk basis.

Write-back caching

WS 2012 R2 can also use SSDs for persistent write-back caching. The idea here is that write operations can be cached to an SSD and then later written to HDD storage. This can help to improve overall storage performance.

Fault tolerance

Microsoft is offering some new fault-tolerant options. A dual parity option now creates a logical disk structure that is similar to RAID 6. There's also an option in the New Virtual Disk Wizard to create a three-way mirror.

Data deduplication

One of the big draws of Windows Server 2012 was native deduplication that could be applied on a per-volume basis without the use of third-party software. However, Microsoft placed a number of restrictions on the types of volumes that could be deduplicated. More importantly, Microsoft stated that Hyper-V hosts and VDI virtual hard disks weren't good candidates for deduplication.

WS 2012 R2 supports running virtual machines (VMs) on deduplicated storage. It's common for VMs to share a common set of storage blocks and, because deduplication tracks the location of storage blocks, VM performance generally improves when the underlying storage is deduplicated. For example, in a demo shown during the opening keynote at TechEd, five VMs were booted from non-deduplicated storage while an identical set of VMs was booted from deduplicated storage. The VMs booting from deduplicated storage booted in less than half the amount of time than their counterparts.

As you can see, Windows Server 2012 R2 offers some promising enhancements to storage management. Features such as storage tiering and new fault-tolerant mechanisms should provide SAN-like capabilities to organizations that don't have a SAN.

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 R2 is the second iteration of Windows Server 2012. 

Some of the new features in Windows Server 2012 R2 include hybrid cloud support, enhancements to storage and virtual machine (VM) portability. According to Microsoft, Windows Server 2012 R2 provides the following enhancements: 

• Virtual machine (VM) portability across customer, service provider and Windows Azure clouds computing environments.  
  
• Cross-cloud management capabilities for virtual machine and storage resources.
  
• Offsite backup and disaster recovery options. 
  
• Windows Azure technology to help customers create multi-tenant web and virtual machine cloud services. 
  
• Site-to-Site VPN Gateway to help customers seamlessly bridge physical and virtual networks and extend them from a corporate data center to a service provider's data center. 
  
• Features such as Storage Spaces Tiering, VHDX resizing and de-duplication for virtual desktop infrastructure to provide high performance for critical on-premises workloads (like SQL and Hyper-V) using lower-cost, commodity computers. 
  
• Windows Server Work Folders, Web App Proxy and improvements to Active Directory Federation Services and other technologies to help companies give their employees consistent access to company resources on the device of their choice.

Windows Server 2012 (WS 2012)

Windows Server 2012, formerly codenamed Windows Server 8, is the latest version of Windows Server. The successor of Windows Server 2008 R2, its improvements include overall upgrades in cloud computing and storage infrastructure.

Windows Server 2012 include enhancements to the following:

Graphical user interface (GUI) - Windows Server 2012 was created with the Metro design language so it has the same look and feel as Windows 8 unless installed in Server Core mode. Administrators can switch between Server Core and the Server with a GUI options without a full reinstallation.

Address management - Windows Server 2012 has an IP address management (IPAM) role for discovering, monitoring, auditing and managing the network's IP address space.

Hyper-V- Hyper-V 3.0 offers a scalable, virtual extensible switch that allows a virtual network to extend its functionality in ways that were difficult or impossible to achieve in previous versions.

Active Directory - Several changes have been made to Active Directory. The PowerShell-based Deployment Wizard can work remotely, allowing administrators to promote cloud-based servers to domain controllers without the Wizard running on the server itself. Following the completion of this process, PowerShell scripts containing copies of commands used in the process can assist with the automation of additional domain controllers, allowing for large-scale Active Directory deployments.

File System - Addition of ReFS (Resilient File System) for file servers.

Storage migration - Live storage migration is permitted and shared storage will no longer be required for virtual machine (VM) migration when using Hyper-V Replica.

Clustering. Cluster-aware updating will be automated, which will allow the entire cluster to stay online during the updating process with little to no loss in availability.

NIC teaming. This is the first version of Windows Server with built-in network interface card (NIC) teaming. This feature allows administrators to team together NICs for failover and bandwidth aggregation, creating server resiliency built into the operating system.

How Can I Copy Files and Preserve Date Timestamps?

The date modified and date created timestamps are commonly used to sort files and folders in File Explorer. Sometimes it's much easier to find a file because we know we were working on it yesterday, rather than having to scroll down a list and find it by name.

This method of organizing files is all very well and good until a file or folder is moved or copied to a new drive. If this is done using File Explorer, timestamps on folders will be updated to the time of the copy or move operation, rendering it more difficult to track files by their last modified date. In this Ask the Admin, I'll show you how to copy or move files and folders while preserving their timestamps.

Using Robocopy to Copy or Move Files

Robocopy is the Swiss Army knife of file copy tools. It's built into Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 and provides a robust way to manage, back up, and copy files. Advanced features include the ability to log operations, restart failed copies, and improve performance using multiple threads.

Log on to Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 with an account that has full access to both the source and destination paths for the copy operation.

Open a command prompt by switching to the Start screen, type cmd and press Enter.

In the command prompt window, type robocopy /? and press Enter. You'll see there are many parameters that can be specified to provide for almost any file copy/move problem that you need to solve.

All we need to do is provide a source and destination path for the operation and specify two parameters to make sure subfolders and timestamps are included.

In the command prompt window, type robocopy c:\finance\ d:\finance\ /mir /dcopy:t and press Enter, replacing c:\finance\ with the path of the folder you want to copy, and d:\finance\ with the path to the destination.

The /mir switch mirrors the contents of the source folder to the destination folder. This switch should be used with care, as any file/folders deleted from the source folder will also be deleted from the destination folder if run for a second time. /dcopy:t copies the folder and file timestamps.

Once the operation is complete, you should see that any folders and files copied to the destination folder retain their original date created and modified timestamps. If you had performed the same operation manually using the GUI, files would have retained their date modified timestamps and lost their date created timestamps; and folder timestamps would have been updated to the current date and time.

5 Reasons To Choose Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.5

The world of virtualization has been divided in two when it comes to picking a virtualization platform (come on, who cares about Xen, KVM, or other similar also-rans?). Do you go with the legacy incumbent, ESXi/vSphere, or do you go with the designed for modern computing, Hyper-V/System Center?

In case you haven't noticed, yes, I am biased towards the Microsoft stack. I am a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional with the Hyper-V expertise. I promote and sell Microsoft licensing. I write about Microsoft products. But (and it's a big but) I started off happily working with the VMware stack (Workstation and ESX/vCenter), and I've angered more than a few Microsoft "blue badges," aka full-time employees, with my criticisms in the past (for an example, see my post "What Went Wrong At Microsoft"). Back in 2008 I started a project and I had my choice of virtualization stacks to build a business on. I evaluated the two big contenders, being quite critical of Hyper-V during the beta period, but eventually I reasoned that Microsoft had the best path going forward. Management agreed with me, and I haven't look back since. So in this op-ed I want to give you my top 5 reasons to consider Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.

Hyper-V vs. VMware vSphere: Making the Right Comparison

Note that when comparing the two companies, it's important to compare apples with apples. That means you either compare the fully featured Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 with the cripple-ware ESXi Free (Hyper-V wins in every possible way). Or you compare Windows Server and System Center with vSphere Enterprise Plus with vOperations Management Suite Enterprise Plus (and Microsoft has so much more to offer here, too).

Do not fall into the trap of comparing different packages, such as comparing WS2012 R2 Datacenter Hyper-V with vSphere Enterprise Plus. Both companies package their products differently, so features reside in different places. For example, VMware's DRS (virtual machine load balancing) resides in vCenter, whereas Microsoft's Dynamic Optimization resides in System Center Virtual Machine Manager. To tilt the cart the other way, Microsoft includes all of their features – including Cluster Aware Updating (automatic patching) – in even the free edition of Hyper-V, whereas VMware has a plethora of decreasingly crippled packages of vSphere as you move up the pricing ladder.

Beware of the FUD

I know that the comments on this article may be… let's say, colorful and intense. I also know that there will be a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt, or "FUD." Some of it will be innocent. Much of it will be out of ignorance and anger. There are those who are invested in the VMware business who don't want to realize that their competitor is growing market share at four times the rate of their favored product. Maybe those people fear their jobs are at risk? Maybe they don't want to re-skill? Maybe they work for a VMware reseller and are addicted to the rebate that they get for even trying to sell VMware software?

Personally speaking, I don't care what virtualization stack you choose to deploy. You might argue that I'm in the business of selling Microsoft server licenses. This is true – but in the end, if you license your Windows virtual machines correctly, you're buying the same Windows Server licenses that you would use if you were buying vSphere or using Hyper-V.

And with that out of the way, let's get down to the business of money.

1. Hyper-V Is Free

You can't beat a free lunch, never mind when it comes with a free dinner, supper, and breakfast. Imagine that you are going to deploy a 5-node virtualization cluster. Each node will have 2 x 6-core processors. There will be at least 20 virtual machines running on each node at any one time. Ninety percent of those virtual machines will run Windows Server. The rest will run the CentOS Linux distribution. You have to price up the solution to run either Hyper-V or vSphere, with live migration which is also known as vMotion.

The hardware will probably be the same, so let's rule that out and stick with the software. The correct way to license each host to run many Windows Server virtual machines is actually to license each host with Windows Server Datacenter edition. Each Datacenter license cost $6,155 under Open NL licensing. That's the most expensive kind of volume license you can get, and it's also the one you see listed publicly. Datacenter edition gives you the following:

• The rights to license a server with up to two processors to run Windows Server.
  
• Licensing for an unlimited (yes, no limits) number of Windows Server virtual machines on that licensed host. Note, if those virtual machines move to another host then that host needs licensing too, even if the move lasts just one second.
  
• Oh, and you have the right to enable the fully featured Hyper-V on the host.

Let's say a host has 20 virtual machines. That will cost $6,155. If that host runs vESXi free, the Windows Server licensing cost for the 20 virtual machines will be $6,155. If the host runs vSphere Enterprise Plus, the Windows Server licensing cost will be $6,155. If the host runs Hyper-V, the Windows Server licensing cost will be $6,155. We have five hosts, so the total Windows Server cost will be $30,775. It is basically up to you if you want to install Windows Server Datacenter on the host and enable Hyper-V. You can just record that you've assigned the license to a host, and install vSphere… at an additional cost.

For those who balk at the cost of the Datacenter license, to license each virtual machine with the Standard edition (which could cause legal issues with vMotion or live migration) would cost $882 per virtual machine, or $88,200 for at least 100 virtual machines.

What is the cost of vSphere? We'll need to go with the cripple-ware Standard edition to get the cheapest license with vMotion. That will cost $1,940.25 and it is per processor. We have five hosts with two processors each, so that is 10 processors, costing $19,402.50 for vSphere. Add in the Windows Server licensing costs and the total for a vSphere implementation would be $50,177.50.

A Hyper-V implementation would have been just the cost of the Data Center licensing. That's $30,775, a whopping 38 percent cheaper than the VMware-based alternative. And you'd get all of the features of Hyper-V without any constraints, unlike those imposed by VMware on each edition.

This is where someone cries about Linux. Yes, Hyper-V supports Linux. The Linux Integration Services (like VMware tools) are built into most of the Linux distributions that are using in hosting or private enterprise, making them Hyper-V ready and supported out of the box. You do not have to buy Windows Server to run Hyper-V if all of your virtual machines will be Linux based. You can download the fully-featured and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. I can't say that ESXi Free is fully featured; it's probably best to call it barely-featured, considering the 32 GB RAM per host limitation that is applied by this cripple-ware doesn't offer vMotion, HA, and other such features considered essential in enterprise virtualization.

Hyper-V = free. VMware = pay lots more.

2. Scalability

I laugh when I hear "vFanboys" cry that Hyper-V isn't scalable for enterprise workloads. This is the perfect example of ignorance or blind loyalty.

You might remember an American company that used to feature the owner saying "I like it so much that I bought the company." Microsoft uses Hyper-V. Sure, Microsoft has some 95,000 employees, so you can imagine that they run a lot of hosts internally. But that is nothing when you consider that Microsoft Azure is based on Hyper-V. The Xbox game, Titanfall, ran on 100,000 Azure virtual machines, or, 100,000 Hyper-V virtual machines in Microsoft Azure. When someone deploys a cloud service in Azure, it's running on Hyper-V.

Let's look at scalability numbers. The following table, from a Microsoft whitepaper called "Competitive Advantages of Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V over VMware vSphere 5.5," shows how a WS2012 R2 host compares with vSphere 5.5. Note that Microsoft didn't bother increasing these "Top Gear" numbers since WS2012 because they had reached theoretical limits that customers were no longer interested in. Microsoft jumped way beyond VMware with the release of WS2012, and maintain much of that lead with WS2012 R2 despite VMware playing catch-up for their last two releases.

Comparing WS 2012 R2 Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtualiztion scalability

Nice numbers for the hosts, but I'm more interested in getting big workloads operating as virtual machines. How does Hyper-V compare there? VMware matched Hyper-V with the ability to have 64 virtual processors and 1 TB RAM in a single virtual machine, assuming that you pay up for the Enterprise Plus edition at $6,815.25 per proc, or an additional $68,152.50 beyond the cost of the same Hyper-V installation.

3. Storage and Networking

Storage is a bedrock of virtualization. Bad storage leads to a bad virtualization implementation. Microsoft made huge investments in block-based (legacy) storage and software-defined storage in the years leading up to and following the release of WS2012.

Historically a cluster from either platform has required a SAN. Microsoft added alternatives in WS202 and developed them in WS2012 R2. SMB 3.0 is an alternative storage networking protocol that EMC (the owner of VMware) has declared publicly to be "the future of storage." When combined with Storage Spaces we can build scalable transparent storage in the form of a Scale-Out File Server. So not only can we reduce the cost of licensing with Hyper-V, but we can also reduce the cost of the physical storage with a flexible software-defined storage system. Meanwhile, VMware has released the interesting, but not production supported,  vSAN.

In terms of storage performance, the Microsoft VHDX supports native 4K disks. The VMware VMDK does not, and therefore relies on a very inefficient RMW process.

