TrustRadius Insights for Hyper-V are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Cost-effectiveness: Users consistently praise the cost-effectiveness of Hyper-V in comparison to VMware ESXi, making it a budget-friendly virtualization option that meets their financial needs. The lower upfront costs and potential savings on licensing fees are key factors driving user satisfaction with Hyper-V's affordability.
Efficient resource utilization: Many users have highlighted Hyper-V's efficiency in terms of speed of deployment and resource utilization. The automation and PowerShell accessibility contribute to streamlined operations and optimal resource allocation, resulting in improved productivity for IT teams managing virtual environments.
Disaster recovery features: The ability of Hyper-V to create backup copies of virtual machines for disaster recovery purposes has been well-received by users. This feature provides an added layer of security and peace of mind for maintaining business continuity during unforeseen events, demonstrating the reliability and robustness of Hyper-V as a virtualization solution.
Hyper-V is a great technology that allows us to create virtual machines and helps us to maintain multiple operating systems on a single physical server. This technology allows us to reduce the cost and count of physical servers in the data center.
Pros
Hyper-V allows us to test the software and tools on multiple operating systems
Hyper-V allows us to create multiple virtual machines on a single physical server
Hyper-V helps to reduce the cost and count of physical servers in data center
Microsoft provides great support and maintenance
Cons
Heavy work load application and database might face some performance issues
Disk management needs to improve
Likelihood to Recommend
Hyper-V is a great virtualization technology that allows us to create virtual machines over a single physical server. Hyper-V helps us to reduce the data center infrastructure cost and physical server count. Hyper-V provides the centralization environment to maintain all the virtual machines. We can easily manage VMs resources like disk, CPU, and memory.
We use 5 physical servers and run over 60 virtual servers. We user the latest version of the host server OS, because of connectivity to Azure services, use Site Recovery and Azure Backup and vulnerability checks with Security Center. Tese solutions make it easy to plan and execute BCP and recovery of the systems.
Pros
Microsoft gives us useful supports and maintenances, technical informations about Hyper-V and other related solutions.
Cons
We would like to be able to backup and restore cluster shared volumes and VM shared volumes more easily.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are using Windows Servers, Hyper-V is the best choice for cost-effectiveness and ease of system management.If you can buy hi-peformance host servers, you should purchace Windows Server Datacenter edition lisence.
VU
Verified User
General Manager in Information Technology (Human Resources company, 5001-10,000 employees)
Hyper-V comes with specific Microsoft licenses to our organization so we use it as a "freebie" which makes it more desirable in some cases than any other virtualization solution simply because we don't need to pay hefty Enterprise-grade licenses. We do use Hyper-V in a rather simplistic way - host servers and guest VMs on each one. However, for this purpose alone we are pretty satisfied with what we get. In a previous company, I was a part of the efforts for automated provisioning of VMs in Hyper-V and even though it required A LOT of reading semi-internal documentation and some in-depth posts, we got it running in a pretty stable state.
Pros
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.
Cons
Hyper-V is very slow to adapt to trends in infrastructure and its features are very basic when compared to the offerings from VMWare and some other companies.
For instance, VMWare has implemented a built-in Kubernetes cluster provisioning feature (that comes with a specific license that costs extra of course).
Hyper-V's infrastructure monitoring is very basic and altering is non-existent. It's up to the system administrators to either create or install separate monitoring & alerting solutions.
Hyper-V cannot handle some virtualization needs all that well - my example is with VM backups and snapshots. Both of these are supposed to fulfill specific needs, but there are a number of gotchas in each of those cases (easily corruptible VHD files, gradually growing in size snapshots) that an administrator needs to address occasionally - administration overhead where you would not expect it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Hyper-V is an OK virtualization hypervisor when used on a Windows workstation or when you have a license for it as a freebie (and no budget and/or knowledge for one of VMWare's solutions). You can do a lot of virtualization tasks manually without problems. Long-term management and more complicated use cases will be challenging and need to be considered. Finally, Hyper-V is not that well suited to be a part of hybrid cloud infrastructure - most of the tooling is proprietary to Microsoft so it's very rare that someone or some system is able to manage Hyper-V hosts using SDKs and APIs.
Hyper-V is our preferred hypervisor, as all our techs are familiar with the Microsoft universe already they quickly learn how to manage the software without a need to learn a second Operating System, this familiarity allows us to quickly roll out new systems as needed and to troubleshoot those systems the rare times it has been needed.
Pros
Ease of Use.
Low Entry Cost.
Quick Deployment.
Cons
Improved backup system.
Better central management.
Likelihood to Recommend
Small businesses that are trying to save costs when software requires a dedicated server are what we have found to be the most useful scenario for Hyper-V as more and more vendors are requiring dedicated server installs for their software. While I understand how this makes support easier for them a small business usually has more than enough horsepower with their existing systems to support these lines of business apps, as Hyper-V licenses are already included when buying windows servers this is often a no-cost option for clients.
Hyper-V is a very cost effective and useful hypervisor. Features like replication and live migration give Hyper-V great disaster recovery or replication options for small to medium size businesses without the need to purchase much more expensive solutions like VMware. Migration from physical servers to Hyper-V VMs is very easy using many off the self products from multiple vendors.
Pros
Virtualize resources, all for one physical server to host many Virtual Machines
Provide easy disaster recovery and replication
Very very cost effective.
