A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
N/A
Pricing
Hyper-V
VMware ESXi
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hyper-V
VMware ESXi
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Hyper-V
VMware ESXi
TrustRadius Insights
Hyper-V
VMware ESXi
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Hyper-V and VMware Exsi are both server virtualization software designed to reduce the need for physical systems. Both solutions allow for server partitioning, so users can create multiple virtual servers that can each run multiple instances of different operating systems.
Both VMware Exsi and Hyper-V are very popular with mid-sized businesses. VMware Exsi tends to be more popular with larger enterprises, perhaps due to its excellent stability and compatibility with other VMware software. Hyper-V is more popular with smaller businesses, likely due to its lower costs and simple migrations.
Features
Hyper-V and VMware Exsi both offer the essential server virtualization features, but they also each have some standout features that set them apart.
Hyper-V allows for quick deployments. Users can get new virtual servers set up in mere minutes. Quick server deployment may be important for organizations that will need to set up new servers often or have a limited amount of staff to handle all server deployment. Hyper-V also offers strong security features with the windows software it is packaged in with, Windows Active Directory. Lastly, it is effortless to create snapshot backups using Hyper-V, allowing new users to minimize data loss when mistakes are made.
VMware Exsi offers extreme stability for its virtual servers. Users are unlikely to experience a crash due to software error when using VMware Exsi. Businesses that utilize VMware technologies such as vSphere can also benefit from VMware Exsi’s seamless integrations with VMware software.
Limitations
Hyper-V and VMware Exsi both offer robust features for server virtualization, but they also have a few limitations that are important to consider.
Hyper-V has limited support for operating systems besides Windows. Though there are options for setting up Linux servers, it is not as easy or versatile as VMware Exsi. Hyper-V is also not quite as stable as VMware Exsi. Though Hyper-V crashes are still rare, and backup screenshots mitigate risk, crashes are more likely to occur compared to VMware Exsi.
VMware Exsi can be challenging to implement with some hardware as not all hardware is compatible with it. Additionally, VMware Exsi is not as user-friendly as Hyper-V, which is comparatively straightforward. Lastly, VMware Exsi doesn’t have backup features that are as robust as Hyper-V. As a result, care must be taken to avoid data loss when rollbacks are necessary.
Pricing
Hyper-V offers a free pricing package with limited features. This package is ideal for smaller businesses with smaller virtualization needs. Pricing for Hyper-V is dependent on organizational requirements but can stretch as high as $4,000 or more. The cost of Hyper-V can also increase based on what support the business needs.
VMware Exsi is available for free as part of the vSphere Hypervisor package, which includes essential tools for server virtualization. Additionally, the vSphere enterprise packages include VMware Exsi along with other VMware software, licensing, and support. Licensing for the vSphere package starts at $995.00 and can reach as high as $5395.00. Support and software subscriptions start at $270.00 per year and can reach as high as $2769.00 per year.
Features
Hyper-V
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Because Hyper-V is a Microsoft product and based on Windows OS, creating virtual Windows servers and clients are easy. When we want to test our group policies it it best to do it on hyper-v environment then implement to production clients. The same goes with operating system quality and features updates as well as operating system upgrades.
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
Virtualization - Hyper-V does this well and I feel like it might be the best and easiest software out there to use. I am able to spin up virtual environments very quickly. Hyper-V also has a "quick" add feature where you don't even need to have the OS ISO on your computer and you can choose between Windows 10, Server or Ubuntu.
Setup and Management - Hyper-V is pretty straight forward. When I first started using this it seemed a bit confusing, but after a couple of days of playing with it you end up finding out everything is pretty straight forward and really not that complicated.
Just turn off the VM and go into the settings and you can manage the Storage, Memory, and CPU's.
Setting a VM up on a Domain is super easy and you can create a static mac address for the machine so in Windows DHCP you can use that static mac address to give that VM an IP it can use every time it boots up.
I think the best feature is the ability to create "Checkpoints" - If you are going to be doing something over and over and you need to start from the same point with each test you can setup your VM the way you need it prior to testing. Create a Checkpoint. Do your tests and then revert back to the Checkpoint so the system will be exactly how you had it setup prior to testing. Then you can go on and do your second set of tests and so on.
Another great thing is the ability to just backup the vhdx file.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this review we run most everything from Hyper-V. I make weekly backup of the vhdx files which are the Virtual Environment files.
This is an extreme example, but if the building ever caught on fire I could go out and buy like 15 PCs at Best Buy and load up Hyper-V on them and just import the vhdx files and be back up and running fairly quickly.
I would love to see Hyper-V add a better remote control feature. As it is, it uses RDP to connect to any VM in the host. This is old technology and slowly deprecating. It would be significantly more useful to have a controlled interface for remoting to the VM's that is much more like Teamviewer, LogMeIn, etc.
There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
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.
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
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.
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
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.
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
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.
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
Most of the time, you can find support on the thousands of websites, blogs and community sites that are out there. Very much Internet supported, and if you don't stray too far away from the standard setup of Hyper-v, you shouldn't go wrong. I've had to call a couple of times, and Microsoft was very good at resolving my problem. it seem that Microsoft has heard from people and their support system, and are doing a much better job in this
I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method
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.
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.
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.
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
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 cost of Hyper-V. We looked at other options including Nutanix and Hyper Converged Infrastructure, however with such a busy team we didn't have the time to learn this completely new technology stack, whereas (whilst also new) Hyper-V had a much easier learning curve.
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.
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.
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.