In other storage areas, Hyper-V has ODX where vSphere Enterprise Plus has VAAI. VHDX grows up to 64 TB, where VMDK was recently expanded up to 62 TB. Both platforms have hot storage resizing, but vSphere is limited to expansion only.

A great service is pretty pointless if you cannot get to it. One of the big headline features of Hyper-V is Network Virtualization, also known as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). I'll give this to VMware: They know how to get the media to think that they're the first to do something. Lots of reporters believe that VMware NSX is the first network virtualization solution on the market. Microsoft was there a long time before VMware announced NSX. SDN was a reality in Microsoft Azure and was launched in WS2012 with System Center 2012 SP1 management. WS2012 R2 added virtual NVGRE gateway functionality to make NVGRE-based SDN a reality for businesses. This isn't just some marketing feature – SDN makes it possible for hosting companies to enable self-service network provisioning. It allows huge scalability of up to 16 million virtual subnets versus 4096 VLANs. And SDN increases flexibility, such as overlapping IP subnets or provider IP-agnostic cloud services.

Pure-software networking is not enough. Hardware in a host can offer functionality increases in performance and service scalability. Dynamic Virtual Machine Queue (DVMQ) provides more efficient and scalable processing of packets into the virtual switch from the physical network. Both platforms offer this hardware enhancement. For those for whom security is important, Hyper-V can offload the encryption and decryption of IPsec to a NIC; VMware cannot do this. Single-Root IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) enables selected virtual machines to connect directly to a host's physical for reduced latency and improved performance. Both platforms offer SR-IOV functionality, but only Hyper-V supports live migration of SR-IOV enabled virtual machines. Note that only Hyper-V offers a "no features that prevent live migration" policy. Microsoft also built on DVMQ to enable Virtual Receive-Side Scaling (vRSS). This feature enables huge throughput into network-intensive virtual machines. VMware also offers this feature but only with VMXNet3.

4. It's All About the Service, Dummy!

We IT pros focus on machines, switches, routers, pretty flashing lights, and all that jazz. The business does not give a monkey's about any of that. Your MD cares that the website is selling product to the customer. Sales cares that the CRM and order services are online. Accounts cares that the credit control service is running. Purchasing wants email and web services running. Our job in IT is to make services operational, available, and responsive. No one cares about virtual machines, but they do value services.

Microsoft has been building service-centric infrastructure for over a decade. System Center is all about deploying services (Virtual Machine Manager or SCVMM), monitoring services (Operations Manager or SCOM), automating services (Orchestrator or SCORCH), enabling self-service (Service Manager or SCSM), or the mother of all service systems, enabling the cloud (Windows Azure Pack or WAP).

VMware has a history of developing a great virtual machine virtualization platform. That's their expertise. They've developed and acquired a collection of point solutions over the years to build their own suite of products. Quite honestly, this collection befuddles me. I can never remember what product does what and how; there are just so many vProducts. The cost isn't pretty either. You can buy VMware's Operations Management Suite Enterprise Plus (for all features) on a per host processor basis for $4,245.00. That will total $42,450 to manage five dual processor hosts.

System Center is an all-inclusive suite that is licensed in the same fashion as Windows Server. Five copies of the Server Management License Datacenter edition for five dual processor hosts and unlimited virtual machines on those hosts will cost 5 x $3,607, or $18,035. So you get all eight components of System Center plus free add-ons like WAP (to build a cloud), Global Service Manager (global monitoring of web sites), and System Center Advisor (integrated cloud-based best practice analyser). And you get all of those tightly integrated suite components for less than half of the cost of the VMware management suite.

Note: When it comes to pricing, both companies offer different bundling options and discounts. I'm comparing list prices. I am also not comparing vCenter to System Center because vCenter has no way to compare with the Microsoft stack. I am sticking to comparing apples with apples.

5. Built from the Cloud Up

I hate to steal a line from Microsoft marketing, but this tagline for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 perfectly describes what Microsoft has been doing. Microsoft built a cloud OS, a single consistent platform based on Hyper-V that runs in:

• Private cloud: managed by System Center
  
• Public cloud: hosting companies that present their cloud to the customers via Service Provider Foundation (SPF, a REST API) and a WAP portal
• Microsoft Azure: a hugely scalable cloud based on Hyper-V

Services can be deployed, managed, and automated using one System Center installation across the entire hybrid cloud. No virtualization or cloud company other than Microsoft can say that they have a consistent offering for private and public cloud, as well as hybrid cloud through the entire stack from fabric through to self-service.

The cloud OS, spanning private, public, and hybrid clouds.[source: Microsoft]

Right now the cloud OS gives you the flexibility to choose the right location to run the tiers of your services, as well as a path forward that you know is built for the future – instead how things were done in the past.