I’d like to
share my experience of planning and developing an IT project. My customer’s need
was to realize a centralized infrastructure with a disaster and recovery site
in a different region and connect about 80 little remote locations.
The customer environment consisted in a mix of operating system that hosted various
services as: Active Directory,
DNS, Databases and third party
applications. These had to be always available 24x7x365. Besides all sensitive data transmitted from the branch office to the central
site had to be available for offline
browsing and stored on a tape
library for a long time to be compliant with the country
law where the customer was located.
Considering the big amount of servers
present in the central site, the choice was inevitable: to propose the customer
a virtualization solution able to offer one centralized point of management, high
availability of the services, disaster and recovery site, and at the same time to
explain that with this choice it would save money.
Two solutions were available: VMware and Hyper-V.
In a very short time with my team we implemented in our lab two different systems
with both solutions to compare them and help us in the choice.
After few weeks of testing, below shortly what
I can assert:- VMware ESXi inserts a robust virtualization layer directly on the server hardware for near-native virtual machine performance, reliability and scalability. VMware ESXi is a compact hypervisor.
- Hyper-V requires an operating system to be installed in the "Controlling Layer" before the "Hypervisor Layer" can operate.
- Vmware in breadth of operating system supported is the clear winner.
- Storage is another critical shared resource in a virtual environment, and the choices are a bit more limited with Hyper-V.
- File System: VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is an incredibly powerful and scalable file system. VMFS delivers a number of features and capabilities that are not found in the Microsoft’s competing VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) format.
- Migration of virtual machine: VMware’s storage vMotion technique is a no downtime affair meaning that is fully transparent to the end user. Quick Storage Migration lies in the fact that it’s not fully transparent to the end user. At the end of the migration process, the VM is placed into a save-state for up to one minute.
- Upgrade simpler in Vmware. Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V is subject to unrelated patching.
Secondary Site: Same Farm VMware
I would remark that I installed the vCenter Server, created the Virtual Datacenter, configured both networking and storages, configured the resource pools and enabled the functionality of HA and DRS. All this was achieved from a unique interface, vSphere, in a very simple and intuitive manner.
Regarding the replication between Primary and
Secondary site, through the Site Recovery Manager, that is a vSphere component, I
first created the array manager to make the replicated storage visible, and then I configured
the respectively protection group and recovery plan.
The important thing to highlight is that I also tested the functionality failover
and failback and in both cases I fully respected their SLA to be on line in
case of disaster of primary site.
In conclusion I am very excited of this experience, especially when I
met the customer after one year and he said: “You made a good work; the virtualization
solution proposed fitted perfectly our goals.
VMware is really a synonymous of safety, reliability and stability. Thank you!”
Which version of Hyper-V was tested and I don't believe that this holds true any longer as we can have bare metal install for Hyper-V just like ESXi "Hyper-V requires an operating system to be installed in the "Controlling Layer" before the "Hypervisor Layer" can operate."
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteTimes when all my work was related to VMWare are now over, I can't be blind to changes in the industry, in technology nothing is forever.
Probably you will want to learn more about Hyper-V in order to help your customers deploying the most efficent solution for each problema, sometimes it could be VMW, but since Hyper-V 2012 most of the time is Hyper-V
Hyper-V has evolve a lot and we (the virtualization professionals) can't be afraid of change.
You don't have to deploy Windows Server to use Hyper-V, you can use the free Hyper-V (Hyper-V Server) a special versión with all the hyper-v features like live migration, live storage migration, vHBA,64 nodes clusters, CSV (VMFS equivalent) VMs with 64 VCPUs and 1TB of RAM, etc, etc.
CSV is far better than VMFS with better limits and features and the NTFS compatibility, native encripion, storage spaces,etc.
In Hyper-V you have live storage migration without any limits, you can change the storage to and from any kind of storage without downtime, in terms of live migration you can move your VMs even without clusters of share storage.
About guest OS support, ¿who supports NT or 2000?, the answer is noone, of course you can virtualize them, event with Hyper-V but virtualizing them with VMware doesn't make them "supported"
Hyper-v gives a great value to our customers saving money with a lot of features like included free replica, SMB storage, deduplication,guest clusters, etc, my customers can use this money to buy more storage, more services, more hardware, etc.
Free Hyper-V replica is a great feature, and if you want all hardware replica providers Works with Hyper-V (EMC, HP, Netapp, etc) you can orchestrate your recovery plans with system center or use Hyper-V Recovery Manager on Azure.
And the innovation continues with 2012R2 (now in beta) with guest clusters using shared VHDs, lots of linux new features, IO QoS, etc, etc.'t , every single virtualization professional must be excited about this competition and his huge potential for us and for our customers.
Regards.
Dear admin, First of all should be better that you sign with your name at the end of your long comments, or better, your long list with the new features available in the hyperV 2012.
ReplyDeleteBesides I would also clarify that My test have been made with hyper v windows 2008 vs Vsphere 4
The version of Hyper-V Server is designed for customers who want a basic and simplified virtualization option. It’s ideal for test and development environments, basic server consolidation, branch office scenarios and hosted desktop virtualization. But if you need some of the more advanced features like quick migration, larger memory support (greater than 32GB) or more than 4 processors on the host then you should be looking at Windows Server 2008 with the Hyper-V role added. About 3GB of installation.
VMware hypervisor it s always about 144 MB !!!
It is also important that you consider that I am speaking of big customers that first of all needs security ,reliability and simple management of their virtual datacenter. This is what they requested to me in the field and I am glad until now to have proposed them the right solution.
In my opinion, at the present VMware with Vsphere5 holds a considerable lead in features and performances respect all the other competitor including hyperV 2012.
Thanks
From my iphone.......Please pardon any typos!!!