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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Hyper-V

    Score8.6 out of 10
    N/AN/A

    $24.95

    per month

    Pricing
    Hyper-V
    Editions & Modules
    Developer
    $24.95
    per month
    Bronze
    $49.00
    per month
    Silver
    $89.00
    per month
    Gold
    $135.00
    per month
    Platinum
    $199.00
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Hyper-V
    Free Trial
    No
    Free/Freemium Version
    No
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    No
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Hyper-V
    Considered Both Products
    Microsoft
    Chose Hyper-V
    VMware Workstation Player and Pro are now free for Small Businesses, but Pro used to be paid and quite expensive. There are compatibility issues between those products and Windows hosts, giving that Microsoft has their own hypervisor platform already. Also, if you use Linux, …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    No extra licensing costs. It's easy to use. We haven't suffered any downtime due to virtualization problems. It's a rock solid solution.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Considering the maturity of ESXi, Hyper-V is something I would definitely consider using in future jobs or organisations. We selected Hyper-V after many years of using ESXi; several factors led us to this change, including a poor support experience with VMware, and the lower …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    ESXi, to me, seems to do things better in almost every way. It is much quicker to deploy ESXi compared to Hyper-V. I also feel like Hyper-V requires more frequent updates so I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    I switched to VMware Workstation Pro, after using Hyper-V for several years. The thing I missed in Hyper-V was the network management which has too less configuration options compared to VMware Workstation Pro. Also managing the snapshots was more user-friendly in VMware …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    The ease of use and essentially free license made the adoption of Hyper-V in some parts of my current and one of my previous organizations a no-brainer.
    For sure it's not the best product on the market, but it will do the job just fine in a lot of use cases. Automated …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Though Docker provides cross-platform support and isolation, Hyper-V provides true virtualization over the host OS and creates boundary over guest OS that protects the security threats, resource-hogging on the host OS.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    While many have additional features or lower overhead the ease of use and low-cost licensing make Hyper-V our preferred choice for most clients. And because we are mostly a Microsoft shop and it is built on Windows when we need to troubleshoot the hypervisor itself we already …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    It is much cheaper and has at least the same functionality as what we use. It integrates better in our Windows environment and it works more familiar with similar tools that we already use. And it is on fewer vendors, much easier for support. Very happy with the switch from …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Overall, VMWare appears to be more full-featured and perhaps a bit more robust, but the integration and no-cost factors of Hyper-V won the day. We have had no issues with Hyper-V since instigating it five years ago and do not regret the decision.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-V is much cheaper and does not have the license requirement of VMware. Hyper-V is not a product that scales like VMware and not well suited to a large datacenter.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-V is well suited for environmental testing purposes. Let's say you want to learn or test a new OS for a product or just for learning purposes. You are able to boot up this os in just a few mins on Hyper-V and then start working, testing, and learning with no money out of …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    I used VMware vSphere at another company. However, for infrastructure with only two virtual machines, the VMware license cost is not worth it, because with the Windows Server Standard license you have the possibility to install two virtual servers at no extra cost.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    We selected Hyper-V because it was built in to Windows and had no licensing costs. The functionality was similar, VMware seemed like a more premium product, and had support. But those are the bare minimum when competing with an embedded solution. VMware is reported to be …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    I used to use VMWare and was certified but I have no justification to move off this platform. It is sufficient.
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-V performs very well in environment running windows operating systems and performs well under various workloads. The replication and recovery features of hyper-v work well but lack some of usability of tools such as Zerto, VMware replication and site Recovery Manager to …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    You already have to purchase the licensing for Windows Servers so why not bundle that in with the cost of the hypervisor. VMware seems to be a better virtualization platform with a better dashboard, but if you aren't managing hundreds of physical servers across multiple data …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    We went with Hyper-V since it's backed by Microsoft. Most of our businesses use MS, so going with supported products helps when we need to open a case if we run into issues. There are other alternatives, but the ease and support of Hyper-V make it our go-to product for …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Microsoft's virtualization with Hyper-V has given us a great opportunity to increase the availability of services, thus increasing the satisfaction of our end user. With Microsoft virtualization, we have increased availability as follows:
    • Improved service levels.
    • Reduced …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-V is not only a free virtualization solution for businesses, but it's also a very stable and very intuitive environment. The learning curve for Hyper-V is very simple and there are a lot of resources online for Hyper-V. VMWare is actually the leader in the virtualization …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    Hyper-V is powerful and virtualizes Windows exceptionally well, with less tweaking. It is also cheaper, and allows our clients to budget more for more frequent expansion. Its only real competitor in my opinion is VMware, and that is because vCenter is much more intuitive than …
    Incentivized
    Chose Hyper-V
    I really do not have a bunch of experience with VMWare or VirtualBox which I know are two other well-known Virtualization software. I have used VirtualBox a few times when I was in college to learn other operating systems, but I don't recall them being as easy to get going and …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    94%
    Would buy again
    31 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    32 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    94%
    Happy with the feature set
    31 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    25 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    30 Answers
    Features
    Hyper-V
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Hyper-V
    Feature
    Hyper-V
    8.6
    71 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning9.059 Ratings
    Management console7.071 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup9.063 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration8.565 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security9.465 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Hyper-V
    Small Businesses
    Proxmox VE
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    VMware Workstation Pro
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Hyper-V
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (72 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.0
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (16 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.0
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Hyper-V
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    If budgets are stretched, Hyper-V is a very cost effective solution. Any veteran MS Windows administrators will have little issue in getting to grips with this. If you are familiar with VMware solutions, then you may find Hyper-V a little frustrating as it does lack some of the functionality of those products, however nothing that will prevent you from managing your virtual workloads and estate. Since rolling out Hyper-V 2019 we have had no real issues with it; ESXi seemed to have more issues and was less forgiving with hardware compatibility.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
    • Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
    • Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • The only issue I have with Hyper-V is I am unable to use Veeam on my Windows 2016 Server to backup my FreeBSD HAProxy VM.
    • There is some sort of checkpoint issue that I have been unable to figure out, but it works just fine on my Windows 2012 Servers. I do believe this is a Microsoft issue and not a Veeam issue though.
    • Another thing that could be useful that Hyper-V does not have would be some sort of GUI that shows the status of all the VM's on a given server to help us manage them easier and know what is going on. However, I do have Zabbix for this and that does a good job at monitoring all my servers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    It is very easy to configure new virtual machines and manage them. But you have to use different interfaces to perform various tasks. Especially as soon as it comes to clustering you have to use at least two different interfaces (Hyper-V Manager and Failover-Cluster Manager) to perform all necessary tasks. The newly released Windows Admin Center is a way into the right direction to get all management tasks into one single interface.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Microsoft
    In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Microsoft
    Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    Hyper-V is greatly supported by techs around the world. There are tons of forums, help websites and individuals ready to answer questions. I've never needed to contact Microsoft for help...because help is so easy to find out there. Do a search online for anything related to Hyper-V and you will certainly find an article with spelled out steps on how to do what you are looking to do.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Microsoft
    We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Microsoft
    The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Microsoft
    Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • Hyper-V has provided for an extremely cost-effective virtual environment with disaster recovery. For the size of our business, it's all we need to ensure our desired level of continuity of services and protection against hardware failures.
    • Since we are a Windows shop, deploying Hyper-V means we don't have the added cost of a hypervisor, since it's included in the cost of the Windows Server license. It's all we needed to achieve our goal of running all our virtual machines on a single server with another, less expensive server on tap for replication and failover.
    • We wanted easy deployment and management with disaster recovery while having the ability to leverage our years of Windows SysAdmin experience. Hyper-V fit the bill.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots