Are people moving away from VMware (towards Hyper-V)?

Yes – people are moving away from VMware towards Hyper-V

You only have to read the news – but just in case you missed all of this:

“38 percent of businesses planning to switch vendors within the next year due to licensing models and the robustness of competing hypervisors”

 

“Microsoft Hyper-V is used at 53% of the respondents’ organizations”

 

“Microsoft Hyper-V usage jumped by 15 percentage points in the last 12 months, fueled by improvements in the hypervisor’s core functionality and the widespread adoption of Windows Server 2008 R2”

VMware’s Iron Grip On Business World Loosens. Maybe

VMware may be losing dominance in server virtualization

Microsoft Hyper-V gaining on VMware in the virtualization market

Why? Because Hyper-V has caught up with VMware and is “much cheaper”

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If you’re virtualising Windows workloads the VMware cost is ALL overhead – Windows Server already includes the hypervisor, failover clustering, live migration and dynamic memory!

I realise that “it depends” and “your numbers will vary”, but ignore the numbers and this chart just demonstrates all that overhead!

Now, performance is a tricky subject to tackle, seeing as the VMware license agreement restricts the publishing of benchmarks which are not approved by them (i.e. benchmarks that show their product NOT performing as well as the competition).  There are lots of reports out there that would have you believe that either VMware or Hyper-V are the fastest, most performant hypervisors on the market and they’ll all be sponsored by one side or the other – so take them with a pinch of salt.  I will draw your attention however to a VMware report (summary here and details here).  In this report VMware shines as outperforming Hyper-V by 18.9% – BUT..

BUT they only get that win by using something that they do NOT recommend in production – memory overcommit.

  • To justify vRAM TAX, VMware advocates customers to not do memory overcommit, as it can increase their licensing costs (and degrade performance)..
  • …but to show “better TCO” to Microsoft, they perform a test with 25% memory overcommitted..
  • Ask Yourself - are you ready to run your business critical apps with a 25% memory overcommitment?

Without memory overcommit, VMware wins by just 2%.  Now, are you prepared to pay 2.5 times as much for your solution for a meagre 2%?

I like this report from VMware (if you read it with your eyes open), as VMware are validating that Hyper-V R2 SP1 works as well as vSphere 5.0 under adequate memory.

Want some help moving?

If you’re interested in doing the right thing for your company and saving them money, then start your Hyper-V evaluation today.  Links to evaluation software, advice and guidance and training are here.

Dave