Cons
Scaling for large environments. No comparable solution to VMWares vCenter.
Failover of a VM to more than one host is limited.
Likelihood to Recommend
Very well suited to small to mid size businesses. Great tools for replication and failover. Easy to implement using existing Microsoft technologies. No need for extensive training if the engineer is well versed with the Microsoft product stack.
Hyper-V is being used by our organization to strengthen and solidify client networks. Hyper-V makes it much easier to schedule maintenance, but more importantly, recover from major software or hardware issues. Even with a major hardware failure, having Hyper-V in place makes a restore simple and quick.
Pros
Maintenance
Restores
Cons
Linux limitations
Supports a limited number of guest OS choices
Likelihood to Recommend
Hyper-V is well suited for a business that does not want to worry about upgrading their server hardware every few years. With virtualization, money can be spent on backups or other key areas of IT like end-user hardware. I really do not see any downsides to using Hyper-V in today's IT world.
Microsoft Hyper-V is a patented Microsoft technology that allows the users to create virtual server environments and manage multiple operating systems on a single physical server. As of today, our company has very few but very powerful physical servers, and we use Hyper-V for creating multiple virtual servers with different functions for each one of them.
Pros
Easy to create new VMs
Free virtualization solution
Cons
Conflict with other virtualization applications
Load balancing not available
Likelihood to Recommend
With Hyper-V, you have the ability to virtualize and manage virtually every aspect of a service. It allows you to create screenshots of the state of the machine, in order to save the state of the machine up to a certain point and continue with a copy, leaving the previous version intact.
We utilize Hyper-V on a few servers to make best use of some of our hardware and to compartmentalize our infrastructure onto particular nodes. It was set up to help reduce hardware use. Specifically, we have Archicad in the office and it requires server nodes for each version, and we used to have a separate physical server for each version. We now have one with 2 VMs running on it.
Pros
Reduce hardware
Save money
Maximize investment on kit
Cons
Setup can be a little difficult and required some reading up on Hyper-v to get it all running properly
When we used failover clustering, we had some issues with performance so had to stop that
It can be tricky with updates
Likelihood to Recommend
It's great if you already have a Windows server and need to create some more servers (using the 2 VM licensing allowance with server standard). It does pose an issue for backups though, as you have to be careful what and how you back them up. We've opted for Veeam and this seems to work well.
We use Hyper-V across our whole organization. We have multiple Windows and Linux servers running as virtual machines on Hyper-V. Almost all servers are run as virtual machines. It allows us to easily spin up new servers as needed, and easily decommission older servers.
Pros
Hyper-V is very easy to administer. Day-to-day operations are done through the Hyper-V Manager, which is simple and intuitive to use.
It allows complete servers to be easily be backed up to either local storage or cloud storage (or both). You can restore whole virtual machines as well as individual files if needed.
It is simple to create a checkpoint of a virtual machine before any changes are made or updates applied and changes can be easily rolled back if needed.
Hyper-V does require adequate CPU and memory and should be used with fast storage, so plan ahead.
Cons
It would be nice if there was a way to upgrade virtual machines from generation 1 to generation 2.
Also, better support for older operating systems.
Likelihood to Recommend
It has been a superb environment for the virtualization of our infrastructure. We have gone from many separate, stand-alone servers to primarily virtual machine based servers without any problems. We have reduced hardware costs, allowed much easier scale-ability, and provided more comprehensive backup and disaster recovery plans with few hindrances.
I currently use Hyper-V with two clients to virtualize a number of different functions. Specifically, I have VMs acting as domain controllers, Linux servers, and a QuickBooks server. Using Hyper-V to virtualize these machines allows for more easy management, especially if a restart is required, as that can be done remotely without worry of the machine not turning back on. In addition, the entire VM can be backed up and restored in the case of a catastrophic failure. Finally, using Hyper-V allows me to have multiple single purposes machines running on a single higher powered physical machine.
Pros
Hyper-V is deeply integrated with Windows Server, and works with the built-in Windows Server backup software, as such a 3rd party backup solution is not required.
In general, Hyper-V is easy to set up. There are a number of different options to choose from, but they are laid out in a logical manner and explained fairly well within the Hyper-V interface.
Hyper-V's virtual disks (.vhdx) are extremely flexible and robust. They support dynamic resizing, i.e. you can create a 1TB disk that will show up as 1TB within the VM, but on the real machine the vhdx will only be as big as the amount of data within the VM.
Microsoft provides a plethora of support documents for Hyper-V usage.
Cons
Hyper-V's support for non-Windows based OS' (i.e. Linux) is only OK. You can certainly virtualize a Linux machine, but it's integration with the rest of Windows is limited, and it's performance is only OK.
Adding an external hard drive (USB or otherwise) to a VM is clunky at best, as it requires the physical to be set to offline via the Disk Management snap-in before it can be added to the VM.
Backing up a VM can be lesson in frustration at times. While a VM can be easily backed up using Windows Server backup - when an issue arises with the backup, it can be very difficult tracking down exactly what the issue is.
Likelihood to Recommend
Virtualizing a Windows Server via Hyper-V works really well. I especially like using it to virtualize a domain controller that requires 100% up time. While you can use Hyper-V on a regular non-server version of Windows Pro, it isn't as tightly integrated and some features aren't available (such as being able to be backed up using built-in software). Finally, I would NOT recommend using Hyper-V to virtualize a non-Windows OS machine.
